Life Design Coaching: A framework for founders to find clarity and action
After some solid soul-searching, a budding entrepreneur stumbles across an idea, followed by an opportunity and the right connections to build a company from scratch. He does a few tests, and the positive results provide him with a resounding ‘yes’. He puts everything he has got —his waking hours and his life savings — into this new venture. He pulls all the stops and is everywhere at once. From selling, designing new products, and handling administrative tasks to raising funds, storytelling and being a visionary CEO, he manages to increase his team of five to a team of thirty. He creates a space to breathe, finally a moment to regroup, but its not enough. The nagging desire for ‘more’ echoes the walls of his newly minted office, floods the shareholder communications and reverberates in every cell within his body. More revenues, more channels, more products. Better margins, better people. Bring on the challenge, I’ll bring more determination, he says. Sheer willpower has gotten me here, so if I continue to work hard I’ll pull through no matter what.
It starts with a sense of resignation, a feeling of losing control of your time and energy and accepting it as fact. Your motivation starts to take a dive, and with it your mood. You begin to find faults in the people on your team, the way they work, or even the competition. Nothing is ever good enough and so you find yourself more alone than before. What do people actually think about this strategy? Are we really on track? Is this what I really want to do? Wait… what do I want?
This is an example of the kind of scenario I have encountered in my experience as a coach. What people generally know is that ‘founders should get coaching’. What they don’t usually know is that being a good senior leader is not only about getting coached on leadership and executive competencies. It’s also about focusing on the individual behind the role.
Everything starts with the individual. This is the basis for what this track of coaching is all about.
Life Design Coaching is a tailored approach for founders and senior leaders of fast-growing companies seeking personal growth beyond their roles and in their daily lives. It helps them make a shift from a state of confusion and de-motivation to clarity and drive, prioritizing their self-awareness and growth. This track is based on hundreds of hours of coaching with these kinds of individuals across Southeast Asia, and is grounded in methodologies from the Co-Active® Training Institute, Positive Intelligence©, and OKR goal-setting to name a few, and is comprised of 3 steps:
- Identity: Unpack the facets that make up your current identity, understanding and redefining the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of the human you are becoming as groundwork for growth.
- Design: Envision and design your future, creating a roadmap for your new definitions in all life areas.
- Integration: Take inspired action through experimentation, fostering a consistent practice of self-awareness and adaptation.
These steps are modular and non-linear, and tailored to you. We design a focus centered on what is most relevant, and give space for the topics to organically unfold over our time together.
It is important to note that this work requires new levels of self-awareness and inviting a new way of ‘being’ in your life, going beyond conventional problem-solving. Here there is no problem to solve, but rather a person who faces many challenges that is looking for a better way of showing up to them. Hence, the Life Design Coaching track is applicable to a wide variety of personal challenges you may be facing, as it focuses on you. I’ve worked with talented individuals running and starting a business while going through serious co-founder conflicts, team attrition, volatile regulatory environments, and brutalizing competition. These same individuals are simultaneously in a geographic transition, starting a family, in the midst of a divorce or undergoing some tremendous lifestyle and behavioral change. Emotions are usually in their full glory — and not the ones that keep them productive. Life is happening all at once, and it’s all interconnected with you at the center. By actively taking this perspective, this coaching track can help you lead a more authentic life, be a more effective leader, and I can guarantee that you will also live life more fully through doing so.
In this post you can get a closer overview of the 3 steps and the why behind them. If you have any questions or if this resonates and you are keen on having a conversation, feel free to email me at me@beckykux.com.
Identity
As founders and senior leaders navigate their changing environments, they recognize the importance of personal growth and development to meet the demands of the business. Yet, all too often, they conflate their role with their identity, and in the process place themselves last. Although the adoption of a tool or framework to enhance leadership may seem like a self-serving choice, the fact remains that their ‘doing’ comes before their own ‘being’. In other words, the individual behind the role shows up last. This results in a repetition of similar outcomes with no changes as the root has not been addressed.
To break free from this recurring cycle, leaders must have a clear understanding of their authentic selves. This will enable them to make well-informed decisions on what they want and how they should present themselves, both as leaders and in their personal lives. An individual’s essence, which can be activated by being fully present in mind, body, emotions and spirit, refers to their own true nature. By connecting them with their values, strengths, personality, and other inner resources, leaders can identify and work with their essence. This will enable them to make important decisions whilst being in tune with their own energy and nature, creating a life that is much more fulfilling.
Values
Identifying their values as an individual in their lives through the action and choices they make is a key to understanding who they are as a leader. Values are not chosen like morals and principles, and point directly to what is important to the individual, regardless of external influences. When a leader’s challenges are approached with decisions that reflect their values, they can move with more agility and ease and be a better model for the teams they lead. Even when things get tough, leaders who are guided by their values are quoted to enjoy more satisfying lives in general.
