Health / Wellness

Working With A Coach For Transformation And Empowerment

Lawyers should consider working with a coach to find success and happiness.

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Ed. note: This post is by Jeena Cho, a Legal Mindfulness Strategist. She is the co-author of The Anxious Lawyer (affiliate link), a book written by lawyers for lawyers that makes mindfulness and meditation accessible and approachable. She is the creator of Mindful Pause, a self-paced online program for creating a more sustainable, peaceful, and productive law practice in just six minutes a day. Jeena offers actionable change strategies for reducing stress and anxiety while increasing productivity, joy, and satisfaction through mindfulness.

Diane Costigan is a seasoned executive and career coach. She currently serves as Winston & Strawn’s Director of Coaching. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with her to discuss why lawyers should consider working with a coach for finding success and happiness.

Jeena Cho: Can you talk a little bit about what coaches do?

Diane Costigan: Coaching at its root is focused on helping you achieve goals that you set that are meaningful to you. And, it’s a process. It’s a process of both transformation and empowerment.

Transformation meaning, you’re going to have goals and something will always be different by the end of your time in coaching. It might be you’ve developed a skill, or that you have changed or enhanced a way that you’re approaching something. It could be accomplishment-based, making partner in a law firm for example, or bringing in a certain amount of business. It could also be changing your mindset around something, or changing beliefs that you have, limiting beliefs that might be getting in the way.

It’s also a process of empowerment in that coaches don’t tell you what to do; they don’t give you the answers. It’s not advising or mentoring or counseling. It’s really working with you to pull the information from you, as coachee, to reach your goals.

Jeena Cho: I’ve worked with various coaches over the course of my career, I love working with a coach because they don’t have their own agenda; they’re fully focused on you and what your goals are. The coach listens to you, asks really great questions. When I first started working with a coach, I said, “Okay here’s my problem, go solve it.”

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Diane Costigan: Coaches ask questions. Sometimes they ask one right question and you see the problem in a completely different way and I think that’s where the magic in coaching happens.

For a mentor, the best compliment you can give is, “Wow, that was really good advice.” And I think for a coach, the best compliment you can get is, “Wow, that was a really great question.”

Listen to the full interview over at Jeena’s website…

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