TRANSCRIPT
SPEAKERS
Tim Thomas, Mike Speakman
Mike Speakman
Welcome to the Beyond Your Why Podcast, coaching edition, where we delve into the world of elite coaching and consulting. This podcast showcases leading coaches who’ve harnessed the power of their why to shatter boundaries and achieve extraordinary success. Each episode will feature coaches who share their unique journeys, breakthrough insights, and transformative impact of living their purpose with their clients and themselves. So now let’s meet today’s guest. His name is Tim Thomas. He is a corporate leadership and career coach. His company is Coaching Technology Group Incorporated. Tim specializes in helping clients navigate career transitions, managing up, and teams, securing promotions, finding new roles, internally and externally, and helping people return to work after a layoff. Tim, it’s great to meet you, and I’m thrilled to have you here today. Yeah, great.
Tim Thomas
Thanks for having me,
Mike Speakman
wonderful. Let’s just, let’s jump in. Can you? Can you give us a brief sixty to ninety second snapshot of what your coaching practice is and the major outcomes you get for your clients?
Tim Thomas
Yeah, my practice has three main parts. So the first part of my practice, I work with these large enterprise companies that hire coaches to work in big corporate environments, and so I’m part of cohorts that are put into these major corporations, and then people select me based on biographical match. I work with a lot of technology leaders in that area. I work with individual contributors. I have a strong tech background, so I work with software engineers, software engineering managers, also corporate marketing, business leadership, business administration, sometimes, if the company is somewhat small, all the way up to the C suite. And my goal is to work with each of those people with whatever their current presenting challenges are, help them to navigate through that, figure out ways to practically apply the things that we’re talking about, put them into practice in their work, and then hopefully they see different results, and so that changes their behavior. They go towards what works for them. The second part of my practice, I work with startup founders, and I’ve worked with six sets of startup founders. Five of those companies did not exit a seed round, so they failed before they really got started. One company I’m currently working with has secured a big Series A round of working on their series B funding right now. And so I support everybody in that company. I’ve grown with that entire company from they were there were six, then they went down to the two co-founders, and now they grew to 30. And I coach all 30 people to the extent that they need to be coached around interpersonal communication, making the business work, figuring out where the gaps are, where they are and what they’re not doing that needs to happen to be more satisfied. And then the third part of my practice is all around career. And in career, I do three main offerings. One, when I’m working with executives, I will do something called executive narrative development, where I interview them and I help them to see their top stories so that they can use those for a variety of things, interviews, marketing materials, and also potentially in a resume. I do career trajectory coaching for people who aren’t sure what they want to do next, or people who’ve drifted into a corner in their career and they don’t understand why they got there. So I help them to unlock where they’re at so they can navigate out of there, and then when they’re clear about what they want to do next, then I offer career transition package, and that’s where I roll up my sleeves with them. As a partner, we redo all their materials based on their future goal. So we redo their res, their resume, their LinkedIn. We work on cover letters, we do interview prep and and we help them to understand what’s going on in the job market. I’m contemporaneously coaching somewhere between 50 and 100 people most of the time, so I get a lot of data, and then I can use that data to help people understand where they are in the market, what they need to do. And I just have a weird way of figuring out what a good what job titles are out there. So people who are stuck and they don’t even know, and I’m like, let’s try this one. And usually we kind of uncover what I call strawberry fields that they didn’t know were their jobs that are in their skill set based on what they tell me. And then we get oriented towards going after that job, and I take care of them until they they’re in their new job for about a month, and then
Mike Speakman
incredible. I And I love the aspect of your startup work, that you’re the coach for this small internal team, and as it grows and grows and grows, that’s if you’re marketing like that, that’s brilliant. And if they’re hiring you, that’s also brilliant. That’s amazing.
Tim Thomas
Yeah, that really, it really helps, because I don’t work for the company. I work with the company, sure. And so when there’s stress inside the company, someone that the the individuals in the company have somewhere to go,
Mike Speakman
right, right? Yeah, you’re not. You’re not caught up in all the stuff and the craziness, yeah, like,
Tim Thomas
I don’t. And you know, sometimes I’ll be in a situation where I know somebody hasn’t apologized to somebody, even though they might have come up with coaching, right? I might. Go into the office and I’m like, they’re getting along okay, for two people who aren’t happy with one another right now, but it’s not my job to do organizational development. It’s my job to be a reflecting pool to the person and say, I don’t have a full reflection of who you are, but here’s what I’d like to reflect back what’s what’s landing on me to you, and then work on, how do you do something? It’s one thing to know. It’s another thing to say, how do I go about doing something about it? And that’s where the coaching and consulting tend to combine. And I’ll do some some teaching around things I see are common in corporate life.
