#37 – How to cultivate your own leadership style with executive coach Carolyn Coughlin

The Role Models Podcast

Carolyn Coughlin is an executive coach, facilitator, and leadership development specialist.

Carolyn’s journey began as a management consultant first at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and later at McKinsey & Co. She was introduced to the idea of adult development shortly after leaving the corporate world 15 years ago, and instantly felt passionate about helping people not only to grow into their biggest selves, but also to live as fully as they can.

Throughout all of her work, Carolyn acts as a coach for executives struggling to navigate new or different career situations and in particular, has a keen interest in encouraging more women to step into leadership positions. With her fellow Cultivating Leadership partner Jennifer, Carolyn co-designed and runs the Growth Edge Certification series – a developmentally-oriented coaching platform that helps people find the right coach alongside helping coaches expand their knowledge in the developmental coaching area.

Key to Carolyn’s work are two core philosophies of:

• Cultivating leadership by offering skills that are immediately useful as well as developmental in nature.
• Seeing leadership as a series of habits that are both self-reinforcing and contagious.

In this episode Carolyn expands on both of these principles and shows us how we can all create a “self-authored” leadership voice that moves us away from reinforcing feedback loops that could potentially be holding us back. We also touch on topics including:

• Why the key to deep listening is curiosity
• Why we need to ask different (not better) questions of ourselves
• How we can all escape reinforcing feedback loops
• Why we’re so hard on our leaders!

If you’re inspired by today’s episode you can learn more from Carolyn at:

Leadership and change consultancy: https://www.cultivatingleadership.co.nz/

Developmentally-oriented coaching: https://www.growthedgecoaching.com/

And if leadership is something you’d like to learn more about you’ll find lots more Role Model episodes on the topic here: https://www.rolemodels.co/podcast/category:leadership/

Thanks to our patrons for this episode:

• Anna Caroline who coaches leaders in Berlin: http://truthcircles.com
• Megan Quinn who supports Code2014: http://www.code2040.org
• Alexandra Cosma: http://alexandracosma.com
• Emma Harris

And if you want to help us create The Role Models Podcast in the future (thank you!), become a patron and chip-in $1, $3, $5, or $10 per episode. Read more about the different tiers and rewards on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/rolemodels