Coaches Take Center Stage - Austin Walker

Austin Walker: So, I'm gonna get started. Cool. So Austin Walker, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, certainly, I am 33 years old, I am a coach by trade, well coach and facilitator. So I spend the majority of my time working with clients one-on-one to get closer to the experiences that they want in their life and I also hold spaces for diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging conversations, how to be more effective public speakers, communicators, overall bottom line, how to be more successful and a couple of different specific tracks in life and business outside

Austin Walker: Well, I hit this point where I had built a really successful career in tech sales and I was living in New York City, this early 2018. Had my dream income, dream lifestyle, and realized that it didn't quite feel the way that I thought it should, which had me really curious and so this led down a year introspective route of answering the $200,000 Jeopardy question of "What is it that I want to do?" And through conversations with myself, connecting with different mentors, people in my space, they are really clear that my purpose is to empower, inspire people to believe that they can create the lives that they want and that they can be the most complete, authentic expressed version themselves, why they do it. So I was like, great, but what does that mean? And serendipitously around that time I got connected to my first coach and I had experienced coaching and athletics played college ball, I had plenty of coaching and corporate perspective, but those conversations were more around how do I put Austin or experts in the best position to be successful? Whereas this style of coaching was more to empower your inner wisdom and to help clients get really clear and answer for themselves, like the things that they needed to move forward, who do they need to be, what do they need to do to create the things in their lives. And that was a really powerful experience for me and led me to, I want to learn a little bit more about this, I went and observed a coach's training program, the one where I ultimately ended up

Austin Walker: accomplishment coaching, and when I saw these masterful coaches working with other aspiring coaches and leaders to help them re-relate to the things in their lives to have barriers essentially dissipate and like move forward through conversation much like we're doing right now, it was almost like watching somebody do Jedi Mind Trick, it was like, "Wow, this is, this is fascinating."

Austin Walker: My philosophy on coaching is to empower people to make the choices that are aligned to creating the experiences that they want. So coaching is about, I feel like drawing awareness, being able to make distinctions around how you're operating, how you're showing up as, what can you take ownership of around your experience and ultimately putting people at choice. And I think that's one of the big misconceptions around coaching and like there's a lot of different styles of coaching, but it's not essentially a coach's job to be like, "All right, this is the thing that you need to do, go do it!" But it's more so to all right, well, here's what we know is predictable based off of your patterns, here's the thing that you want. So what is actually going to have to be generated for you to create a new experience, right? And putting somebody a choice for what they're going to do or who they're going to need to be in order to have a new experience, create a new possibility.

Austin Walker: My superpower in coaching is my ability to develop trust quickly. That's what I've heard from a number of the clients that I've worked with and just people in my life there is coaching can be a very intimate partnership, you're talking about all different depths and elements of somebody's life and the ability to feel you can be your full self and you can be accepted with no matter what comes into your space, can be just a huge component of a powerful relationship. So yeah, being able to build trust and then honoring and using that trust to say the bold thing or offer the bold reflection in service of the person on the other side.

Austin Walker: Well, if you're struggling with anything personal and work, I find it really supportive to get clear on "What/So", What are the facts around what's going on? Can you distinguish what some of the story that might be going on that could be influencing your experience of the facts. So the manner to which you can actually get distinguished (around) you can be surprised around for how many people I talked to that the facts and the story around the facts are actually one thing together when you actually pull them apart and actually be able to discern between the two, it also gives you different ways in which you may be able to relate or the choices that you might make once you've got them separated. So once you have that making a choice that's aligned with the outcome that you want and who you want to be.

Austin Walker: I love the Viktor Frankl quote that I reference. I think a lot when I'm coaching. "The space between stimulus and response is the power of choice, and in each moment you actually get to choose how you respond." So there is an inherent reaction to when things happen. And then there is a deliberate and intentional response. And in every moment, every moment of every day you actually have an opportunity to choose how you are going to respond to something as opposed to the default reaction and being able to respond.

Austin Walker: My go-to is generally the book called "Getting Real" by Susan Campbell It was actually one of the first books I read when I started my ontological coaching training and the book does a really fascinating job at looking at some of the truths or lies that we tell ourselves. And I mean the premise of the book is getting real and getting fundamentally real with who you are, how you show up, what are some of the stories that you might be telling yourself or you might be subject to that, you know, impact your experience and getting really clear on that. It's just, it's almost like drinking water through a fire hose of different thoughts and possibilities or ways that you might be able to show up differently. And I just think it's such a fascinating look on how real are you being with yourself?

Austin Walker: The words of wisdom that will offer us to be present, to making sure that you are tuning to your needs. I have a lot of conversations, a lot of people, a lot of ambitious people who are trying to create these great things and one of the most common things that has overstepped in any pursuit is personal wellness. And so it leads to this conversation around what is possible - if you didn't just have standard wellness within your life, whether that's sleep, exercise, coaching therapy, whatever the case may be, but what if you were actually abundantly supported to create whatever is that you wanted. So just a words of wisdom that I can't preach enough for being in the wellness spaces, actually getting clear on what is it that you need and prioritizing your wellness and the degree to which you're willing to be in conversation with people around that so it's not just a one person conversation, but you actually have a community of people that are supporting your wellness, good things happen.