Love: A Transformational Objective
Sometime in mid-2024, Lindsay, my circa 2020 - 2022 Executive Coach called. To ask me if I would be interested in picking up working one-on-one with her again, specifically on a new coaching offering she had recently developed after an intensive training that left her wanting to go even deeper with her female executive clients.
“Caroline, it turns out that everyone has a set of limiting beliefs that can restrict their growth in some way, at some point in their career, and their life. Let me help you find yours as practice, so I can bring this new toolkit to my all clients.”
She’d previously already contributed so much to my professional growth while on SLT at Slalom DC. And had been instrumental to a difficult exit from Invent, later too. I didn’t have to think about it - I’m a forever hard yes on working with coach Lindsay. On anything she wants!
Yet one thought crossed my mind as I listened to her describe the work we were about to undertake together: I radiate positivity and have so much confidence, I doubt I have any limiting beliefs…
Cute.
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We kicked off in the summer with her giving me a classic homework assignment: to come up with a transformational coaching objective. One that would serve as the focus of our efforts for the next 6-9 months.
Easy peasy, I thought, I crush at management by objectives. In fact, I’m a chameleon for transformation.
Except that for the next 2 months, I would show up to our sessions with the objective we’d emailed in between, completely achieved. Proud even, to show up with a 100% done! The second time, I realized within minutes of our gathering that these objectives were just goals I needed an accountability partner for. Were they transformational? Nope. Just get shit done.
She sent me on my way with this impulse for the 3rd month: “Have you considered thinking about love?”
I left that session dumbfounded. Partly because duh, yeah! I’d been studying love, the emotion, for more than 2 years by that time. As my own thought leadership passion project and as a serious topic I was now bringing to corporate America, as a source of unexploited richness for growth in love-at work. Also completely aware of having placed an imaginary geo-fence around romance, to put it out of play, in fear of not being taken seriously in the workplace. In love-at work, I had, by design, put traditional love to the side by only addressing it with a couple of fun facts I’d gathered along the way to seemingly satisfy my audiences. I had also apparently done that in my real life too. To my own, now, dissatisfaction.
At our 3rd session, she prompted me with - I paraphrase: You are an achiever. You crush all the goals you set for yourself. And they just keep getting bigger and bigger. So riddle me this: how come you haven’t explored what having a significant partnership with someone you deeply love would enable for you and the impact you yearn for in your career and life?
Touché Lindsay.
Indeed, count on me to deliberately put intention, and moreover strategy, in everything I undertake. Yet even with the desire to share my life with someone, I’d never even considered what “the one” could be like. In fact, until that point, I'd traded the most important decision of my life - commitment, for the comfort of being a passive participant in a series of long-term monogamous relationships with nice men I wasn’t likely to become anything more than a live-apart girlfriend to. Also, by design.
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It was October, and I was on my way to Germany for a month, both for business and pleasure. We’d agreed that I would use the time abroad, out of my normal physical space and cultural context, to actively witness myself through the lens of romantic love. This was the work.
Suddenly, I was facing writing the most difficult objective I’d ever considered.
On October 3, Reunification Day (the irony isn’t lost on me) - Germany’s less loudly celebrated 4th of July equivalent-ish, I squirmed in discomfort as I hit send on the first draft of what would eventually become a truly transformational objective:
By the end of 2025, I have met and started to build a romantic partnership with a man who sees me both as an equal and as someone who enhances his life, desires to share in time, places and experiences together, and brings me to feel a kind of safety I have never imagined possible before.
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We haven’t yet named my limiting belief, me and Lindsay. That’s for the next session. But what I know to be true now, almost 4 months after this first pass at the real objective is that I deserve to be someone’s number one (#1). The only one. And together, to make it for the long road. 🫶🏼
