References

A 25-year-old, who graduated in economics and geography, has also a sound engineering, and more recently a programming degree. This eclecticism in terms of training is reflected in his various professional experiences. Clear about the potential for changing the mode of governance in a democracy in general, he is driven by the desire to change the prevailing model. To fulfil his desire, he has not sought political action, but rather chose to test it through his professional activity. For example, he has set up projects in music (as a sound engineer) with the creation of a web platform intended to help music professionals to be visible and find commitments. He also makes websites and develops applications that users find very good and useful. But he still doesn’t feel on the right track.
Répandre du bonheur et émanciper les gens autour de lui ne trouve malheureusement pas, selon lui, d’écho en dehors du bénévolat qui ne constitue pas pour lui un modèle économique.

Spreading happiness and emancipating the people around him according to his vision, unfortunately does not meet, according to him, any interest outside of volunteering which does not constitute for him an economic model.

The work he undertook with SAYactivate was to put specific words on what is his « raison d’être » to understand how his “inner engine” operates without relying on purely intellectual reasoning. Awareness of his predisposition to be focused primarily on action and insights provided by his coaching have greatly helped him to positively reassess his perception of what he considered to be failures so far and to identify the real battle to be waged. The latter is: work on a single project implementing his concept of direct democracy successfully, and only then to develop it on a larger scale. Having accepted that his aspiration would only yield positive results over the long term, he now accepts – and without devaluing or even despising it – his talent for developing applications which can help him make a very good living for his newfounded family.

Alexandre Savinien, 25, developer,
6 months of orientation coaching

Despite very good school results, a young high school student in her first year of the science section suffered from not obtaining sufficiently excellent results for her taste and became discouraged. Her mother, aware of her daughter’s perfectionism, asked me to help her gain self-confidence, especially in speaking English. The presence of many bilingual students in her class had intimidated her since the first semester to the point of gradually making her lose her footing and end up mute. She became marginalized in her class despite her endeavors and high skills. Having to be responsible at an early age due to a complicated family context, she was subjected to very strong external pressure. Added to this, was the internal pressure linked to her own exigency. With the application of the program “unleash your learning potential in English” for 12 sessions between March and September 2019 – including a 3-hour immersion course – Lola was able to regain her self-confidence. Instrumental in her success to progress was the specific focus on social issues that fascinate her. By better understanding her deeper purposes in life, she was not only able to improve her English speaking, but it had a more generalized effect in other subjects. She even ended up winning a scholarship which allowed her to gain independence from her mother’s very limited means and she integrated a prestigious preparation for Normale Sup in maths & economics (equivalent of undergraduate for a top-class university).

LOLA
Preparation to Normale Sup Maths-Eco competition examination

This is a special case of English coaching which also helped to achieve results generally obtained through orientation coaching.

An 18-year-old Parisian student (back in 2018) who wanted to work in an international commercial context and was wondering about the choice of a 2nd cycle course entirely taught in English chose the English coaching.

The English immersion seminar played a key role in his decision to go and enroll at the Vinci center at La Défense, With the 4×4 method of SAYactivate Alexander was able to realize all that that he already knew in English and how he could constantly improve his skills by implementing new practices to stimulate and maintain his proficiency.

This is a good example that shows that permission that the person gives to him or herself is a very efficient way to overcome a psychological barrier and take the right direction at the right time. By “permission” we mean a accepting to change view point and question one’s limitations. Alexandre who was hesitating to go for this full English teaching could have missed a great opportunity hadn’t he decided to get coached.

Today Alexandre Samet is in his #Erasmus class together with international students in different European cities. He follows 100% English courses which bring him a cultural richness and an openness to the world he is happy to share in an advertisment for his school in a live video. A good marker of his major shift.

Alexandre Samet
French student choosing a full English teaching at international Business School

A young man in his forties working as manager, particularly devoted to fundraising, in a world-class humanitarian NGO asked me to coach him when he was applying for a position of high responsibility in country management, telling me that I was the only one who could understand the confusion he was experiencing at the time. He told me with an impressive amount of detail about the complexity of power relations and the processes in his organization. Along the lines of the golden circle by Simon Sinek, we worked on his “why”, in other words, what we call his singularity, or his fundamental raison d’être. And with the timeline tool, we sequenced everything he had left to do between now and his major interview. This was the axis of the deconstruction of the complexity of the situation as he was evaluating it. He succeeded in “spatializing” his problems, in other words visualizing them on a timeline to relate to these in concrete terms. By isolating these components, he was able to realize the resources already present within himself that he could mobilize. Specially to deal with each of the anticipated fears he might have in relation to the new position sought. The first job interview was unsuccessful, but he immediately found another opportunity a few months later and this time he succeeded obtaining an important position as country director. That was a very major qualitative leap with increased responsibilities exactly in line with his wish. He is now fully operation as of today, truly happy. Let’s say he has ticked all the boxes of what he wanted for his professional and personal life.

