For most of my career, I've worked in project and program management: launching programs, navigating change, bringing people together, and helping teams move work forward towards a goal.
Last year, I started exploring a career pivot toward work that more closely aligned with my values and long-standing interest in health and wellness. That journey led me to health coaching, and this year I completed the Health Coaching Certification program through mindbodygreen.
I expected to learn how to become a health coach. What I didn't expect was how much becoming a coach would also make me a better project manager and program leader.
Here are 5 coaching skills I'm bringing back to my project/program management work:
1. Listen to understand.
Project managers spend a lot of time communicating (we are communicators!). Coaching has challenged me to become a very intentional listener. I'm more self-aware of my levels of listening, and tuning my listening to understand someone's perspective. In project management, this matters. Stakeholders tell us what they need, but going a step further, with reflections and engaging questions, reveals the deeper concern, motivation, constraint, or value underneath the request. Knowing the deeper reasons for change, and what is desired, tells us where we are going, which is key for managing the roadmap in the desired direction.
2. Ask a question and then listen some more.
As project managers, we're often rewarded for solving problems quickly. Coaching has reinforced something I've learned throughout my career: I don't have the solutions, my team works together to find the best solution. Questions like What's most important here? What do we want to be different? What have we already tried? What's getting in the way? all create greater understanding before moving into action and that's not something I bring to the table, it's something my client or my team brings. Effective leadership and coaching means resisting the urge to immediately fix something (resist the righting reflex!) and instead create space for the team to discover the best way forward.
3. Understand the human side of change.
A project can have an excellent implementation plan and still struggle if the people executing it aren't ready, engaged, or confident. Health coaching has given me a deeper understanding of motivation and mindset in lasting change. What matters is a clear vision of the future, autonomy, values-alignment, unique strengths, resources, past experiences of success, and a plan. Whether someone is trying to build a new health habit or a team is completing a project, outcomes are not from brute force, all-or-nothing thinking, or will power; rather sustainable change comes from a meaningful foundation, structure, using strengths, adapting, and learning. Before any change happens, engagement, focusing, evoking, and planning are key.
4. Look for strengths, not deficits.
Project management naturally trains us to look for gaps: risks, blockers, missed requirements, cost/schedule variance, constraints etc. Coaching has trained me to intentionally look and highlight something important to success: What's already working? What strengths does this person or team bring? What has helped them succeed before? What resources already exist? What progress should we acknowledge? Recognizing strengths doesn't mean ignoring problems, it gives us more resources with which to solve them, and can help people build confidence in their ability to move forward.
5. Action is an opportunity to learn and adapt.
One of my favorite concepts from coaching is approaching small steps as experiments. We try something, gather information, reflect on what happened, and adjust. Project managers know this concept well through pilots, minimum viable products, agile methodology, iterative development, retrospectives, and continuous improvement. Coaching has strengthened my appreciation for applying that same learning mindset to people and change. There is no failure in experiments, only learning. Action gives us more data and information. When we take this approach, when we are agile and flexible, learning and shifting, we are not just moving closer to our desired outcome but we are building a growth mindset which is key to sustainable change.
Health and wellness coaching has expanded my perspective by teaching me how to help people move forward towards the change they want to see. I'm still a project and program manager. I'm also now a health and wellness coach. Rather than seeing those as two disconnected paths, I'm seeing how much each discipline strengthens the other.
I'm curious about other PMI community members who have pursued education or experiences outside traditional project management: What have you learned from another field that unexpectedly made you a better project manager or leader?
And if you're a fellow project manager who's curious about my pivot into health and wellness coaching or what the training experience was like, I'm always happy to share more.