Character Strengths
Being self-aware of how they overcome challenges, build relationships, and how they can do so at their best is at the heart of what makes a leader bring out the best in themselves and their team. When operating in accordance with their signature VIA Character Strengths©, leaders feel less stressed, have better relationships, have more confidence and overall well-being, leading to greater work satisfaction.
Personalities
Accepting their default structure of beliefs, motivations and emotions as a functional construct to reach their goals helps leaders realize the invisible barriers they impose on themselves. Knowing where their personality resides in growth and in stressful environments through the Enneagram personality typing system identifies exactly where their authentic leadership style needs to develop in order to serve a higher purpose outside of themselves.
Inner Resources
The awareness around how their values, strengths and personalities are being lived through experience, or through their other faculties like the body, the emotions and spirit is just the beginning of leveling up as leaders. Continuously checking in on how they relate to themselves within different contexts and recognizing how this impacts all relationships kick-starts an empowered way of guiding themselves through the uncertainties of business and life.
Design
The work environment is dynamic and constantly changing. To steer a company through this environment, leaders are need to have the capacity to do the same for themselves first and foremost. If they can confidently envision what they are here for as individuals, encompassing their work and other life areas alike in that outlook, the more effective they can be. Making this a practice and instilling regular cadences for reflection is key to sustained success. This foundation in themselves would support them in co-creating a bright future with their team that they resonate with and can confidently contribute to.
Understanding the top life areas they need to focus on in their current stage of development, and exploring the beliefs and ideals that reside there, reignites a spark of curiosity and motivation, wherever they are today. For the only way to feel ‘unstuck’ is to begin by really accepting what the landscape is, now and what it is becoming, in more nuanced detail. This creates space for resonant choice, and the preliminary definition of their personal ‘why’, which is necessary for the creation of a successful strategy. Basing their strategy on vision-derived outcomes in the OKR creation process gives them the simplicity of focus on what really matters, and the motivation to drive innovation in themselves and the teams they lead.
Vision
Allowing themselves to fully envision the person they are becoming has innumerable benefits that stem from creating the positive neural connections in their brain that are associated with cognitive, perceptual, and emotional openness and better functioning. With practice, visioning helps them develop memory, improve problem-solving skills, and find conflict resolution with more ease. Furthermore, the pre-existing condition necessary for visioning or future-mindedness to take place, a state of creativity, is associated with intrinsic motivation and eudaimonic well-being, helping leaders live a life of meaning, purpose, self-actualization and authenticity, key to empowering their teams to find the same.
Strategy
Different companies have different ways of setting priorities and getting things done, yet all can agree that the strategically important — the vision they are setting out to achieve — often gets pushed aside to focus on what is most urgent. Leaders who can set inspiring and measurable goals that reflect what is truly important to them, make progress on those goals, and set an accountability cadence to reach them that is unique to their way of being are able to see changes in their lives that have incredible ripple effects. When they ‘walk the talk’ in making what’s truly important a top priority, they become magnetic leaders, whose pull towards growth is unstoppable.
Integration
As leaders grow and navigate complex systems, they understand the inter-relatedness and dependence of many moving parts and perspectives. They understand that creating an integrated way forward must be co-created with other people, in an ongoing conversation. That conversation breeds new life into ideas that take a life of their own, leading to progress.
The same goes for the systems in their personal lives: they need to reorganize and assimilate the learning to metabolize it into action, in a continuous conversation between themselves and the impact of their actions ‘in the field’. In receiving and processing feedback through these conversations, supported by the right mindset, a cycle of experimentation is born. This cycle keeps them in alignment with their Identity (values, strengths, personality, inner resources) and Design (vision, strategy) as they make incredible strides towards a more fulfilling life inside and outside the office.
Taking action
Leaders who find Life Design Coaching attractive all agree: they have a bias towards action (as do I). Yet at times, taking action on their commitments without the accountability to hold them to what matters most fizzles out over time. What keeps ideas and inspiration alive is conversations, with oneself and with others. Through the process of Life Design Coaching they will have access to a partner that holds them to the standards of what they are committed to becoming, with consistency, and will have the support in creating the systems they need to continue this growth independently.
Experimentation
There are two key components to Life Design: one is the process itself, and the other is the mindset. Through the process of discovering, ideating, strategizing, and taking action, there will be countless opportunities to readjust to the changing environment. Leaders who manage to fully embrace a mindset of experimentation, creativity, playfulness and expansion through the inevitable ups and downs of running a growing business are more able to cope with stress and obtain more positive outcomes.
Refresh
Leaders often express feeling lonely, frustrated and humbled in their position of leadership. Reviewing what has been achieved, and reflecting on what can be improved within the thinking environment on a regular cadence and co-created with a coaching partner enables them to see across the imaginary boundaries they erect between themselves and the world around them, enabling them to reset, recharge their energy and refresh their perspective.
Becky Kux is a coach to founders and senior leaders in positions across Southeast Asia and beyond who partner with her to discover their authentic leadership essence. You can follow her on Linkedin and email her at me@beckykux.com
