Amechi Udo began working as a Personal and Business Coach in 1999 having previously worked in human resources and recruitment. A trained NLP practitioner, Amechi also has a Diploma in Performance Coaching (Business) from Newcastle College.
Given his background in career development many of Amechi’s personal and corporate clients work with him to achieve their rewarding career of choice. Here he talks about how he became a coach.
'As a child I imagined how my life might be. I dreamt of being a footballer or a successful athlete. I would go to university, have a brilliant, exciting, interesting, career. I would marry a beautiful and intelligent woman and have two wonderful children, all of us living in a lovely five-bedroom house. All by the age of 30!
A few months before turning 30, I had my appraisal. I’d been with the company six months. Having given me feedback on my performance, my boss ended the appraisal by saying “I was running out of time to make something of my life”. A few weeks later I was made redundant. I had no career, no house, car, wife or children.
And most of all there was no image of my future.
At that moment I realised how lucky I was. I had seven years’ work experience, good qualifications, no ties or obligations and the support of family and friends. Most importantly, I had the opportunity to think and create the life I wanted through using my skills, talents and experience.
I recognised that I enjoyed working with people, listening and talking through their problems, as well as being a sounding board for their ideas. It was great to know these things. But knowing was not enough to feed me or pay the bills!
I had no set idea about what I wanted to do. I did have a strong feeling that my previous career path had been ’in the right area’ but not quite right. Without the pressure of having to take the next job that came along, I decided to do some interim work in human resources for a year.
In that time I earned more money than I had done at any point up to then. I took my first trip to New York to visit my brother and his family. They had been living there for thirteen years. For the first time in my life, I trusted my gut and my heart over my head.
As I worked in the interim roles the feeling inside me got stronger. I did not know what was causing it, what it meant or why now I was consciously aware of it. On reflection, I now realise that that feeling had been growing over many years and I had simply ignored it until it got too strong to suppress.
The day I discovered that I wanted to coach was when Sarah called me. I was working as an interim HR manager and Sarah was one of the company’s employees.
She told me she wanted to discuss an internal promotion that she had been offered. I arranged to meet her in her office and assumed she was keen on being promoted, probably in her forties.and simply wanting me to discuss any problems she had with the contract. Sarah quickly removed all my assumptions about her and her situation.
For a start, Sarah was only three years from retiring. She definitely did not want to be promoted. And, most importantly, she wanted me to listen to her ideas about her future, not solve her problems for her.
I really did not know how I was going to help. After all, I had only been working for a few years and was only 30.
Sarah had her doubts about what was the right move for her to make. She worked in a small team and felt that someone else in the team, keen on building a career, would be better suited for the job. Having already climbed the career ladder to a point where she was satisfied, Sarah no longer felt driven to go any further. Instead she was looking ahead three years to when she was retired and what she would do with her life.
In her spare time Sarah enjoyed writing stories and features and wanted more time to do this. She also wanted to continue making presentations at seminars and conferences to her current clients and feared that not taking the promotion would stop her from doing work she enjoyed.
I asked her whether she was specifically requested as speaker by these organisations and she said that this was the case. Sarah realised that continuing to do this work was not dependent on staying in the job she was doing. In fact when she retired she would have more time to do this work along with her writing.
That meeting proved to be a turning point for me. At that moment I realised I wanted to do more of this work, even though I did not know what it was called. The feeling I had inside me after the meeting was amazing. A total surge of energy radiated out of my body not just for a few minutes, but for weeks afterwards. People around me noticed the difference too. Friends and family commented on how relaxed and happy I looked. A former colleague even said they could feel an energy coming from me, as they stood opposite.
Over the following months I went through a series of ’coincidences’ that gave shape and form to the experience energising me.
One Saturday morning I went to buy my usual paper. It was sold out. I bought The Times instead. I quickly flicked through the magazine that came with it, to see if there was anything interesting. Then I saw it - a column headed “Dear Coach”. It was about how people were achieving their goals through personal coaching.
I was instantly excited because I now had a name for what I wanted to do. Then I was sad because I thought this idea was only mine. Then I was confident. Why? Because I had proof that the work that I wanted to do was already being done successfully by people in the UK to a level where an internationally known newspaper was prepared to write about it.
On another day, I was sitting on the Tube and I saw an advert for a book called The Work We Were Born To Do by Nick Williams. The title exactly matched my thinking over the years about my work and those of others that I had met throughout my career.
I thought about the hundreds, if not thousands of people I had interviewed for jobs.
Many of them seemed to be unsure about exactly what work they wanted to do. Others were willing to do work that made them unhappy - in some cases again and again - simply for more money. The title and the book’s contents made it clear to me that this was my chance to do enjoyable and rewarding work.
I went to the seminar based on the book and, by chance, met another coach, called Jilly Shaul. As luck would have it, she lived quite close to me. Jilly told me about a coaching network that I did not even know existed. Both Jilly and the network (the Eurocoach-List) has since been a great support to me in growing my business and it has been a pleasure to help others within the network too.
The seminar also resulted in me being challenged by a woman called Marion to bring coaching to her organisation. Shocked though I was by Marion’s request and, fearful that I lacked the experience she needed, I gave her my card and asked her to call me when she wanted. Two months later Marion called and became my first formal coaching client. Her goals from back then have been achieved and we have since become friends.
Then one day I was reading the Evening Standard – a London newspaper – when I saw an article on a Personal and Business Coach called Jeremy Lazarus.
Jeremy was ten years older than me. He had previously had a successful career in finance. He had been coaching for a year. I had been working with people most of my life. I was ten years younger than Jeremy and not coaching. I called him and hired him as my coach. Guess where he lived? Ten minutes away from me!
Since then, I have coached a many people to achieve their personal and business goals. I have also presented at the 2nd European International Coach Federation Conference, held in May 2002, as well as running the first UK coaching teleconference in November 2002 and the 1st Global Teleconference in May 2003.
Choose between luck, coincidence and hard work. All have played their part in bringing me to the point I am at now. Most importantly for me has been the ability to recognise and stay connected with my sense of purpose. And to accept the fact that insight comes to each of us at the right time.'
"There are two ways of meeting difficulties:
You alter the difficulties or you alter yourself to meet them."
Phyllis Bottom Click here to buy the e-book inspired to coach
Copyright 2004 Amechi Udo all rights reserved
"The stories are very motivational to new and aspiring coaches. There is a great variety of professions/backgrounds the coaches in the e-book have emerged from. These real life people show that you will become successful not only in your work but in your life when you coach yourself and be coached!" Dr Wouter Havinga, newly qualified coach
"I was impressed that coach after coach described the journey of becoming a coach as one of profound and life-altering personal development. An inspiring collection of first-hand tales of human evolution!" Anne Kaplan, US Coach
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