On Smashing The Jolly Rancher, and Other Coaching-Related Revelations

This summer I read Trudi LeBron’s “ Anti-Racist Business Book .” Even though I’ve been coaching for about a year and a half at this point, I hadn’t read one fucking business-related book until a month ago. This was on purpose. I have a history of getting a bit emphatically vocational about shit, like pursuing a doctoral degree, or increasingly becoming known as a chronic dog rescuer. Anyone that knows me knows that I can get a little intense about things I believe in. With all of this in mind, I decided to spend at least a year just focusing on improving my coaching skills and getting as much experience as I could get. I didn’t want to also have to reckon with the fact that if I were ever to make this THE thing that I did professionally, I would have to *directly* participate in the sheer capitalism of it all. Surely that had to be much, much worse than being a professor teaching about and researching inequality. More morally bankrupt. Less substantial. In avoiding any real discourse on business apart from one tiny podcast that I allowed myself to digest once a month, I kept some real identity-based distance between myself and “entrepreneurship.” What’s with the French anyways? Now, well over a year since taking on my first paid client, I’m in a completely different place. You wanna know why? Cause I fell in love with coaching and as is the case with many other kinds of love, that falling also necessitated some serious reckoning with who I am, what I believe in, what I can forsake, what makes me happy, and what I can not endure. In particular, I had to deeply interrogate whether or not I had been wrong about my previous way of thinking about the world and my involvement in it. LeBron’s work really, really helped understand the short-sightedness with which I had thought about being something like a business owner. Charging people for shit I made or provided to them. That just sounded so---scandalous. But you know what else is also true? I now have the opportunity to have the same moral compass as my employer. My employer is my coaching practice. My coaching practice is my moral compass, in verb form. It is the first time I’ve ever gotten to know with absolute certainty that the policy decisions I believe need to be made, will be made. Where I can wrestle with a hard equity or ethics issue and know that at least I’m sparring with the nuances, on the margins of ethical boundaries that are most closely aligned with who the fuck I am. I am not bullied or gaslit. It is work that requires deep care and attention. Most of it is not easy and yet it is ease-full because there is no questioning or undercutting of my priorities. When there are celebrations-- a new job offer for a client, a sweet thank you letter from a coaching alum, a text from a friend that they are proud of what I’m doing, I know it’s all going just as it should be. There is a spaciousness and a sense of renewing wonder about it all. My clients are the fucking best. Most of them are women who have been subject to the particular cruelty of academia’s grandest irony-- that it perpetuates systemic harms while fashioning itself as the cure for outdated & problematic thinking. For as free as I thought I would feel in academia, this sensation of rippling far eclipses even my most incredible daydream I had. That’s why I want more of it. I encourage you to check out “The AntiRacist Business Book” & support LeBron’s work if it resonates with you. I also encourage you to check out how our coaching can help prompt and nurture these kinds of joy-filled & impactful revelations, in addition to offering the hands-on support from two academics-turned coaches who have successfully traveled down a similar path as you dip your toe into your first new adventure, either within or outside of academia. with love, Sarah