Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Women, Context & Coaching
64 Plays2 months ago
In this *Culture in Coaching* episode, Elias Scultori, MCC talks with Rachel Vandenberg, executive coach and founder of Accelerate Women Leaders in Travel, about what it means to coach women through the lens of identity, context, and community. Together, they explore belonging, agency, and how cultural awareness deepens every coaching relationship.
Chapters
01:10 - The Many Facets of a Leader — Rachel shares her unique professional and personal journey.
07:07 - Women in Leadership: What Coaches Should Know — Insights into belonging, voice, and agency.
10:27 - Coaching Through Shared and Different Lenses — What male coaches might miss when coaching women.
13:50 - Context and Culture in Coaching — Seeing the client within their broader world.
15:29 - The Leadership Perspective of Women — Collective leadership and empathy in action.
18:03 - Closing Reflections & Invitation** — Lifelong learning and community through PRIME HOUR.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to Prime Space, a Prime Coaching Academy podcast with your host, Elias Coutori. So hello hello, coaches. And today for our Prime Space episode, i have a guest.
00:00:21
Speaker
And you know, I love when I have someone to chat with me here. And today I invited Rachel Vandenberg to come and talk with us here today. Hello, Rachel.
00:00:33
Speaker
Hi, Elias. Thanks for having me. It's a joy. Rachel, I've known Rachel for a few years now, and and she recently took our Level 2 program at Prime Coaching Academy.
00:00:46
Speaker
Rachel is an executive leadership coach, a fabulous coach, because I have seen her coach many times, and she is fantastic. I invited Rachel here today because she has a specific focus on working with women I wanted wanted to get her perspective here. But Rachel, how would you like to introduce yourself to our audience here today?
Rachel's Career and Passion for Coaching
00:01:10
Speaker
Where do I begin? um I'm a ah being in evolution, but I... I am currently doing many things. i My family owns a hotel and for many years I was a general manager at our family family hotel.
00:01:28
Speaker
From there, I think a lot emerged from that career experience. And one of them is I created a a retreat called Accelerate Women Leaders in Travel.
00:01:42
Speaker
So that's a project I work on on the side and I'm the founder and director of that ah yearly event. And from that, I gained a passion for coaching and went through coach training with Elias and in my level one and other, other great coaches.
00:02:04
Speaker
And at the at the same time, still carry this passion for travel and hospitality. So stay very connected through my event and still overseeing. I'm no longer the general manager of our hotel, but I'm still overseeing the hotel.
Family Life and Outdoor Activities
00:02:21
Speaker
And then, you know, part of my personal evolution was was going after dreams and ambitions and decided out of the blue to become a flight attendant. So I'm now a flight attendant for a major airline.
00:02:36
Speaker
and So, yeah, i'm I'm still I'm in the process of that evolution and seeing how all the pieces fit together. But um and at the same time, I'm a mother. i have three wonderful children, all teenagers, ah a husband.
00:02:50
Speaker
Yeah, some other other personal things about me is that i I live in Vermont, love the outdoors. I'm usually if I'm home, I'm always taking the opportunity to get out on my mountain bike or go for a hike.
00:03:05
Speaker
um Love being in the woods. That's that's really a big part of my life for sure. Thank you so much for that introduction. And I'm here with a broad smile, listening to all of these facets of who you are as a person and listeners.
The Inception and Growth of Accelerate Retreat
00:03:21
Speaker
I don't know if you realize this, but every time I have a guest, I always ask them to share something personal about them because sometimes you're so focused on our professional lives.
00:03:31
Speaker
And I really want us to get a sense of the broad aspect, the multifaceted aspect of of us, of every individual and especially our guests, because I truly believe that all of these facets support us in being better coaches and you with this diverse background and diverse interest and excitement about life. It's so beautiful to see how much that embraces you in your in your coaching. Thank you so much, Rachel, for living life fully.
00:04:04
Speaker
Yeah, thanks. ah So, again, listeners, the list the reason why I invited Rachel here is that last year she invited me to be the first and only male speaker ah to this Accelerate retreat that you had in, I think it was New Hampshire then, yeah right? Yes.
00:04:26
Speaker
It was a wonderful time to be there in person and and feeling a little bit like an outsider, but at the same time, participating and mean and contributing to the to the retreat. Rachel, before we get into the main aspect of our conversation here today, what is Accelerate? Can you tell us a little bit more about it?
00:04:46
Speaker
Sure. ah So in 2019, was feeling myself as a leader a little bit on an island and in managing my hotel. And I really had this eagerness to connect with other women leaders.
