🥁 Five Transformational Things I’ve Learned From My Exec Coach of Six Years

I’m Allison Stadd, drummer turned CMO, and I write for people who want the way we work to work for us.

“I have excerpts of your newsletter written on post-its, plastered over my screens at my desk.” — Kat, subscriber

My executive coach changed my life.

We’ve also never met in person.

I met Kari in 2020 as part of a leadership development program offered by my employer.

When I left that job, I took her with me.

I couldn’t not!

I’ve met with her every other week for six years at this point, through two pregnancies, parental leaves, and returns to work; through two job changes and my first CMO role; through a move from NYC to Philly.

She’s taught me so much about not just work, but work life, and life life. We talk about parenting, and friendship, and female adulthood, and spirituality, almost as much as we talk about leadership and work challenges.

I credit Kari with dissolving my impostor syndrome (she’d tell me to credit myself), crystallizing my three core values, and showing me how to not lose my absolute mind balancing full-time work and two little kids.

She lives in California so we’ve always met via video call or phone call. But she knows me better than most people in my life, and has guided and pushed me in ways I could never have anticipated.

I’m such a Kari stan, and promoter of executive coaching in general, that I wanted to share the goods with you all.

Here are the five most transformational things I’ve learned from her in these six hyper-intense years.

To build professional self-awareness, pay attention to what happens in your body over the course of a work day. Shoulders hunching, stomach clenching, muscles tensing are big tells—for example, is something energizing vs. depleting you? Inspiring vs. demotivating you?

Prior to working with Kari, I didn’t think about the physical manifestation of work thoughts and feelings at all. But it’s so powerful once you do.

With an understanding of how stress, nerves, impatience, and excitement show up in your body, you can take proactive measures ahead of experiences that might throw you off. For example, I take a few long, deep breaths and roll my neck and shoulders before or during a tense meeting because I know my shoulders creep up and my breathing gets more shallow when I’m stressed.

You can also use this body-listening to make difficult decisions. When faced with a hard choice, heed how your body feels. It’s such useful data.

I spent my teens and twenties frustrated and flabbergasted by whatever I deemed bad or unjust behavior. I couldn’t understand how people could get away with breaking rules, or treating other people unfairly.

I remember waiting in an hours-long customs line at an international airport and watching a guy play dumb, wandering into the very front of the line while on what seemed to be a fake phone call. Everyone grumbled but no one said anything, and he successfully saved himself countless time and the indignity of waiting like everyone else. I stewed about it for days.

Same with unfair calls made at work, or leaders behaving badly and then “failing upward.” I spent so much energy fuming about injustice. I knew the trite therapy turn of phrase that “you can’t change other people, you can only change yourself.” But it felt impossible to internalize.

Kari unlocked this for me.

She helped me see that accepting bad behavior doesn’t mean you approve it.

Acceptance just means letting go of the righteousness. You accept that this situation is the situation. It’s a matter of facts and logic in our current space and time. This thing literally happened or is happening. But it doesn’t mean I have to endorse it, be into it, or have any positive feelings about it at all.

It’s about neutrality. I accept that it is. And stop banging my head against the wall willing it not to be. That’s all.

This insight is related, but different.

It really blew my mind. I still remember the block I was walking on as I took this particular call with Kari.

This sounds dramatic, but it’s true: it literally stopped me in my tracks. When she said this sentence — “Letting go of needing to be liked doesn’t mean you won’t be liked.” — I stopped walking. My brain recalibrated like a 90s modem shutting off then sputteringly re-connecting to the internet.

I’d spent my early years as a people manager plagued by the same people-pleasing tendencies I had in my personal life. I assumed being a good boss meant being likeable. I wanted my team to think I was nice, funny, smart, cool. And how would I have known any different?! (This is why I’m an advocate of mandatory year-round leadership training.)

Even as I began to internalize the fact that people need a leader, not a friend; and that fretting about being well-liked was making it harder for me to make hard calls and give clear direction; I was afraid of letting go.

Kari helped me discover that no longer orienting myself to being liked didn’t mean I definitely wouldn’t be liked. It never occurred to me that I could have both: I could be a strong, confident, grounded leader AND my team could like me (at least most of the time).

This realization has been freeing. Now my foremost concern is being a good leader; I may not always succeed but that’s what I invest my energy into. And because I also strive to show up at work as myself, with the sense of humor, optimism, and empathy that’s in my DNA, even when I have to make challenging calls, share hard news, or give difficult direction, most of the time I feel pretty liked, too (at least I hope—see, people pleasing dies hard! 😂 An executive coach’s work is never done).

“What” and “how” questions, in contrast, are powerful. Whether coaching a direct report, talking to one of my sons, or navigating a tense conversation with a peer, I learned from Kari to always anchor to being curious but framing questions without the word “why.”

Asking someone (even a 5-year-old!) why they did something or think something immediately puts them on the defensive. It feels like an accusation.

And any “why” can be framed as a “what” or “how.” For example:

• “Why didn’t you bring this problem to me earlier?” ➝ “I’m curious, what stopped you from bringing this problem to me earlier?”

• “Why didn’t you speak up in the meeting?” ➝ “What would have made it easier to share your perspective in there?”

• “Why did you take the project in this direction?” ➝ “I want to understand; how did you land on this approach?”

• “Why aren’t you listening?” ➝ “What’s making it hard to focus right now?”

Object-referenced means your sense of self is calibrated by externalities, like your title, the size of the team you manage, other people’s opinions, how you rank, whether you got credit.

Self-referenced means your internal compass is the signal you trust. You know, on your own, what you value, what you’re building, how you matter. Other people’s wins don’t threaten you, and critical comments don’t unravel you.

When you're grounded in your own identity and values, i.e. self-referenced, other people's behavior doesn't destabilize you.

This insight has been absolutely transformative for me in navigating dynamics with colleagues, family, and even comparing myself to other moms.

A few hundred hours of conversation with my executive coach Kari have made me a better leader, a better mom, and a more grounded and, dare I say, happy human. If you've ever considered working with an executive coach, consider this your sign.

Executive coaching is not a luxury. It’s infrastructure. If you have access to it through your company, use it. If you don’t, advocate for it. And if you’re a founder or leader with discretionary budget, fund it for your team. The returns compound in ways that are completely impossible to ignore.

Go crush it this week,

Allison

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

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