Jeanine: Hi and welcome to our listeners and thank you for tuning in. My name is Jeanine Bailey and I'm here with my amazing business partner Marie Quigley and I'm currently in New Zealand and you're back in Doha Marie. Welcome.

Marie: Yes.

Jeanine: And I guess it's warming up there now.

Marie: It's beautiful at the moment actually. Yes. We've had some nice weather. I was able to sit outside last night in lovely warm weather. So yeah really enjoying it.

Jeanine: Fantastic. And so today we thought we'd get together as it is International Coaching week. And we thought we'd come together and share our thoughts about the wonderful journey that we've been on as we've become coaches and as we've progressed and joined forces to support others to become coaches with our ICF approved programmes. And then it's just rippled out from there. So many opportunities, so many amazing things have come our way and we've made things happen. And so we thought we'd celebrate on this very special week.

Marie: Yes absolutely, celebration is necessary. I think it's Tara Brach who says we need to marinate in the joyous moments for at least 30 seconds for our bodies to remember and to pay attention to the beauty that we're experiencing. And Jeanine we often are so busy doing and making things happen that we don't take the time to celebrate and let ourselves feel all this joy. So, this is a perfect opportunity to celebrate the journey we've been on and we have trained so many people from around the world with the work we do. That it is really appropriate that it's international coaching Week. We've got people from New Zealand, from Doha, from Lebanon, from the Czech Republic, from Jordan. We've got people from all over that world, India I mean so many so many countries.

Jeanine: Bangladesh, South Africa, yeah it just goes on, Australia.

Marie: Yeah, UK. In fact we feel like the United Nations when we're in our training where we always smile at how many people come together and come together for the same purpose of making a difference in the world, whether it's their world, whether it's their little world of their families or whether it's the bigger world of their organisations and communities.

Jeanine: Absolutely and I do recall one of our recent trainings that we had 17 different nationalities in the same room, and men and women. It was such a beautiful experience - this diverse mix of people and cultures and different desires in terms of what they wanted to do with the coaching, the coaching program: whether it be go on a personal development journey of their own and learn the skills of being able to coach self or whether it be a leader in the workplace or being a coach as a professional.

Marie: So Jeanine what's been the biggest impact coaching has had on you personally since you joined the profession since you immersed yourself in the work you do for others but also for yourself. What's the biggest impact it's had on you?

Jeanine: Gosh what a question. Coaching as you know and what we do is my life. It's what I live and breathe every day whether it be through what I do as a coach when I'm working with an individual or when we do what we do with our coach training, mentoring, supervision, or whether I am being part of a family or community. My relationship with my husband. You know there's an element of how coaching has impacted my world in terms of taking that 100 percent responsibility for my experiences in everything I do as much as I can because I will ‘fall off the horse’ from time to time but I can quickly get up.

So, it’s a big question Marie. I think apart from that 100 percent responsibility and being and recognizing that I'm the driver of my destiny and it's totally down to me to create my own experiences, which means then I'm attracting so many wonderful people into my life and I'm coming across so many amazing experiences and opportunities.

I think the other main thing is that perhaps what I've noticed since I've been going on this coaching journey, which is all about contribution and supporting others, which I always knew was there, the desire to do that - but learning the skills of how to do that has been incredible. But I think what's happened is that the old thought patterns that held me back are no longer there, or probably they are there - but it's been - I guess that feel the fear and do it anyway and you know the magic will show up and the beauty will show up.

And it's the embracing of the unknown. It's the embracing of - as we say - scuffing our knees and seeing all the beauty and all the learning underneath it. So I think before I went on this coaching journey, I was being driven by my own limiting beliefs that were holding me back and this journey, this coaching that has enabled me to live an incredibly rewarding, fulfilling, amazing, I would say beautiful life and that's very much down to the people that I'm meeting and working with like yourself. Working with incredible people like-minded, heartfelt people. It was a long answer to your question.

Marie: It was and it was a beautiful answer. Yeah. If I answered my own question.

Jeanine: Can I ask you the same?

