Client Stories

I Discovered What I Stand For

Kathryn McNeil describes how coaching enabled her to gain focus and clarity on the way forward.

After dedicating two years to establish her training and coaching business, Kathryn McNeil’s venture was becoming successful, but she was tired and felt out of touch. “I was feeling restless because I couldn’t quite see where the business was heading.

When you’re around the world of training and development and spending time around other small-business owners, you hear loads about goal-setting, target client groups, focus, and vision. I didn’t feel like I had any of those,” she says.

“I was pretty shattered. After two years of just trying to make things work, I had got tired. I’d lost vision and perspective and a fair bit of confidence along the way.” Kathryn felt “out there on her own” and clueless about what to do in the here and now.

As a business owner with an extraordinary long-term vision, Kathryn struggled to define and claim what she wanted to produce in the present.

“It’s frustrating for anybody, but as a coach who’s there often trying to help other people, the fact that I couldn’t work out my journey was very frustrating,” she admits.

With Marianne, Kathryn found an “unhurried space to reflect and learn. The journey went at my pace, and I loved that.”

Marianne’s coaching style offered what Kathryn specifically wanted: pure coaching as opposed to mentoring, “I wasn’t looking for somebody to give me advice or tell me what to do,” she explains. “I needed to be able to come up with my ideas and find out what was meant for my business.”

The coaching process led Kathryn to realise that she could capitalise on group training rather than the one-on-one coaching, as she had previously expected.

This perspective shift has enabled her to come away now with a more precise target market for training, and she’s now getting more inquiries for her one-to-one coaching, too.

Marianne’s approach wasn’t to be an expert in Kathryn’s world, which Kathryn valued as she says, “It was about helping me to understand what it is I stand for, value, and believe. This clarity of focus means I now have a much more peaceful outlook on my business situation.”