Kevin Stafford 0:00
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Conversations with Coaches podcast. I’m your host, Kevin, and I have the immense pleasure of having one of my favorite guests back on for a second conversation. This is Andrea Sigetich. Did I remember the pronunciation right?
Andrea Sigetich 0:14
Yes, you did beautifully.
Kevin Stafford 0:16
As I was practicing a little bit before. But the first time we talked, Andrea is one of the few coaches I’ve spoken to who has essentially gone through the hall, more or less. She is a retired coach. Let me refresh your memory as to who Andrea is before we get back into the conversation. Andrea opened her coaching business, Sage Coach, back in 1997. She’s logged over 10,000 coaching hours working with executives, leaders, and entrepreneurs. She also teaches for CTI. More importantly, we’ve talked about this before. She lives a well-balanced life up in the high desert, loves to hike, and apparently soon renew her passion for backpacking. She’s visited all 63 United States National Parks and remains, first and foremost, an adventurer, which I just love so much. “I remain an adventure.” I just wanted to say it again. So Andrea, thanks for coming back on and chatting with me again. It’s really good to see you.
Andrea Sigetich 1:11
Thank you. It’s my pleasure to be here. Thank you very much, Kevin.
Kevin Stafford 1:15
So I was maybe blowing smoke a little bit up here, but I was speaking admiringly about your coaching journey and how you have, at least in my experience so far, having talked with, at this point, almost a couple of hundred coaches, particularly for the podcast, a very unique perspective. Having really been through the entire coaching journey professionally, having your own business, coaching for so long, putting so many different types of people across an area of time. I’m thinking about 1997 and how differently the world feels when I kind of summon up my memory of ’97 in my head across the board. But I think especially the coaching business has evolved so much in the last–I mean, it’s evolved so much in the last five years, let alone in the last 25 or 30. So you had a lot to say that I hadn’t really heard before, or not a perspective that I hadn’t quite gotten before, on how the coaching business has evolved. So I think I want to start you out by just teeing you up and seeing what you have to say about what’s maybe the most significant evolution you’ve seen in the coaching business over your time in the business, in the trenches?
Andrea Sigetich 2:23
Well, you know, it’s really interesting because I’m still teaching for CTI, I get to interact with brand new coaches all the time too. And I’m learning a lot from them. So my answers are twofold. One is that I mentioned it last time, the word coaching is like–people know what you’re talking about. And so the old coach jokes that were around, or not quite so funny anymore. I mean, people generally know what it is, certainly in business they know what it is. But the second big change is the technology. I mean, absolutely. When I learned to coach, we always coached by phone. Maybe once in a while under certain circumstances in person. But now coaches are seeing their clients on the screen. And I think that’s a big difference.
Kevin Stafford 3:17
That’s a really good point too. I mean, especially the ability to have everyone’s got a camera, access to a camera pretty much. It’s kind of weird to think about it that way, but everybody’s basically got a camera on them or very nearby at all times. It’s still, I’m still getting used to it. And it’s been around for quite a while. But that ability to is just one of the reasons I like this podcast is an audio-only podcast, obviously. When people are listening to it, they won’t be seeing us. But we get to see each other. And that’s something I always like to mention when I’m interviewing people or talking to anybody, is even if this isn’t going anywhere that people are going to see, I like to be able to change my facial expression and raise my eyebrows. I’m typically a very physical talker anyway. You can kind of see my hands bubbling around the bottom of my Zoom screen. And I like to be able to demonstrate that. I like to be physically available in a way that’s actually perceivable by the people I’m talking to. So I want them to be able to understand me and also to allow me to communicate to them that I’m listening, that I’m following what they’re saying, or that maybe if I make a quizzical expression, maybe I didn’t hear something. There are all sorts of different levels of communication now that have become accessible to us via this digital realm, as opposed to just the voice. And I mean, it doesn’t sound like much when you say it like, “Oh, we have cameras now,” but the change and the effectiveness of coaching in this format, I think, has been a profound evolution.
Andrea Sigetich 4:39
I think that’s true. It took me a while to get through the change because I learned to hear and recognize changes in tone and expression, whether or not people were moving their hands and if they had a smile or frown. I learned to hear that over the phone, that’s the way we were taught. When people started coaching where they could see so much, at first, I was resistant to it. But as I’ve watched many more coaches coach on Zoom, I can see how they’re using it and integrating it. My only caution is to not rescue your clients. Just because you can see their face doesn’t mean you should be less of a coach or less challenging or less listening at that deep level. When I teach, I’ll do some coaching demos with the cameras on and off, and I challenge my students to try coaching with the camera off and see what happens.
