Chloe Drew

Coaching in the Clear

Chloe Drew:

That grounding in your values and principles again and again, every day can be the, okay, my feet are planted solidly on something and it allows me to make better decisions. And what I always say to leaders, when it comes to diversity inclusion, to bring it back to that is, it's a lens you apply to every single thing you do.

Jeff Hunter:
Hi and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter, and you are listening to coaching in the clear, the podcast committed to help you learn about coaching. Coaching is more popular than ever, and we believe that sharing in depth, personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their potential while creating market leading big change businesses. Coaching in the clear is a production of talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity. We send out a weekly newsletter called the SenseMaker where we offer our latest thinking about issues affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content and enable you to unleash your potential.

Learn more and sign [e-mail]. Today I'm speaking with Chloe drew. Chloe can spent the past 20 years achieving significant impact in both the corporate and political worlds in the areas of social justice, philanthropy, diversity, and inclusion. We'll discuss her first experience with a transformational coach and how it helped her find direction and purpose. You'll also review ways to make ourselves more coachable. Then we'll shift our reflections on empathy and creating safe spaces in the world of business and how critical this is in our current business environment. Finally, we'll explore how business leaders must challenge their blind spots around social, gender and racial inclusion by starting with more self skepticism. So Chloe, thank you so much. Joining me today on coaching in the clear I am so grateful that you've made time for us and just really appreciative of you making the space to have this conversation. So thank you.

Chloe Drew:

I'm really delighted to be part of this. Thank you for asking me Jeff.

Jeff Hunter:
Of course. So let's just start out with how you found coaching, everybody comes to be a part of a coaching experience in their own way. Some people have been athletes and got to know it that way, other people have just through being successful executives, but everybody sort of comes to it in their own way. And I'd love to hear your story.

Chloe Drew:
Yeah, no. And I have experienced coaching, frankly, in both of those parts of my life and being. I ran cross country and track in high school and I was thinking, and sort of preparing to talk to you today. I was thinking about coach Cody, who was my cross country coach and track coach when I was 14 years old. And he sort of had a bunch of qualities that I think are good professional coaching qualities, good managerial qualities. And one thing that really struck me as I thought about him is he used to tell us running tips and sort of coach us real time in races, but he also ran with us and there was this feeling of hanging with the team, solidarity, literally sort of sweating in the hot summer with us. And then on race day, we were kind of on our own except he was there and, you know, every lap I would do or every sort of, you know, break in the trees or he'd pop out and yell something he was there.

And, you know, I think the important through line for me from sports coaching to professional coaching is the best of coaching wires in your very sort of cellular makeup and musculature, the better way of doing things. Because you're hearing feedback real time, you're then practicing it. You're screwing it up. You're getting more feedback, you're trying it again. And that's sort of the definition of sports coaching, at least in my life. And then the best kind of professional coaching had those qualities too. So that was sort of my high school years. And he's one of the most memorable coaches I had. And then I had three different sets of professional coaches. One was when I was a very young executive director of a nonprofit and I had a very young untested coach and she was, I would say sort of friend-like and her approach.

It was a weekly session for me to download, vent, get some tips on managing. I did not know how to manage at all. I manage this team and all these volunteers and this board, and she had some sort of valuable frameworks for me, but then I had this truly, truly transformational experience of spending time with a coach and Carol Morley who had the right approach for me at the time that I came to her because I was probably about 32 and needed to move on from the nonprofit that I was running, but didn't know who I was or what my skills were or sort of how to think about the change I wanted to make in the world. And it was this very rigorous, I mean curriculum is probably the best way to put it, of sort of soul searching, strength searching.

And we never talked about the job I wanted to have until one day it came to me as if it was sort of the hand of god, and I was brushing my teeth one morning and I realized, Oh, that's exactly what I want to do. And for the first time in my life, I had the idea of what I wanted to do and I went out and got the job and it was, and I really credit it to that, that coaching experience. And of course I've had my most recent, incredibly, incredibly valuable, critical lifeline experience with Doug at Talentism, which was very different, very important and suited what I needed at that moment, because I was in, I would frankly just call it a professional crisis. And he was my life raft, kind of got me to calmer shores. And then as sort of now, even helping me think about what the next phase looks like.

Jeff Hunter:
So that's wonderful. So let's pick up on something there. So you're talking about what coaching is both in different sorts of forms and also at coaching at different parts of your career or life. One of the things I've been talking to people about is what are the essential sort of elements of a coachable person? What is it that makes you want to be coached and what makes you successful in coaching? Because you've had what sounds like four successful coaching sort of engagements in your life, very different, very different approaches, different people, different times of your life. And yet the sort of through line of all of that is you. So what do you think makes a coachable person?

Chloe Drew:
It's funny, I love this question and I've started coaching just as a pro bono offering to the world, two women, one who works for a startup for-profit enterprise and one who works for a nonprofit. And I've been thinking about that a lot, cause one is a more difficult engagement than the other. I think that coming to coaching with an, you know, such a cliche, but sort of openness and vulnerability, which means different things to different people, but a real willingness to be bare and introspective and absorb and think to really look squarely in the mirror at things that you're not doing particularly well. I think those are some really important sort of foundational elements. I think eagerness to, I would say curiosity about the world and curiosity about yourself, curiosity about other people. And, you know, I don't think that I'm particularly good at this, but I think someone who, I'm not su...