When you look for a definition of em
pathic leader, you just might find a photo of Regina Miles, the subject of my latest leadership coaching case study and YouTube interview.
Regina has spent most of her professional life in service-oriented industries, from retail management to interior design to healthcare. Yet, despite her wide range of skills and talents, truly huge strengths for anyone, she began to realize that her career “wasn’t moving or progressing in an upward way that I had envisioned for myself.”
This brought her into my world, when she started the transformational leadership program; a program for heart-centered, empathic leaders who want to transform the way they lead and are ready to step up into their true power.
As Regina explains it:
“I guess the part of my life that brought me to the program was I have worked in the professional arena for many years [but had not reached the level I wanted to]. I have gone to college, I have gained a multitude of skills, and have worked in a variety of roles and have mastered technicality in many roles. I really envisioned that at this point in time, I would be in a management level role, I would be leading a team, and I’d be a rock star manager.
“But it’s not moving that way, or had not been moving that way, and I began to get very frustrated and feeling disappointed in myself.”
(BTW… This is the type of insight into Self that can make the work I do so rewarding! It can also be rare.)
Why She Sought a Leadership Coaching Solution
“I noticed people around me seemed to be moving, and I was not; so that’s what brought me into researching to figure out where am I blocked… what was causing my path to kind of plateau.”
“And so coaching… honestly it was new to me. It wasn’t a term that professional coaching, leadership coaching, was not something I had heard of, or was very familiar with… I started digging to figure out what kind of help did I need and what, who could help me, and that’s what led me to finding Maria’s program and finding coaching.”
As I do with all of my clients, I asked Regina about her priorities when we began working together.
“Some of my coaching goals at the beginning was to, I guess, have this huge, amazing change in my life, almost instantaneously. I thought I’d join a coaching program, I’d get some answers, I’d have some, you know, develop maybe a few new tools, and get some new scripts and steps to follow, and everything would just magically change. My life will be just completely different.
“However, it does not happen that way, and looking back, I realize that it’s best that it doesn’t happen that way.”
And here is where the real work gets done, as she describes what actually happened:
“The process is internal, and there are micro shifts that happen along the way in how you think, how you feel, how you process things, and with those [micro changes], they become more permanent; if everything just happened instantaneously, you wouldn’t shift completely, just yourself, into someone new, into a new habit, into a new way of being.”
Now, this is why I call my program Transformational:
“After I began to realize it’s not what’s happening, my goals changed, and my goals became to become more aware of myself, and to become more aware of how I’m processing things as life continues on to me, not just only today, and not just only as in the program, but as life continues.”
The results she saw were manifest and positive:
- She became assertive in communication with her manager
- She is learning to work with different emotions (such as resentment) rather than being stuck with them
- Increase in courage and self-confidence
- Going after two leadership positions
- Learning to take risks and take committed action in the presence of fear
Yes, this is the sort of self-awareness that leads to transformational change and this is why I said earlier that Regina is such a great example of empathic leadership.
In my interview with Regina she shares a great deal more of her journey, and the coaching that has helped her get there. For more of her inspirational story, click on this link: Regina Miles Interview.
If you would like to learn more about how to be a more empathic leader, by improving your leadership skills and the enhanced use of emotional intelligence in the workplace, click here to schedule your FREE Discovery Call.