Kevin Stafford 6:27
That’s a really good point. You don’t want to over-rely on a particular tool or avenue because it can obscure what you’re trying to perceive. It’s especially tricky because of how visually dominant human beings are, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’re seeing more clearly or perceiving more clearly, it’s a matter of getting used to using the tool. I love that in your teaching, you focus on camera on-camera off, because it’s a key exercise for coaches who are required to be very intuitive and interpretive when they’re engaging with their clients.
Andrea Sigetich 8:07
I also want to talk about the client perspective. The first time I faced this was a long time ago when I was coaching a CEO in person, but then I moved and we continued our coaching relationship over the phone. What changed in him was remarkable because I no longer read his nonverbals. He had to articulate what he was feeling, thinking, where he wanted to go. In the coaching, he became better able to notice what he was feeling, thinking, and doing and communicate that.
Kevin Stafford 9:11
And I feel like that that touches on a concept that’s very near and dear to my heart. And any of my like creative or communication pursuits as I’ve moved through life is that limitations aren’t necessarily limiting. Sometimes limitations of form or format can actually be uplifting or focusing. And I think about three times I’ve tried to write, you know, a novella, whereas like I could really excel in the short story format or something like that, where it’s like the limitations of like word count and you have to like the just the way in which the format changed. My approach allowed me to pour myself into whatever the thing I was trying to create was in a different way that accentuated different aspects of who I was and what I was trying to express and some things worked better than others based on subject matter as well as format. Sometimes my mood would be such that it wasn’t really the right like the format I was trying to communicate, it wasn’t quite right. Sometimes what I could say in 15 seconds on a phone call will take me 30 minutes to type out in a short email, you know, it’s like, which one might be better? Is it like? And how will the person receive this? Like? Would it be better for them to be able to read this and have the time to consume it? Or is it gonna hit them better if I say it to them in real time, and I’m there to respond to any questions they might have. All these considerations in my mind starts to go all these different places that these things that we think of as limitations can actually be amplifiers or guides, or focusers. And it’s really again, case by case basis, some people, it’s going to be better to be communicating with them in a certain way. And for them to communicate with you in a certain way, it’s going to bring out the best in them, which again, is sort of I mean, if you could if you could summarize what a coach is trying to do, bring out the best whatever that whatever that means for a person is something that a coaches is passionate
Andrea Sigetich 10:54
about. Right? Yeah, absolutely. Yes.
Kevin Stafford 10:58
It’s very fascinating. I love consider LF considering tools, both from a classic perspective, like the tools, you have the tools that are tried and tried and trusted, you know, they’ve been put through the wringer. And they work and then some of the things that are new, that people just kind of adopt and maybe haven’t properly considered how to use like, we have a very limited, a very two dimensional understanding of how to deploy them. And when sometimes it might be good to pull away from some of those some of those tools like zoom, and maybe just hear all you could see, you could see Andrea, I can I can move my little, my little lid right there, I have a physical cover for my camera lens, because sometimes you want to close that down. But just making sure that I have have an awareness of the usage of the tools I have at my disposal and using the right tools for the right job. So to speak, I feel like I keep just conversing with you. And as I come up with questions, there’s some really great stuff on my mind, I’m like, I’m dizzy with the with the potential of where this conversation could go. I think Oh, another thing too, this is something that came to my mind earlier in the conversation when you were talking in particular about zoom. But even before that, how we were just talking about the way the technology has changed and evolved coaching in a way that I feel like we’re still just really grasping and zoom is obviously one of them. And kind of related to that is the ability to, to reach people at different places in different times like to record a course that could then be like available online or to like put together something that someone can rather than have to attend in person, or attend at a particular time from a particular timezone someone in India, or, or you know, Japan or somewhere in Europe or in Africa, can watch something that was recorded, you know, five days ago in California, and be able to access a level of whatever it is being taught or trained. And I feel like that has really, it’s another tool for the amplification of what a coach can do that ability to reach people in a, you know, it’s different, obviously, from the one to one coaching that a lot of people get their start is different from the other formats, but it has that ability to reach more people in a way that’s still impactful.
