My Own Pair of Safe Hands

Nobody warns you about this part. When the mentor who guided your whole career retires, the hard part isn't that they can't help you anymore. It's that you realize you never built your own judgment. 

In this episode, Kim gets honest about the years she lost sitting still after her mentor left, the Olivia Dean lyric that finally woke her up, and why an executive coach is a need-to-have, not a nice-to-have. A mentor gives you answers. A coach builds the muscle so you become your own pair of safe hands.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Thank you for being here. I'm so happy that you have joined me today for this episode. So, today I want to talk about something I have never actually heard anyone talk about. And I've been doing leadership development work for a very long time. So when I tell you I haven't heard it, I mean it. It's about what happens when the person who guided your whole career walks away. Not because they wanted to leave you, because they retired. And it's about why I have come to believe that an executive coach is not a nice to have, it is a need to have. I'm going to tell you why I say that. And I'm also going to be honest with you about how I learned it the hard way. For years, I had a mentor, and not the kind you check in with once a quarter. The kind who watched over my whole career. The kind who, if I called him about a job posting, would tell me straight, no, don't do that one. Or yes, that's the move, go. He had years on me. He had the scars, the pattern recognition, the read on a room that I just had not built yet. And whatever he told me, I did. Because I trusted him completely. And because I had always done it that way. And then he retired. Now here's what I would need you to understand. It is not that he couldn't help me anymore. He would still take my call to this day. The help was still there if I asked for it. But something changed the day he stepped away. And it took me a long time to name what it was. The person who had been watching over me was gone. The one who kept an eye on the whole board for me, looking out for the opening I couldn't see, was no longer in the seat. And now it was my board to watch by myself. And I want to tell you the truth about what I did with that. Absolutely nothing. I stalled. And I don't mean for a few weeks. I mean for years. I didn't apply for anything. I didn't make a move. Opportunities came across my path and good ones, real ones, ones that I probably should have taken. And I let them pass me by. I just sat there. And the part that still gets me looking back is that I couldn't figure out why. I had the experience. I had the track record. On paper, I was ready, but the confidence to look at my own career and call my own next move just was not there. I kept waiting for someone to tell me it was the right one. It took me a while to be honest with myself about what had actually happened. I leaned on his judgment for so long that I never built my own. Every time he told me yes or no, I took the answer and skipped the work of understanding how he actually got there. So when he left, I did not just lose a mentor. I realized I had never developed one thing I needed the most: my own judgment. I was listening to Olivia Dean. I love her as an artist. Her music just, it just speaks to me. And there's a song of hers called Baby Steps. And there's a line in it about becoming your own pair of safe hands. It's not the end, it's the making of. And I have to stop what I was doing. I had never become my own pair of safe hands. For my entire career, as a matter of fact, I actually let someone else be the hands. Someone else caught me, someone else steadied me. And the day those hands left, I realized I had never built my own. I did not know how to catch myself. That is a hard thing to admit out loud, but I think a lot of you know exactly what I'm talking about. So here's where I landed. And this is the whole reason, actually, I wanted to make this episode. A mentor, a lot of time, gives you the answers. And that is a gift. That is the shortcut through years of mistakes you would have otherwise have to make on your own. I am not knocking mentorship. My mentor changed my life. But there is a trap hidden inside the gift, and nobody warns you about it. When someone keeps handing you the answer, you can quietly stop building the muscle to find the answer yourself. You don't even notice it happening. It feels like support, and it is, right up until the support leaves. There is a difference between a mentor and a coach. And understanding the difference is what changed everything for me. A coach does something completely different. A good coach does not hand you the move. A good coach builds your capacity to see the move. They ask you the question instead of giving you the answer. They make you do the thinking on purpose so that the thinking becomes yours, so that you walk out of that relationship stronger than you walked in, not more dependent on it. Sit with that for a second. The exact thing that made losing my mentor so brutal, the fact that I had outsourced my own judgment, is the exact thing a coach is built