Life After Coaching Training with Lucy Mullins

All these questions were raised and addressed in our Monday Masterclass session this week, when we had the pleasure of talking to one of our favourite coaching training providers, Lucy Mullins, about “Life after Coaching Training”. 

If you missed the event, you can listen to the recording here.

Lucy is an experienced and professionally-accredited coach and co-founder of Ride The Wave Professional Coaching Training, a programme to help leaders, founders and other people that want to make a difference to the world. 

We spoke about the core values that underpin coaching training at Ride the Wave – inclusivity, community and laughter – and the great opportunities that arise within the community after coaching training, like co-coaching forums, meet-ups and ‘Beach Hut’ zoom sessions. Lucy talked to us about the value of community for each of her graduate coaches, who she puts into different ‘bucket’ groups: 

• people who want to add coaching as a career-enhancing ‘string to their bow’ 
• ‘internal coaches’ looking to enhance their leadership and facilitation skills 
• Established coaches seeking Accreditation
• Those who want to set up their own coaching business, who are looking for a community to share ideas, brainstorm new ventures and support each other.

Lucy’s advice for coaches just starting out on their own is to ‘buddy up’ and ‘network’ with one another – to offer moral support and perhaps even exchange clients in order to avoid what feels like an initial easy win – to offer coaching to friends and family. Why not instead, Lucy suggests, introduce another coach to those in your personal network and in turn be introduced to people with whom you have no previous relationship?

On the subject of increasing your coaching hours, Lucy talks about the wonderful work that Ride the Wave does in connecting its trainees to a portfolio of charities with which the organisation works closely – it also offers scholarship places on its training programme, which helps to realise the inclusivity goal that is certainly not just paid lip service to in RTW’s marketing.

The conversation continued with social media, and the value of an online presence to gain clients – how TikTok can be used for more than just dancing (!) but also the real fear that many of us have about such social media platforms. (If this is you, please join our Better Bolder Braver community if you are not already a member – not least for our forthcoming What IS TikTok?! community event!)

We also chatted to Lucy about the work/life balance – what she calls ‘doing’ and ‘being’…. We can overly-focus on the ‘doing’… stuck on what Lucy calls a ‘task-treadmill’… whilst simultaneously rejecting our needs and what truly motivates us. She shared what works for her… to just ‘be’ – to find her own clear space – to see what ideas arise that elevate her future plans. For Lucy, this looks like taking time in her ‘Thinking Chair’ or writing as an exercise to brainstorm ideas. You will hear us talking a lot about this in the Better Bolder Braver community too – the concept of how the process of producing (content for marketing, for example) can, in itself, help with the inner peace-finding.

We asked Lucy what we ask others on the Monday Masterclass series…”which coaching question that you ask your clients could you ask yourself about your marketing?”. She gave us some really good options: 

• What do you really not want to do?
• What are you afraid of?
• What do you know you need to do but you’ll only find out in one year from now?

This got our audience members thinking about their own marketing journey, with lots of great responses in the chat. Joanna wrote that “doing and being” is “the process of simultaneously being and becoming”, whilst Carla said, “RideTheWave surfers love what you do!’. These demonstrations of resonation with the ‘process-for-self-growth’ thing, and the ‘community cheerleading’ thing were a lovely and meta way to round up.

You can watch the full discussion on Crowdcast here and if you’d like to join the next Monday Masterclass session check our full schedule of upcoming conversations.