Andrea Sigetich 13:07
Right? Yeah, I think that’s true. And again, you know, there’s a, there’s an age and experience difference here. A lot of coaches are a lot younger than I am, and you know, are making great use of the technology that that way. And also makes me think about is that while those, you know, all having having your blog post or having having a video of you can can certainly engage people, maybe invite people in maybe new clients, I don’t sight of the referral process. And so talk to us a little bit about the referral process, because Because coaching is so unique. It’s so it’s so individually focused, you will build your business, through referrals. I mean, yeah, I mean, that’s that that’s, that’s going to end up being your primary source. So one thing I did, I don’t know that 10 years into my into my businesses, I went and looked at my client list, and I looked at who referred them, and I’m like, Okay, well, but you know, okay, so who referred Kevin, Kevin was referred by Sam, but who referred Sam, Sam was referred by Carla. And I found that that five people had built my whole business. It just kept going up upwards. Now again, I had the advantage of working in organizations, but those five people all held the job title, Vice President of organization development, or vice president of leadership development, and so said, Oh, I guess I know who my people are. And I began to just completely target my my marketing to those people. You know, so when you have a little enough experience that you’ve had a few referrals, look at the commonality you know who you really resonating with and those people are our, you know, the beginning of your referral network.
Kevin Stafford 15:06
That’s I in my head the words success detective just went across the back of my eyes was like you were like a success detectives like so I’ve so I’ve gotten to this point like, I wonder why and you start like running your fingers back along the along the timeline along the genealogy of your of your of your coaching clients. And I feel like if anybody who engages in that has been in the business for long enough and engages in that, like detective work is gonna find probably something fairly similar that there’s a certain small subset of clients that are at the heart of their entire business network, their client network, and that they probably have one or two things very much in common.
Andrea Sigetich 15:43
That’s right, and you might go back and discover that it’s salespeople, or its engineers, or it’s or, you know, whatever it is, that doesn’t matter, except, except it helps you to see. Okay, so what’s the language of those people? Which I obviously talk well already? And, yeah, and why don’t I just interact there to look for more clients. So
Kevin Stafford 16:04
that is, I mean, I almost said this out loud, not intending the pond at all, I almost said, that’s very sage advice. I didn’t mean to make the pun, but it came into my head. And so I’m just going to own it, I’m gonna own up to the pen. And that was a very corny pun, but nonetheless, very true. It’s extremely sage advice for people. Because a lot a lot of people are they feel like at least or at least they’ve expressed to me that they’re kind of feeling around in the dark for understanding the why of what they’re doing, like, why things are working and why they’re not they kind of understand that certain things work. And they kind of have a, at the very least an intuitive understanding of how they connect with people very well. And they have systems and processes. But there’s this like core. And that disconnect, but there’s this core mystery of like, why exactly am I connecting with people I connect with, and it’s, it’s one of those things where I feel like the information is there. Once you’ve been in the business for long enough, there’s just enough that you can look at and I just, I really feel like it’s such a good a good exercise for an experienced actually a coach really, at almost any level, obviously, you have to have some information to work off of at first, but I feel like this is such a good like it should almost be a part of like a yearly practice in my head, I’m, I still have them still having January thoughts, which are very like end of the last year beginning of the new year. So I’m still thinking about like, should do this all the time thinking about forming better habits. And this just feels like a good exercise for just making sure that you’re staying in touch with who you’re serving. Well,
Andrea Sigetich 17:24
yes, yeah. Yeah. And there’s something that I, I believe you don’t have to have experience in a particular profession to coach someone in that profession. I mean, I absolutely believe that. But your experience does help you get in the door. And, and knowing and like knowing the language. So I had done all this carpet work, I’d done all this human resources work, and I knew the language really well. And then my husband trained and certified as a coach. And he was a he was a 40 year nonprofit executive when he started. And so he would speak to potential clients using words, I didn’t even know what he was talking about, you know, so, so I had to get a little bit of educated just on like, what their language was before I could work with a nonprofit exec because just the languaging was so different.