An international lawyer in social protection and retirement law interrupts her career and takes a break of several years for two reasons: a disagreement with the company in which she works on management methods and insufficient ethics on one side and upheavals in her family life on another. Taken up by the desire to get back to working in a professional collective environment, she decided to join a renowned international and very dynamic firm and in line with its values. She knows that the level of requirements will be high, but she is considering this new challenge with a strong desire for integration.

The performance coaching that she chose to experience with Bernard Garnier for 3 months notably went through a work of refocusing on her fundamental WHY (her singularity) and a modeling of her way of dealing with different situations drawn. Based on personal experience analysis the coaching helped her mobilize her strengths and clearly assess her readiness for this major new challenge. The key to that success was understanding what constitutes very precisely the why of her actions, the way she goes about it and the impact she has had so far in her life.

The resumption of a position with a high level of expertise and its implications could then be put into perspective in a very coherent and achievable way in relation to what constitutes her life mission. She was able to approach her new job with increased confidence and awareness of her core strengths. Today, almost one year later, she’s definitely thriving in her new business life.

Mehdi Magha
Country director of an international NGO

In 2017, after 25 years in market finance, a senior finance executive was fired. His training as a polytechnician oriented towards the “hard” sciences did not particularly predispose him to consider coaching as essential. But the lack of response to his various proposals for services to his network provoked no reaction. This situation persisting, he decided to call on SAYactivate to analyze the situation and see how he might have to reconsider his professional transition approach in a disruptive way. Today he has created several financial services companies centered around his ability to detect the critical points of very complex systems to offer new high-performance technical solutions.

Emmanuel Goudouneix
(Polytechnique class of 1983), 58 years old. Financial systems specialist.   

A manager in the IT world, met at an after work, already unemployed for a few months confides that one of the worst sides of his unemployment is that he suffers from not being able to talk about his work in social occasions. When asked the trivial question: “And what you do in life?” it invariably triggers an unpleasant feeling of shame and helplessness. I ask him to tell me more and I discover that he is passionate about historical research and that he works and publishes articles on specific subjects. It turns out that he is also captivating when he talks about it »… Later, we worked together to help him realize that he could totally change the impression of “compassionate” or a little “pitying” attitude of his interlocutors into envy and admiration by saying “I took a sabbatical year to work on my research” and totally change his mindset. We also studied his fundamental skills to help him become aware of the invariant qualities which were at play in all his actions.

After a few sessions, this executive found a great job in less than a year and since then, has been recommending me as a coach by saying “this is the guy who said the most enlightening thing to me when I was feeling a bit sick…. and which totally allowed me to change my vision of my self-value and to get back on track”. As it turns out: the right remark, at the right time to the right person who was ready to hear it, no matter how apparently simple can yield remarkable changes.

In 2021, a senior executive specializing in interim management finds himself facing a professional dead-end linked to an unfavorable context in terms of governance of the company where he operates. That puts him in an untenable situation. Despite all his efforts to propose solutions to end the crisis, the shareholders refuse his proposals and condemn the company to filing for bankruptcy. With his spirits seriously down and damaged and exhausted with overwork this person decided to consult me. We worked for almost a year with 3 intensive months of performance coaching to start with and followed on with monthly status points. When studying his why and all the invariant qualities he had demonstrated in his previous job, he became aware that he was far stronger than he thought and could market them on his own, without having to rely exclusively on the decisions and whims of an employer. This new narrative on his proficiency was enlightening. Confidence and morale came back as evidenced in the attached testimonial.

MAJ,
59 years old, interim manager, 3-month mission and occasional follow-up.

In 2018, a thirty-year-old sound engineer, composer, and professional video director, consulted me to help him move forward in his work because he felt he was not evolving fast enough. After the first destabilizing sessions during which he had “persistent difficulties defining his problems”. We were able to help him formulate his issues and go beyond his initial request which was to precisely identify what was his core competence and what he should put on his business card to market it! This allowed him to successfully evolve in his work by ultimately targeting and meeting a clientele that better matched his level of requirement. Working on his fundamental talent and understanding his “WHY” helped him reveal his own worth. Incidentally, it also helped him to organize his working time and to become aware of the little time he gave himself, and his family compared to the time he gave abundantly and voluntarily to many people without getting any real benefit or satisfaction from it.

His precious gift was not going to be invested in the right place! Thanks to a reversal of priorities, this performance coaching allowed him in one year – in about twenty sessions – to reinforce his strong points and get out of the impression of slump and very frustrating on-the-spot of which he had the feeling of never being able to get out. Recently (3 years later), he thanked me warmly, giving me specific examples of his success that he attributed directly to our work. A moment of happiness that is always rewarding for a coach.

Pierre Dufour
composer, 35 years old, professional video director

A thirty-year-old who had quitted a very profitable job in finance decided to leave everything to go into the field to help refugees in a country at war with a humanitarian organization.

Leaving full of goodwill and convinced of having found the answer to his quest for meaning, the young man turned out to be totally overwhelmed by the brutal events he had to face. He fell into a spiral of stress leading to burnout which forced him to repatriate to France.

