What makes a coach really good, or even great? Maybe it’s experience as a designer. Especially in branding and identity.
A good coach knows how to listen for what matters to you, and reflect it back to you in a way that makes your heart feel a deep-seated recognition of yourself, jumping out of your seat to say, “Yes, exactly! That’s me! You got me. That’s what I want.”
As a designer, especially in branding and identity, we are constantly listening deeply to others, and trying to understand their perspective, while also understanding their business, and their customer, and looking for their unique approach to their industry.
A decade and a half of being an independent designer has taught me how to listen for and recognise the most critical and meaningful aspects of someone’s work, method and even their personal joy.
Ultimately, our brand should reflect our personal joy, the part of our work that brings us to life and that we would work day and night for just because it gives us innate pleasure. Because that’s the real inspiration that compels people to follow a brand.
Working as a designer has also taught me how to synthesise all this information, factual and subjective, into a core concept that articulates the meaning of a business or offering, and even further, translates it into a verbal and visual form that captures the essence of the feeling and meaning of what someone wants to say. This translation needs to identify both, the person speaking the message, and the people receiving the message, and so it must carry a sort of “specific universality” — specific because it only speaks to the target audience, and universality because it appeals to the core emotionality of being human. In the end, our emotions are universal, but critically, also the place from which we make decisions, big or small.
What’s key, however, is that the one whose message it is recognises themselves and their aspiration in what I reflect back as the representation of what I have heard them say, and what they represent. Without this authenticity, a brand cannot be truly powerful.
However, the best coaches do more than make you self aware of who, what and where you are right now. They also know how to extend your line of sight from your current horizon further outward into the deep unknown space. And often, this is where our true purpose, our vision and our ability to make an impact on others in the world, to really leave a legacy, lives.
My own personal journey to discover my vision for life and the world I want to create has served as a huge insightful research into how we can make a difference in the world through the work we do today. And how to fill each and every moment of our working life with a long-term positive impact on our own lives, and the lives of others. To really create a legacy, right here, in the present moment. Step by step by step.
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Today, I take all my collective experience, as a branding creative, as an independent artist, as a disruptive thinker asking the question “what if…?” and offer it as the service I personally call “impact coaching”.
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After listening to people from all industries, formats, cultures, identities and business models, I offer it to executives, companies, organisations or individuals to identify their core message and meaning, not just to market themselves, but to get clarity internally about what they stand for and how they stand out from the crowd, essentially what it is they bring to this world unlike anyone else. Today, and in 20 years from now, looking back on their legacy.
There are plenty of great designers in the world but the ability to listen and synthesise information into an emotionally stirring, captivating and recognisable identity story that allows someone to truly define and determine their direction, aspiration and vision is something that I have identified my unique offering to the world.
I believe in a world where everyone does what they were born to do, what puts them not just in flow, but in ecstasy — because when we will all be fulfilled by doing the work that makes us feel really alive, we won’t need to find temporary superficial satisfaction in material things. We won’t keep eating the planet to death to keep our souls alive. And this is my personal vision.
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So let’s find what gives you meaning, and infuse your work, your business, your life with it.
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And let’s tell the whole world about it, so you can sustain yourself while doing it. And sustain the planet and all lives on it, while you’re at it.
I believe in doing well while doing good. Are you ready to come live in this world with me?
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Interested in learning more and working together? Contact me and let’s start a conversation straight away!
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Yes, I want impact coaching!
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