Learning to Lead Myself, to then Better Lead my Business and Others

A personal account of the Coaching journey of one of my clients

"When I met Cara back in the summer 2019, I was feeling pretty down. The business was struggling with lots of pressure on cash flow and we were going through some tricky HR issues. Making it worse, I had built up a habit of starting to drink beers or wines in the early afternoons in the office and continue drinking at home throughout the evenings. A bottle of wine or 3-4 pints of beer could have been easily consumed every day for four years. I felt my life was sucked into this downward swirling eddy.

 "I knew I was heading towards a big health issue if I continued drinking like this and I knew I needed to do something to fix my business before we ran out of cash. So my friend Paul suggested that I should talk to Cara. I didn't know if it would help but I was willing to give it a try.

"We started off by closely looking at various aspects of my personal and professional life and followed by a systematic approach and plan to fix and improve every aspect one by one.  

"I had been reluctant to address my daytime drinking but on the 4th session, I was moaning that I had to cancel my gym membership as I couldn't afford to go to the gym anymore, nor did I have time. Then she asked me how much I was spending on alcohol and if I stopped drinking, would it be enough to pay for the membership at a local health club that I always admired. I did the math, it turned out that I was just about to be able to afford it and then the rest is history.  

"I quit drinking in the office and at home, lost over a stone within 3 months, and started exercising 3 or 4 times a week. I found myself suddenly with so much more energy. I remember before quitting drinking I was exhausted by the time I was home from work. Now after the kids went to bed, I would have 2-3 hours of quality reading time every night.

"On the business side, Cara introduced the OKRs system which I just started implementing in our firm. We started by reviewing our values, missions and visions as an organisation, then set our long term and short term objectives and key results, which are a set of measure of how we assess ourselves if we achieved those objectives.

"Armed with the new finance knowledge acquired from reading books during the sober evenings, I managed to produce profit and loss account forecast and free cash flow forecast. I have no idea how we survived as a company in the last 8 years without proper budgeting and forecasting. We still have problems, as all the businesses do, at least now we know what the problems are and what solutions to put in place and how we measure ourselves to check how effective our plans are.

"From a functioning alcoholic businessman living in constant fear of going bankrupt, I feel I am now healthy, confident, ambitious and passionate about all aspects of my life. 

"I said to my wife, that I was sorry, since I changed my life habits I probably have increased my life expectancy by at least 10 years. You are going to have to put up with me for 10 more years. Thank you Cara. You have changed my life and I promise I will pass on your positive energy to the people around me."