00:05:05
Speaker
And I really didn't have a space in which to do that. So I decided, well, I'm going to create it myself and started the first year with about 25 women.
00:05:16
Speaker
I knew that I wanted to have a retreat that had a coach approach to it so that we used certified coaches for workshops and the like.
00:05:28
Speaker
At the time, I really didn't know that I would myself step into coaching. I was more producing the event and finding coaches to run the workshops portion of the event.
00:05:42
Speaker
But now we've grown to 100 women yearly, many repeat participants. we Every year we have different workshop themes around leadership within the context of hospitality and travel.
00:05:57
Speaker
And it happens mostly in New England, but um we have ambitions to expand to multiple events per year. And we welcome also people from outside of New England.
00:06:11
Speaker
ah So it's become a really great community of learning and professional development. Yeah, it was a fascinating event and wonderful to see the community and the people coming back on ah on a year after year and building relationships and connections and supporting each other.
00:06:31
Speaker
And I hope that you're going to start branching this out outside of the hospitality industry, outside of New England, because it's a fabulous event. So thank you for starting this connection here.
Challenges and Community in Women's Leadership
00:06:43
Speaker
But Rachel, the the reason why I invited you here, especially in this Culture in Coaching series that I have here at Prime Space, is your work with women. So what are you noticing when you work with this segment of the population that is important for us to coaches to keep in mind about their context?
00:07:07
Speaker
Yeah. So i think some of the things that I've noticed, um, they've come from kind of two different areas. One is actually listening to the women that we work with in the retreat or women that I have coached from ah other areas.
00:07:26
Speaker
But also that my event has also caused me to dive deeper into some of the research. around women in leadership and what are the challenges that women face.
00:07:38
Speaker
I think one of the first that comes to mind is that ah where it comes from where I started is that sense of feeling alone and feeling like you're the only one dealing with a certain issue.
00:07:52
Speaker
So at first, it's that need for a community and a support network. And that I think is a really a huge common thing is that just by being part of a community, there's already this ah sense of strength that women gain from from being part of a community.
00:08:14
Speaker
And ah part of that is also because they feel seen, you know, they feel seen, there's a sense of belonging. And we every year at my retreat, we do a survey post-retreat to see what their experience has been. is And this has been one of the strongest recurring themes that comes out of those surveys.
00:08:35
Speaker
Another really big one is the sense of women having the ability to make a choice about their personal and professional lives.
00:08:47
Speaker
Sometimes there's like this idea of a prescribed path out there and that you just are supposed to follow this path. And this is what success looks like.
00:08:59
Speaker
And okay, I'm just going to start off on that path or that they feel like there's the, all of these outside constraints, at least At least that's what I felt um is that there were these other outside of me things that were determining the course of my life. And I felt this lack of agency to change it.
Agency and Voice in Leadership
00:09:25
Speaker
yeah I remember clearly when I was at Accelerate last year, ah the common theme that I kept hearing over and over again is this the voice, right the opportunity to have their voice, to to speak up, which is by the way, as I was there,
00:09:43
Speaker
and also myself being part of a quote unquote minority, I was I was like, well, this is this is not just women. Like if you are part of a less privileged group, there is that sense ah of where is my voice? Where is can I have agency towards that?
00:10:01
Speaker
and And it's very clear and it was very clear and palpable to see that from the women in that particular room. I'm curious here because you work with women clients, but you are you identify yourself as a woman as well.
00:10:17
Speaker
So what are the parallels between your story and the stories that you see with your client and how does that influence the coaching that you do with them?
Symbiotic Growth in Coaching
00:10:27
Speaker
Yeah, you know, like I started with, I'm i'm very much a person in evolution. you know, like I learned very early on from you and other other coaches, our ability to be good coaches comes from constantly going back to who we are as as people, as coaches. And when we do our development, our our own personal development, we are then much more able to help create help support the transformation of others.
00:11:04
Speaker
So there's this ah constant symbiotic relationship or whatever you want to call it. And I think that as a woman, i can relate to other women and the challenges that they are facing.
00:11:20
Speaker
i see myself in them and they see themselves in me. You know, I think we're literally growing together in that relationship. You know, so i'm I'm listening to you and I'm here thinking of the opposite because I identify as male.
00:11:37
Speaker
So I didn't grow up with the perspective of looking at this world through a woman's eyes. What may I be missing?
00:11:52
Speaker
What are things that perhaps I should be more aware of or keep in mind? when I'm working with a client that identifies as ah as a woman?