Mike Speakman
Perfect. I love that. I love that. So before the call Tim, we talked about your Y, O S, which is challenge better way and makes sense? Yeah. So I’d like to showcase that a little bit, because it’s, first of all, it’s a really powerful combination of of your Y O S, your, why, how, what? But so what that means for the listeners is that if, if Tim was saying this, he would say, I believe that success happens when we think outside the box. How I do that is by finding better ways and sharing them. Ultimately, what I bring are solutions that make sense. That’s that’s really powerful. I have to say,
Tim Thomas
yeah, it could be kind of atomic.
Mike Speakman
Right way to say it,
Tim Thomas
yeah, I’m not, not. I used to joke when I worked in the corporate world. Everybody says they want a breath of fresh air, but they don’t want to blow in all the time.
Mike Speakman
Yeah. So I looked at your y o s earlier, and I’ve been playing with this a little bit in kind of a different way of, kind of how to attract your ideal client that you were just describing. And I’m just going to read this out loud too, for a second, something like I’m looking for someone who’s looking for help and thinking differently and living your life outside the box. I’m looking for someone who’s looking to innovate and seek better ways to do things than when you find a better way is needed. I’m looking for someone who’s looking for solutions that are well thought out and make sense. So that’s just just another way, a little little twist on it, that that I was playing with before
Tim Thomas
our call. Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. So
Mike Speakman
we’ll keep going here. What would you say sets your coaching approach apart from others in your space?
Tim Thomas
I think one of one of the real differences is I’ve actually worked. I didn’t set out to be in any kind of therapeutic role or anything like that. I’ve always just really loved communication and communications. My Bachelor’s degrees in communications, I thought I was going to go into mass media or something like that, but I lived in Seattle, and Seattle is a technology town, not a media town. If I was in Los Angeles, maybe something would have been different. And so when I decided to finally become a coach, I’d done a lot of different things in my career, and really, frankly, I got to the point where I just couldn’t work for other people in their environments anymore. This is that challenge. If there, if there was a leader that had an ethical lapse that would really kill my morale, I wouldn’t want to be there anymore. But, you know, I need to make money if I if, if we were, if the company hired a consultant, and the consultant produced a document that was the same ideas that we’d already generated internally. I would get furious about that, because they want it’s you didn’t need to go outside the company, to go outside the box. It was already here. And so eventually I’m like, you know, I need to be in a situation where I work with people, not for people. And then that took me out of this, the structures, the power structures that would that made it difficult for me be successful as a person. And so I’m like, I need to be an entrepreneur. And of course, you know, so I have this entrepreneurial mindset, and then I take my experience from real life, from a lot of ups and downs, you know, I’ve been fired a couple times for being too challenging, and had to reinvent my life a few times before I finally got to this role. So I bring this, you know, real, real life experience of being a person who’s a challenger, whether I like it or not, it’s just part of my, my my character, and then it’s gotta, it’s gotta track down to something that really helps people. So, you know, as a coach, I can spend time asking people who they are for themselves, right? And we can look, you know, sometimes I call it navel gazing. We can go navel gazing. The question is, when, when will we put this into action to create a change in our life, or, better yet, what needs to be in place so someone can have a transformation of understanding about themselves, such that that every behavior they do is new now they’re generating something new because they see themselves differently, because they understand themselves in a new way.
Mike Speakman
Wow, powerful stuff. Tim, I mean, I get it. I. I love when you said, with people, not for people guilty is charged, yeah, yeah, we’ll keep moving here for what, what? What do you see is the biggest challenge, or one of the bigger challenges your industry faces, and how are you tackling it for your clients and partners right now?
Tim Thomas
I think one of the biggest challenges is the techno, the application of technology in spaces that really should be interpersonal. So hiring people for jobs, for example, has become so automated, and has become so robotic. And so the, you know, the the main crux of my practice, that’s that’s separate from, say, coaching, coaching around, helping people find their way into careers, is, let’s say they’ve worked at a company for 10 years. The way about going about a job search now is completely different, and the people who are making decisions are significantly younger, and they have grown up in a highly technological environment. We we joke about this, about phone phobia among people who are Gen Z, not willing to pick up the phone and call people. And so all these things are we’ve created all these systems behind shields so people who are looking for jobs get really frustrated. And so what do we need to do? We need to figure out what I mean. It’d be great if people would just sit down and talk to one another again. One another again, that actually solve it all. But since we’ve decided to build this scaffolding of technology around it, then we also need to understand what technology do I need in order to get an opportunity to interview for a job, for example? And there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and so helping people to understand what is the real environment that I’m in. We can lament about how nobody talks to anybody anymore, but that doesn’t change the fact nobody talks to anybody anymore. So I say, here’s what’s real, here’s what’s going on, and here’s the challenge that you’re in. And then I try to bring something human back to the process, to say, I’m your partner in this. We’re not here to defeat the the robots. We’re here to work together to help you get a job.