Kevin Stafford 18:16
And that moment of when when someone speaks your language, whether that happens to be industry terminology, or if someone makes a reference to like a book or a movie that you like very much or like you make that reference and somebody gets it, it’s amazing, the leap that your relationship takes once or twice, it’s just because you really begin to feel like that person gets me a person understands me even if that journey still has a long way to go before that’s actually true. Just that moment of just showing demonstrating to someone that you do a little bit speak their language, I mean, even if all you could do is ask for directions to the bathroom, or the library in that in their language, you know, extending the analogy that goes such a long way towards building the kind of trust it’s going to be at the foundation of the coaching relationship. All right. All right. I know I said this earlier on I really love talking with you even like especially love talking with you I just I just I mean the obvious reasons your experience the way you’re able to communicate it you’re you clearly are a teacher and you have you have you have a teachers approach. I love the way your mind works. I just feel I don’t I can’t put my finger on it exactly. But I have just I really especially even amongst all the other coaches I get to talk to you I’ve really enjoyed talking to you again, this has been I don’t know I feel like I have a lot to think about and also have a lot of my suspicions confirmed is that thanks so much.
Andrea Sigetich 19:32
Gonna put one one more thing in the into the into the air here because it keeps popping into my brain. There is this woman on a Facebook group. I’m out of coaches, who’s asking about significant relationships in your life, and whether or not your spouse partner kids, whatever it is, support you in being a coach and the responses to her question. I just keep thinking about them. And word has taken me in As you mentioned this, I think it was before you turn on the recording that, you know, once you’re a coach, you don’t like shut it off to talk to your spouse or your kids or even though sometimes they want you to put the lid on it, you know that there’s a way that you be in a world that doesn’t go away. And I just kept thinking about how important that is for relationships. And I don’t have any bottom line, but But you may find yourself I know, I certainly find myself gravitating towards people who are coach, like, who can still listen well. And who can ask powerful questions, and the other people in my life sort of drift away. Because it’s, it’s not enough. It’s just not enough to share a movie if you can’t have a beer afterwards together and talk about it.
Kevin Stafford 20:54
Exactly, exactly, I find that my exposure to coaches and coaching makes me makes me a better human being in general, because of the good because of the way my values shift in that direction. And I mean, you lay it out, and it makes perfect sense. It’s good listeners very empathetic, able to invest in your well being without having any sort of personal stake in it. Just there’s there are certain like just human interaction tools that have just like muscles that have been developed that are strong and a coach that it pays it pays such dividends in all of my relationships all across the board.
Andrea Sigetich 21:29
Yeah, yeah. And sometimes people lose relationships, I lost a couple, sometimes people lose relationships as a result of their focus on. Yeah, I really do care about your growth and development and you having a happy and fulfilled life. You know, they do care about that, you know,
Kevin Stafford 21:48
we talked, we talked about it earlier in the conversation, how important fit is when it comes to coaching, it’s like, not every coach is for every person. And not every person is for every person. Sometimes people come into your life, sometimes they fall away. It’s it’s natural, it that doesn’t say that doesn’t mean it’s that difficult sometimes, and sometimes that painful, but it is natural. It’s just a part of the process. And so I like I like I like our process.
Andrea Sigetich 22:11
That’s great. One of my one of my clients, hollows her first name taught me a reason a season a lifetime. And that never goes away. It’s a good thing to remember.
Kevin Stafford 22:21
It is it is well, as I suspected time has flown. I’ve already had you for 25 plus minutes chatting, so I shouldn’t have to go. But I again, thank you for talking with me again, thank you for for who you are, not just what you what you’ve done and what you do. Thank you for who you are. I just appreciate that you exist in the world and that I’ve gotten to talk to you a couple times. And if you don’t mind, I might I could see myself reaching back out to you and like May or June and just having like a little summer check in and just, you know, have some new questions. I have some new new things that have occurred to me and chat again. I don’t know. I’ll I’ll let you know if I I mean, I probably will want to and I’ll probably reach out but I just I have so much. So enjoyed this conversation. I’ve so enjoyed the last one. Thank you. I think I’m just a long way around just to saying thank you again. I’d really appreciate it. We got to get to talk again today. Thanks. And to the audience. You know, Andrea, you’ve heard her before. She’s fantastic, great person to know if you get a chance to talk to her. Take advantage of it. It’s delightful. She’s happily retired. She’s backpacking, you know, somewhere in America in the next couple of months. I’m really excited about that for her and a little bit jealous myself. But we’ll talk about that offline. And we’ll talk to you again here very soon.
