Before starting Giant Leap Consulting, I spent six years as an executive with Accenture, one of the world’s largest management consulting firms. During my time there, I became the company’s first full-time internal executive coach.
Just before moving into the role, I was so afraid of coaching the company partners that I actually considered foregoing the opportunity. I was a middle manager and had reported to a few of these execs, so I knew personally how intimidating and level-conscious a few of them could be. Knowing that most of them were older than I only added to my anxiety. Yet, my success as a coach (and their progress as coaches) would be contingent upon my ability to give them unvarnished feedback. Unless I could develop a stronger backbone, I would be utterly useless to them. Coaching is all about demonstrating and instilling courage. What kind of role model would I be if I were a wimpy coach?
About the time I was to move into the role, I came across a poem by Mahatma Gandhi titled Resolution. One line in particular resonated with me, “I shall not fear anyone on earth.” Until reading the poem, I had always assumed that Gandhi had been fearless in affecting such transformational change. It caught my attention because I knew that for Gandhi to declare this as a resolution for his future, he must have experienced fear of others in his past.
A few days later I happened to watch a documentary on Martin Luther King, Jr. Living in Atlanta, King is one of my heroes, and I never miss a chance to learn about his life. It turns out King was a great admirer of Gandhi and even had a picture of him hanging over the archway to his dining room. King had patterned his principles of nonviolence and passive resistance after Gandhi’s. In his last speech, delivered the night before he was assassinated, King talks of the promised land and says, prophetically, that he may not get there with us. Then, as if he were speaking directly to me, he says, “Tonight I am fearing no man.” Once again I was struck with the fact that for King to have made a special point that he was fearing no man on that night must have meant that he feared men on other occasions.
It was somehow liberating for me to know that the fearful feelings I had about coaching the company bosses were very similar to the ones experienced by King and Gandhi during their struggles against the ruling authorities. Feeling part of a noble lineage, I borrowed the words of both men to come up with a mantra of my own:
I will fear no man.
That simple mantra helped me get ready for taking on the new job by stiffening my backbone during those intense moments when I found myself feeling intimidated by my coachee’s position or age. My mantra helped me coach more assertively, which, in turn, built my credibility and earned the executive’s respect.
Excerpted from Right Risk: Ten Powerful Principles for Taking Giant Leaps with Your Life (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2003).
