Lessons in winning the game of life

By Louis White

Shannah Kennedy has a question: who are you without your career? It is a good question and one most people struggle to answer.

We are constantly driven to achieve goals within our work environment. From day one, objectives are set and we are judged on how we meet them, but what about the rest of our life? Where do our personal goals fit in and how do we find time to achieve them?

Kennedy believes she has the solution. She has been working in life coaching for a decade and has clients ranging from senior business executives to leading Australian athletes.

She has a background in the business and sporting worlds, having worked in finance with JBWere before being introduced to sports management by Paul Galli, who established Pro-Sport Management in Melbourne in 1988.

After three years working with Galli, Kennedy moved into the role of sponsorship and media manager with Bolle, where she first worked with athletes, notably at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics, forming her own company between the two events.

“It started with Bolle, working with athletes across a range of different sports,” Kennedy says. “People were not planning ahead and I saw all these athletes going from not much to gold medallists to then suffering injuries and falling into a massive depression. The other scenario is that they might not have been picked for the team after years of being selected because of a youth policy or something like that and they have entered this downward spiral.

“I then found myself in this coaching role, naturally. Athletes would always come and sit in my office and tell me everything about themselves. They would always ask my opinion and the one thing that they had in common is that none of them had planned for their retirement. It was a huge gap that I saw.”

Kennedy says there was no one to look after the athletes’ interests. “They had the manager who just wanted to get the deals done and sponsors who wanted to bleed them to death. I felt that was very poor.”

She decided to study life coaching through the International Coach Academy, a two-year course. “Then I started my own business,” she says.

Kennedy is an accredited advanced life coach through the International Coach Academy and a member of the International Coach Federation.

“I started my business by coaching athletes into retirement, combined with [guiding] the young ones into setting up a whole structure for their career,” she says. “I helped set up all the safety nets along the way and educated them about taking responsibility.”

Eventually, she caught the eye of the corporate world. “Businesses wanted to know what process I went through with the athletes. Now I work with individuals and companies such as Macquarie Bank and PricewaterhouseCoopers because they want that fresh set of eyes.”

The question remains: what does a life strategist-coach offer an individual and how can they change your life?

“It has helped me understand who I really am, what my core values and beliefs are, and how I can apply those in everything I do,” says Doug Lee, head of sales at Macquarie Financial.

“In a sense it has been a journey of self-discovery, creating a better me and bringing more balance into my life. I have become a better person, husband and father.

“It has assisted me in taking control of my own performance and taking responsibility. It has assisted me in realising my true strengths and playing to those and understanding the areas in which I need to develop; and taking a course of action to develop those areas.”

Ed Nixon, principal of Trilogy Funding, is equally impressed with the idea of a life coach.

He says he thinks of a life coach as an accountability partner, someone who makes sure plans are made and executed well.

“How has it helped me? I just get so much more done. I prioritise my life more with small, but important things like date nights with my wife through to cleaning out my wardrobe and de-cluttering my life.”

Kennedy says the principles she puts in place are paramount to achieving success in all aspects of life.

“It is not advice, it is questioning. I am asking: Why are you doing that? Why are you doing that? What is the strategy behind that?”

She says if clients can’t answer these questions they haven’t thought things through properly. “They need to be able to answer me in short sentences and that means it is right.

“The way that I coach is very strategic. All of my clients section everything off into work goals, their clients, personal goals, health and so forth.

“The more successful a person, the more we need to start on these. We plan from the friends, family side. When you plan from your own gut instinct as to what is important to you, then you get the balance right.

“Everything is very practical and measurable. They have to memorise their own set of values and, if their decisions they are making every month don’t match their values, I will always question them. Is each decision getting you towards your values or away from them? A lot of people go off path. If you don’t know where you are going you don’t know what is a distraction.”

Kennedy asks clients to commit to an initial three-month period where she sees them once a fortnight for an hour. Initially, there are a lot of questions to be answered and forms to be filled in to help people clear their minds and focus on what they want to achieve.

Each meeting is very open and direct, with goals and tasks set.

Kennedy encourages clients to focus just as much on their personal life as their business life as that is the key to being successful.

Article from The Australian, October 9, 2010.