to prevent. A mentor can make you feel safe. Now I have to be honest with you about something because this is where I see a lot of people get stuck. I was not ready for a coach at first. And I want to tell you why because I think my reason is a lot of other people's reason. It was trust. I had built years of trust with my mentor, and I knew going into any coaching relationship that I was going to compare every single coach to him. I knew it was not fair to them. I knew it would get in my own way, and I did it anyway for a very long time. I told myself nobody could do for me what he had done. So why even bother? That was fear talking. And the fear cost me. Because while I was busy protecting the memory of one relationship, I was missing the chance to build the very thing that that relationship was supposed to leave me with. Eventually, I did get an executive coach. And I'll be straight with you, I wish I had done it years earlier. Oh, all the jobs and opportunities that passed me by, I'm not sure where I would have been today. Probably, I don't know, something bigger. Not sure. Not, and here's the thing. The coach was not to replace him, but so that the whole time he was holding my hand, I would have been learning to use my own. This is why I have stopped calling an executive coach a nice to have. I think that language is actually part of the problem. We treat coaching like a perk, like a reward you earn once you have already made it to the top. Something the company pays for if there is a little budget left over at the end of the year. That is backwards. A coach is a need to have, and not because you cannot think for yourself, it's actually the exact opposite. Because the entire point of good coaching is to make sure that you can think for yourself on the day the safety net moves. And the net always moves. Mentors retires, sponsors leave for other companies. The boss who championed you, right, gets reorganized right out of the building. The market shifts under your feet. Everything external you have been leaning on is temporary. The only thing that travels with you from job to job, from season to season is your own judgment. And here's the part I learned the hard way. That judgment is a muscle. It is not a gift you are born with. It is built. And a coach is the person whose entire job is to build it with you on purpose before you need it. I lost years because I did not understand that. I do not want that for you. So let me give you something practical because I do not want this to just be a nice story. If you have a mentor right now, somebody whose judgment you lean on, here is my ask: do not collect their answers. The next time they tell you yes or no, ask them how they got there. Make them walk you through the thinking. Build the reasoning, not the dependency, because one day you are going to have to run that play without them. Second, pay attention to the signal. If you have stopped making moves without a green light from one specific person, that is it. That is the dependency. That is the exact place I was sitting still for years. And notice it now while you still have time to do something about it. Don't wait like I did. Third, and this is the big one: get the coach. And get the coach before the net moves, not after. Do not wait until you are in crisis. Do not wait until the person you have been leaning on is already gone. The whole value of a coach is that they develop you. They are not there to rescue you. They are there to make sure you never need rescuing in the first place. And if you are sitting there thinking you do not have access to an executive coach, that your company will not pay for one, hear me on this. Start building the muscle anyway. Find someone who asks you the question instead of giving you the answers. Make small calls on your own in low stakes on purpose, so that the muscle is there for the high stakes. The point was never the title coach. The point is that you stop outsourcing your own thinking. I want to come back to the line that stopped me in the Olivia Dean song. It's your own pair of safe hands. Because the work was never about finding someone to watch over me forever. I used to think that it was. I thought leadership was about finding the right person to follow. But the work was about becoming someone who could watch over myself. Someone who could catch herself, someone who did not need a green light from anyone to believe in her own next move. An ending can be a beginning, but only if you have built the thing that lets you walk through it. So if you are in that place right now, the place I was in a couple years ago, scared, stalled, waiting on permission that is not coming, then let this be your sign. Do not sit there like I did. Go build your own peer safe hands. Okay, if this one landed for you today, I really want to hear from you. Send me an email, Kim at the KPAdvisory Group.com. I also offer executive coaching services, but more importantly, I just want to hear from you what resonated for you, what landed for you. This is Leadership After Five, and we always, and I mean always, keep it real over in these parts. I'll see you in the next episode. Take care.