Marie: Yeah. I think the biggest thing that coaching has supported me to do is to love and appreciate myself. To practice self-compassion and in my times of being failure and my humanness and not getting caught up in it and to realize that I am enough. And when I realized this about myself, when I stepped more into my courage, which also requires vulnerability. It allows me to be fully myself. And I think being fully myself then allows me to be in a world, in a place that is authentic and allows others to be authentic too. And I think that's the biggest thing. And actually it's only recently that I've really realized that, and I was having a conversation with a friend last night about appreciating myself and how grateful I am with all of who I am - my warts and all. And she reflected back on something that kind of gave me a bit of a surprise and I realized that I am loving myself in a way that I potentially haven't in the past. So yeah I think that's the biggest thing that coaching has done for me personally and I believe with people I work with - that has a knock on effect too, as you've just described.

Jeanine: How beautiful and I know we've been working together for gosh how many years now Marie?

Marie: Seven.

Jeanine: Yeah. Losing track. And now I've been witness to your journey and the journey that we've been on together, on my own journey and I believe we both have expanded and grown. And you know that old saying of, two heads are better than one, I mean it's so true from my perspective. It's like no other journey and I am so fortunate, so blessed to be in this space and place with what we do and to have learnt these skills that as you say support us to love and appreciate ourselves to really appreciate that we all come with our own unique gifts. And so that's the journey that I'm experiencing for myself as well. I have recognized my uniqueness and what I bring. Yeah it's an incredible journey.

Marie: It sure is and it's never ending. I mean we continue to grow each year. We do new programmes for ourselves to grow but also so that we can share with the people in our community. Part of my purpose is my learning is that I'm meant to be sharing it with the world too. So whatever I learn I want it to take and also give back and I know that's part of your philosophy too.

Jeanine: Yeah. And you know we're so lucky Marie that the programme that we've created -although it's not lucky - we've worked hard for what we've created, to build this incredible programme that really changes you. And as you know I'm in New Zealand right now and you know part of our programme is going - as you said internationally and really changing communities, changing countries. It's amazing what's showing up, and of course in Qatar and our small community in Qatar as well. We're starting to see that ripple effect now.

Marie: Well we are and it's not so small anymore. It was small when we first started. But my goodness have we impacted the coaching community in Qatar, knowing that now we have set up or being part of the set up - being part of the process for setting up the ICF Doha chapter. We're really delighted with that. We've got Clare Beckett as our President, Gordon Penny as our vice president; We've got Moh as our secretary. I'm director of ethics and we've got lots of people from Empower World who are creating that and we're very proud of that because we tried to set that up seven years ago but there was maybe a handful of ICF accredited coaches back then and now we're getting near 50 people who can make this actually a charted chapter. So that's really exciting as well. And we've been part of that. So I think we need to celebrate that part too.

Jeanine: Yes. Yes absolutely and I so wish that I was a part of that now in Qatar, but as most listeners might appreciate, I'm travelling in and out so of Qatar, so it's a little bit tricky for me to be there and I'm so grateful and so pleased that you're there Marie representing Empower World and yourself as the director of ethics.

Marie: And it's a wonderful community as well because we had a lovely event on Monday evening where the Doha community got to experience coaching from a lot of our coaches. So that was a joy to witness and be part of.

Jeanine: That's wonderful. So, Marie as we potentially wrap up. What are your parting thoughts for anyone that perhaps isn't a coach yet but is considering and listening to this and maybe considering becoming a coach or to be coached themselves; what are you imparting wise thoughts.

Marie: Well I don't know if they are wise, but I'm noticing all these books behind me as I'm looking at myself in this video and I'm looking at all of the things that I'm interested in reading. And books are fascinating but doing it, experiencing it is how I live. I learn by experiencing and if you want to know more about coaching, go and experience it, either reach out to someone you know as a coach and ask them for a session or come along to one of our Free events.

We do some networking events and free opportunities to learn about coaching and if you know you want to do this thing called coaching, come on and take part in our trainings because the experience and the journey you will go on is second to none.

Jeanine: I couldn't agree with you more Marie, I couldn't agree with you more and yeah if you're wanting to go on a personal development journey this is learning the skills of being able to create deeper connections, deeper relationships and how to communicate even more effectively. So, it's a powerful programme of experience not just learning the theories it's actually putting it into practice. It's not role playing. Its bringing real things that you want to work with that will change your life. So yeah come and experience it.

Marie: Lovely! Great to speak to this morning, your evening Jeanine. Wishing all our listeners and all our viewers a really happy International Coaching week. Go try out. It really is a beautiful thing to have in your life. Lots of love to everyone. And we will see you soon.

Jeanine: Much love to all and we hope that we somehow somewhere we get to meet you along the journey of life. Thank you for listening.