I thought I would tell the story of how I came to coaching, and how I ended up in Rome, doing what I love, with people that inspire me.
The quick pseudo-narcissistic update.
Monica (the woman I moved to Italy to be with) and I broke up in May of 2006. It was, in ways, the best and most difficult relationship I have ever had. When there is that much positive and negative in anything it usually translates to ground trembling life changes. Not wanting to disappoint me, life delivered.
It’s interesting how after a big life change we look back and say things like, “You know, I wouldn’t change anything. I learned so much about myself in that period of my life.” Yet when the next big thing comes, we turn and run screaming from the change monster.
Since the break up I’ve created a social network in Rome, lived in two gorgeous and historic areas of Rome, and made a swinging career shift. The career shift is big for me, and it deserves a little back-story.
The hunch, back-story.
In 2000 I did a transformational thinking course. It felt like someone walked up and smacked me in the back of the head with a 2X4.
The best way to understand the experience is to imagine a statue. Let’s take one of my favorites - Bernini’s Apollo & Daphne.
Imagine staring at that statue from one angle for 30 years and one day someone casually walks up and rotates it 180 degrees. Your view of the statue changes, thereby drastically altering your experience of it. It doesn’t change what you are seeing, it simply gives you a new view to add to your overall perception of the piece.
Just like seeing my best friend's baby being born, this course was a radical experience in my life.
In the follow up 10 week seminar to the original course, I found myself in a roomful of people, all with matching 2X4 marks on the backs of their heads. The seminar was meant to build up muscles around the new insights gained in the first course, sort of a practical application class. It was watching the course instructor that first night that I knew I wanted to do what he was doing. I didn’t know there were Life Coaches, Executive and Business Coaches, Career Coaches, and so on. What I did know is that what he was doing with the 100 people in his seminar was nothing short of magic. So I introduced myself .
Professionally, he is an organizational consultant and executive coach who works with clients around the world. In short he helps people grow, expand and transform personally and professionally, while creating opportunities for unprecedented levels of accomplishment and business growth.
I subversively tested him by introducing him to one of the clients of my design firm. My client was really great to work with, and we had already became friends in the first year of working together. In several years of working with him, my client has transformed her life and her IT consulting and software company. Her business grew from around $3 Million a year in revenue to close to $10 Million. She went from being a divorced mother of two managing a good company with no real vision for the future, to a woman with confidence and patience and a drive for greatness. She found the hidden leader in herself. She remarried. She is in the best physical shape of her life. She is the happiest I’ve ever seen her.
So, OK, he proved himself.
After successfully working with him professionally to develop my design business and expand my own effectiveness, I started to crave more. One day, in a conversation he mentioned that he thought that I had the raw skills and the personality to make a great coach. I never had announced that I had intentions of becoming a coach to him, but somehow the message came through, loudly and clearly.
I officially started my coaching practice, Wagner Coaching - about 15 months ago (new businesses are like babies, you express age only in months for the first 3 years.) There's so much to say about coaching and what it has brought me, both having a coach and being a coach. My design company is still in operation, we are still serving clients and designing great things, but now I have this second business where I get to be part of all KINDS of exciting people and projects.
So here I am, writing at one of my favorite café’s just off the Tevere River in Rome, one of the greatest cities on the planet, where I just happen to live, working with these ridiculously accomplished and interesting clients from all over the world, all the while being supported by an incredibly neat family and cool group of friends back home.
