Success as a Trap (#049)

Awareness
Awareness
Success as a Trap (#049)
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My guest today is a leadership coach who has helped many organizations thrive by building leadership skills among top executives across the globe. Alison Napier is a certified executive coach, human resources consultant, and the founder of Ripple Solutions. During her long career as a senior HR leader at a Fortune 500 company, Alison has helped hundreds of leaders and teams optimize their performance. In today’s episode, Alison shares her wisdom on coaching, avoiding burnout, maintaining healthy habits, finding the courage to pursue change, and many more.

Show Notes

Self-Coaching – Alison opens up about how coaching for herself was the first step of her journey towards overcoming all sorts of hurdles that came in between her professional as well as personal life. As an executive coach herself currently, she expresses how coaching from different coaches at different aspects of her life back then helped her as she was approaching burnout, negative sleeping patterns, and a couple of other negative habits.

Costs of Not Changing – When asked about her courage to go from being an HR leader at a Fortune 500 company to becoming a coach, Alison highlights her realization in the costs of not changing being too quick and high.

Signals of Burnout – Given that 40 percent of the people in the US currently are considering quitting their jobs and get a new career path due to burnout, as stated by Bobby, Alison states some of the signals of burnout from her personal experiences.

Whole-Person: Upon being asked if the tension and having a lofty goal were a part of becoming the whole person, Alison agrees and explains how important it is to figure out the lofty goal first since each individual has a different lofty goal and then go about working to reach the preferred, planned, and potential vision in depth. Personality Tool: Lumina – Alison explains about the personality tool she has been working with in order to find answers to self-reflecting questions such as what are one’s strengths, potential blind spots, and how are these going to inform one’s bigger choices ahead of them.

Contact Alison Napier

Website: https://ripplesolutions.ca/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alison-napier-0059163a/

Bobbi's Takeaways

Have you found not just inspiration, that conversation, but also some really practical tools that you can apply? Here are my three insights for thriving?

  1. Something that really resonated for me was when Allison said that the cost of not changing just became too much too high. I think that we can all probably relate to that. I know that I can personally, as well as having seen it show up in coaching, you know, sometimes that pain, that cost becomes the catalyst for change.  

  2. I really loved the word picture of the rubber band spread over the thumb and the forefinger, with the forefinger being on the top and representing our lofty goal. However, we authentically define that for ourselves, free of shoulds, free of arts; it’s got to be true for us. And then, the rubber band is also hooked under the bottom of our thumb, and that represents our current state. And here’s the thing, our current state is simply our current state, it’s not our future, and it’s not set in stone, and then the space between our current state, our thumb, and our lofty goal, our forefinger, creates a tension. The bigger that gap is, the more tension we have. And that tension can feel uncomfortable. So to reduce the tension, we have two options. One, we can lower our goal, or we can raise our current state. In coaching people, I’ve noticed that because that tension can feel so uncomfortable. It’s tempting to give in to lowering our lofty goals. But remember, it is simply an uncomfortable feeling. It’s just discomfort.

  3. Sit in the tension, as Alison described doing for herself. Don’t lower your goals, not when they’re true for you. You know, give yourself the grace and the margin and the permission to sit in that uncomfortable space because you will grow through it.

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