Description
Richard: Fiona, it’s great to talk to you. Can you begin by telling us a bit about the work that you do?
Fiona: Of course I can, yes. I’m a voice and speech coach, which means that I help people to engage with their audience. My clients are generally people who have reached the stage in their careers where they want to go to the next level. But they’ve realised that the barrier preventing them from doing that is their ability to effectively engage their audience, whether that’s in a meeting facilitation context or presenting to senior leadership or at a conference. Or it could be that they’ve already been promoted and they’ve realised they’re ill-equipped for this new role that is less involved with software or laboratory work. Many of my clients are in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medical, Maths such as Accounting or Manufacturing), but now that they’ve moved up to management level, they need to engage with the people that they’re leading. Or the third possibility is that they are going for an interview and they need to feel confident and engage with their interviewers, in a way that really sells who they are and what they do. I add that into a training as well as a coaching environment.
I’m also a certified Time to Think Coach because when I transitioned to working exclusively with adults, I couldn’t call myself a teacher anymore, so Coach was the best title. I found Time to Think to be the least prescriptive form of coaching methodology because you don’t advise people, you help them think generatively and independently for themselves.