00:12:06
Speaker
I mean, one of the things that I've seen emerge in the same way, like if I'm working with a woman who maybe has a piece of her identity that is not the same as mine, what I've become aware of is that in coaching,
00:12:23
Speaker
we're coaching the person, not the problem, right? So ah you're always bringing it back to who the person is and their beliefs and theyre their values, their strengths, things like that.
00:12:38
Speaker
However, what becomes challenging is sometimes there is an outside context that that really is influencing how the person sees themselves or how the person behaves.
00:12:54
Speaker
For instance, if someone is legitimately being discriminated against, then that really is a problem that needs to be addressed. And that doesn't get solved by focusing on the person and who that who they are. I mean, yes, they're they're related, like helping them develop to be able to address that situation is a key part of that.
00:13:19
Speaker
I mean, to make it more concrete, I think You know, I had a, I had a client once where, you know, she had some self self-confidence and self-doubt issues.
00:13:31
Speaker
Now that outside influence might be impacting that. That's not necessarily just an internal thing. There's actually an outside force that is influencing that abilities person to have confidence in themselves.
00:13:49
Speaker
And I think that you you landed in a beautiful point here. And the reason why i have this Culturing Coaching series here at Prime Space, because the bottom line is that when we are coaching, we are coaching the individual.
00:14:04
Speaker
And every person is a mix of several of these labels and these boxes that we have that is unique to that particular person. So that's why it's so important for us to focus on the on the individual and not the labels and the expectations and the stereotypes and all of the the things that come with these labels, right? It's important for us to think of the individual.
00:14:29
Speaker
However... we cannot forget that that individual is part of a context. It's part of a culture. It's part of a ah larger arena that influences how this person even sees themselves or the choices that they are making for themselves.
Collective Benefit and Self-care
00:14:47
Speaker
And that's why i think it's so important for us to talk about the the context of many different individuals and as many boxes as we have in this world for us coaches to be aware of it. what What is influencing this person just because of this label this person carries is influencing the way they are perceiving themselves and their world and the choices that they are making.
00:15:15
Speaker
What would be some perspectives that an individual growing up, identifying as a woman, that this individual has to contribute to our world?
00:15:29
Speaker
Yes, i think that's a great question. This can be a slippery slope because you don't want to generalize the the common experience of women. But I do think there are a couple things. One is the perspective of contributing to the collective versus in you know individual gain.
00:15:53
Speaker
Women are ah often thinking about how can we make things better for all of us rather than just me. There's also issues around ego.
00:16:06
Speaker
Many women are thinking about other people and that comes from kenno caring and empathy and things like that, um sometimes to a fault. like It can also go in the other direction.
00:16:18
Speaker
where they're not they're constantly pleasing other people rather than taking care of themselves. So there's also that to watch out for. you know How can we grow and improve for as many people as possible? And and it's rooted in that caring and empathy piece.
00:16:39
Speaker
Such a wonderful message for all of us here. Thank you for sharing your experience.
Experience at Prime Coaching Academy
00:16:45
Speaker
I cannot let you go without asking you to share with us and with our audience.
00:16:51
Speaker
You just came out of our level two program at Prime Coaching Academy. What did you think? It was great. I mean, we had a wonderful group of students. I knew it was going to be great with two wonderful coaches that I've already had experience with, Elias and Amy.
00:17:09
Speaker
What I was looking for through the program was to have ah to have an experience that brought me to the next level. And it really did do just that. I was kind of feeling like I had stalled a little bit in my growth as a coach.
00:17:26
Speaker
And it really challenged me and pushed me to go further, further develop myself and my coaching skills. I see the change that it's brought to my coaching. So thank you.
00:17:37
Speaker
Oh, thank you Thank you for trusting us with your coaching education and for sharing your perspective and exciting life with us. It's always a joy to share this space with you. Rachel, I'm always inspired by you and by who you are and what you do. And thank you so much for being here.
00:17:56
Speaker
Any final words you want to share with our audience here today before we close our episode?
Conclusion and Community Engagement
00:18:02
Speaker
I would just say, yeah, if you're interested in the Prime Coaching Academy, definitely start by attending Prime Hour. i did that myself but and really enjoyed that and hope to get back to participating soon.
00:18:18
Speaker
Fabulous prime hour. Our schedule is on our website and it's a free hour for the community where coaches from many different arenas come and we share and we usually have a topic for us to discuss.
00:18:32
Speaker
It's always wonderful to share that with the community. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you everyone for listening to this podcast. Please share the podcast with others and don't forget to subscribe and I will see you next time. Take care.