A hectic day loaded with media led me to be a bit off my game yesterday. I left the apartment without my front door key. Oops.
So after taping a TV show, shooting a tax protest, lunching over policy and beer, I headed home. Only I wouldn’t be getting inside anytime soon. Damn. Solution? Starbucks. I picked up a cheap notebook from the Bargain Books section of my local Indigo bookstore and went upstairs to settle into ‘bucks for quiet contemplation and coffee.
Instead, I was accosted by an effusive blond woman with incredible turquoise eyes. “Have you heard about what we’re doing here today?” Being the miserable misanthrope that I am, I nearly shoo’d her away. That would have been a terrible mistake.
Crystal Campbell is a personal coach. Her business is helping you focus your life on what matters. Stuck in a dead-end job? She helps you find hope. Laid off due to the recession? Maybe now’s the time to start doing what you’ve always wanted to do, instead of listening to others’ expectations of you.
As for what Crystal was doing accosting me at Starbucks, that’s the best part. The International Coach Federation and GTA Coaches partnered with Starbucks to raise money for charity. The coaches, Crystal and her ICF/GTA Coaches colleagues, were offering a 25-minute recession-busting session called “Coaching Conversations for Power+Possibility”. Coaches are life consultants, and they charge consultant rates. But the 25-minute session could be yours for a $5 donation to the United Way. Sweet deal!
A team of more than 70 life and career coaches descended on four Toronto Starbucks locations to help those effected by the recession find light at the end of the tunnel. But… What is a coach?
A coach, according to Crystal, can help you find your “passion, potential and purpose.”
In the current economic environment, she says “It’s too easy for people to have spiraling conversations and slip into discouragement and despair. Mass layoffs, scary as they are, “give people an opportunity to pause. To get off the treadmill.” A coach can help them discover what truly matters most to them. Their strengths, their passions, what success means to them as an individual, and what steps they can take to reconcile it all together.
Ok. Why Starbucks?
“Starbucks already promotes a sense of community.” Many people come to Starbucks with conversation in mind (apparently even misanthropes like me, though we may not know it). It was the perfect fit. Offering coaching to the wider community, plus helping United Way “seemed like the right thing to do in a recession.”
Crystal originally studied journalism, getting an undergrad degree in it. She quickly learned that hard news would never be her area of interest. “I loved doing the feature pieces, connecting with people, teasing their story from them.”
The next phase of her life took her into corporate marketing and communications. She loved getting a company’s message out, playing with words, writing copy, but “I felt I was becoming too distanced from the end user.” So she switched tacks again. This time to counseling.
She enrolled in a master’s program to get her counseling degree. I asked her the difference between a coach and a shrink, and why she chose the former over the latter. “Counselors are extremely important, but it wasn’t something that fit with my personality. They deal with a lot of the past, and a lot of pain. Then I come bounding into the room with a big ‘HI!’”
Fair point, and one I can certainly relate to. I have excellent client-facing skills, but I was terrible as a real estate agent for the recently departed (I worked in a cemetery). The first time a couple came in needing to bury their child, I quit.
Crystal: “I’m still working through my master’s, but I enrolled in Adler International Learning to become a coach.”
She’s been at it for four years now. “My specialty is career coaching and corporate leadership.”
I asked her if she had a coach of her own, knowing that every therapist has a therapist. “Absolutely!” And what area do you and your own coach work on? “Whatever I bring to the table.” Career, family, time management and more.
When I think about what I wrote the other day, about how early in every freelancer’s career they face the ’scared to death’ phase, I see where coaching could be an important asset to any entrepreneur.
Crystal Campbell runs c2coaching + consulting from her home just outside Toronto. Her career and life articles can be found and Canadian Living Online and in the Financial Post. Crystal can be reached at crystal@c2coaching.ca.