Mike Speakman
I think you nailed it. That’s perfect. I mean, it’s still so human, but there’s so much augmentation that things just get passed by people don’t get a second chance. Yeah, that’s what you said. You know, you’re digging in. You’re digging in. You’re doing all this, this, this research, collecting all this data that sounds like is very unique to your practice, that you’re then using to help your your folks find the right place for them. Yeah,
Tim Thomas
I want them to feel psychologically safe in a process that has really feels more dehumanizing than ever.
Mike Speakman
Couldn’t agree more, that’s really powerful stuff, but now we’re going to shake it up and we call it our lightning round. Okay, quick answers for quick questions. I know you’re going to do great. Let’s so let’s roll. Okay, coffee, coffee or tea, coffee, cats or dogs,
Tim Thomas
cats.
Mike Speakman
If you could, this is funny, if kind of silly. If you could only grab one weapon or item during a zombie apocalypse, what would it be? Ooh,
Tim Thomas
I probably just, I probably grabbed my guitar. I can always use it to hit zombies.
Mike Speakman
There you go. Favorite quote or phrase that you think about often.
Tim Thomas
That disappointment requires adequate planning.
Mike Speakman
Love that. I’ve never heard that one that’s great, yeah,
Tim Thomas
I didn’t invent that one that comes from some some training I’ve done in the past.
Mike Speakman
Okay. I love it, though. Uh, one book that’s influenced your life the most,
Tim Thomas
um, probably the book trance formations, the word trance, like a hypnotic trance, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. This is a very early book in neuro linguistic programming, and made me realize the power of communication to people at the subconscious level.
Mike Speakman
Perfect. I love that. What’s one of the biggest obstacles you’ve ever had to overcome, and one lesson you learned from it,
Tim Thomas
yeah, speaking into my why I was, I was a challenger. We have a joke. We call it being an edge Lord around my house, but as a full time living embodiment of that, I would challenge people. I would I would say it things that maybe were true but really inappropriate in time or place, too insightful or too painful. And eventually it cost me everything. It cost me my marriage, cost me my job. And I remember sitting on a couch staring at a wall, going, how did I get here? And how am I going to get out of this situation? And so, of course, I was like, well, there must be something besides actually going to talk to somebody about this. So, you know, first I did, I learned how to do tarot cards really well, avoiding actually having a conversation. And what I learned is, over time that I had, I had become, I gotten to the point where I couldn’t allow myself to be vulnerable. Yeah. And so I was shut down. And so the fact that I was shut down for myself, man, I was shut down for other people. And so then I had to go on a journey to say, how do I thaw myself out from the things that had happened that didn’t work out the way that I wanted, that made me want to withdraw from the world? I have some I have ADHD. I didn’t really realize it at the time, but now it’s, it’s become very clear to me, working with so many people who do and so the more difficult things got, the more I wanted to run from what was really happening. So I had to learn how to be courageous and vulnerable in the face of bad news and emotionally challenging situations. I wasn’t always very good at it. I don’t know if I’m still very good at it. At least I recognize when I’m there,
Mike Speakman
right? Wow, that’s that’s deeply personal. It’s powerful, and I really appreciate you sharing that with us. I think a lot of people can get a big takeaway from from a bit of your story. I really appreciate that. Yeah,
Tim Thomas
you got, you got to be vulnerable so people can help you. Otherwise, you’re just going to live in your chamber, and we talked about earlier, dehumanization makes it easy to sit at home and go out on the internet and look for people who seem to agree with you, but that keeps you from opening up your heart and being with people
Mike Speakman
absolutely WELL SAID SO WELL SAID SO. Tim, if any of our viewers would like to collaborate with you? What’s the best way for them to get in touch? They
Tim Thomas
should go to my website, Timothy thomas.com and on that page is a very clear explanation of who I am, what I’m about, and what we might do together. And there’s a very clear spot to book a 20 minute informational phone call with me. So if someone goes to that site, they like what they see and they’re serious, then they can book a phone call. And we’ll get on the phone together. We’ll talk for 20 to 30 minutes about what what they’re working through. If you’re somebody who’s been kind of stalled in your career, you don’t like where you’re at, or you’ve been having trouble getting back to work, these we really should talk, because there’s new ways of going about thinking about getting a job that I’m working with people on all the time.
Mike Speakman
Fantastic. Tim, this has been great. I really appreciate your time, and most of all your insights. I mean, you’re a really interesting, intelligent guy that has a unique approach, and I hope people can find you, because you can really help them. And I really,
Tim Thomas
yeah, super appreciate it and and thanks for the compliments. Bye.