He was sent to me by a member of his family who knew about my reinvention coaching and the usefulness of finding our fundamental WHY. We did only 6 sessions spread over 2 months to make him realize what was really at work, deeply, and how he was fundamentally structured. When our work together helped him evaluate that his “WHY” was to reveal the true value and potential of people or situations, it triggered a sudden surge of energy and morale boost. This revelation allowed him to reevaluate the narrative of his life and past actions from a totally new perspective. What had bothered him in his own perception and doings suddenly made new sense. What had appeared to him so far as a conflict between his ability to earn money in the finance world and his desire to give free help was no longer a source of suffering. Because he realized that the same pattern was at work no matter what he was doing as a trader or as an NGO helper and that he didn’t necessarily have to discard one to do the other. He understood how he could tell another story about himself far from simplistic readings. Therefore, he quickly rebalanced himself by accepting his contrasting facets, without judgment.

It happens that working with hyper-sensitive people who have already worked on themselves such as Omar, can exceptionally experience a flash or a revelation that restores meaning to what was previously only a muddled scheme or an entangled knot of contradictions. As a conclusion it turns out that we are entitled to give space to our multiple facets, and we don’t have to be what mainstream schemes and peer pressure indicates as the one and only “reasonable” or “successful” way.

Omar,
commercial, 32 years old (2 months of coaching)

A coach participating in a training course on singularity came to consult me afterwards so that I could give her clarifications on her archetypal core according to the theory. We worked on it again and she discovered that she belonged to a different category than the one initially identified during the course. This revelation had a strong impact and we worked in depth on her fundamental why for several months to enable her to reinforce her intuitive approach to what she calls her dynamic purpose. She was then able to understand in finesse what was part of her identity (variable factors) and what belonged to her singularity or the fundamental “raison d’être” which was an invariant pattern. This in-depth work allowed her to reinvent her practice by strengthening her awareness of all her intuitive qualities. Among other benefits, this support allowed her to acquire a new coaching tool designed to forsee the future evolution of organizational systems to offer her clients new powerful strategic predictive models and actual projections.

Évelyne Cherbit.
Professional coach, 57 years old, (6 sessions spread-out on a 6 months’ span)

A fifty-something who finds how her maternal side can be transferred into a fulfilling friendly professional activity

Successful and very happy in her job won after a hard fight, a mother had to put an end to her management control activity in a multinational company following a move imposed by her husband’s new job. It also coincided with the birth of her first child. Consequently, she found herself devoting herself exclusively to her family afterwards.

15 years later she wants to resume a professional life but sees the labor market as hostile and this gives her some anxiety. However, she does not see herself returning to her old position at all and wonders how to approach this challenge of reintegrating into the world of work: what company will she want from her?

When we started the reinvention coaching – because you had to put your life in perspective and be disruptive in the approach – insecurity and doubt about your own value had been well established for years. It took a whole time of trial and error to manage to isolate the lines of force capable of supporting it to relaunch. We started by highlighting all that she had been able to deploy in terms of know-how and interpersonal skills to manage her large family like a business. And from simple things she gradually reconstituted a much more attractive mirror of herself during the 8 months that her coaching lasted.

A positive anchoring element updated in her coaching was her theatrical activity which was an opportunity for her to be told that she was “tremendous”. This apparent detail later turned out to be a very strong lever and marker of positive development. Three years later, she has made great progress on this point in parallel with her new professional activity.

Thanks to her husband’s real estate activities, she gradually devoted herself to the creation of short-term rental suites which made it possible to mobilize a very large number of her basic qualities and be “tremendous” also in that activity. In the background, the work on her core of singularity done during her coaching allowed her to review everything she was doing from a much more strategic angle. By observing her singularity at work and without letting herself be carried away by a flood of emotions and judgments that were holding her back, she was able to free herself from significant brakes. And it is the permanent reassurance of being in connection with its fundamental essence that gives it the daily confidence to deploy all its capacities on its own account. Now she has her engine on the way to a course that she will not let go. And now, in the groups of entrepreneurs she frequents, she no longer feels like an outsider who dreads the question “what do you do for a living? » …

Mother in professional retraining,
50 years old, suite rentals manager (6 months of coaching) 

A coaching client I had in English speaking coaching realized that making progress in English was too difficult a task for her, as we quickly brought to light snippets of her childhood that showed that this desire to progress in English was blocked by early trauma which impact went far beyond the question of her level of English (a phenomenon frequently encountered during the English coaching of many clients).

Our work took a totally new turn when we talked about singularity and working on the specificity of her vocabulary, revealing our deep uniqueness. As she was marketing a book she had just written, the idea was to work on her pitch to make it as sharp and impactful as possible. What came out of this was a very powerful realization of his hidden gift.

By putting her “internal program” into words (how her why, how, and what it produces) she realized that she had turned her back on an essential part of herself. Since she accepted this gift, which is not always easy, neither to understand nor to wear…we will call it “clairvoyance” the customers have started to flock and her path to the future has suddenly been illuminated.

Since this work, which lasted 3 months, we have regularly maintained powerful exchanges and I have found myself in the role of supervisor while my client brings me powerful insights into personal questions that make us live a great experience of co-operation. co-construction and mutual enrichment.

Myriam Delval,
60 years old, personal development coach