The amazing Kate McGuinness, author, advocate, and former BigLaw partner and Fortune 300 GC stopped by to tell us about a low-cost program that provides women with a coach to make positive changes in their life. Check it out, especially if you’re in law school!
Thanks, Kate!
If you’re challenged by law school or legal practice, help is available — but it’s only for women. For once, you can get a leg-up on the guys!
Women for Change Coaching Community (“W4C3”) offers coaching to women seeking to make positive changes in their lives. Almost every law student and lawyer meets that description. There is one more criterion: a participant’s annual household adjusted gross income must be less than $40,000.
All you need to do is submit an application, complete a questionnaire and pay a $35 fee. W4C3 matches clients with volunteer coaches based on factors such as employment experience and location. Clients receive a round of 12 one-on-one coaching sessions over three months via telephone or Skype.
How A Coach Can Help You
The heart of coaching is a respectful, appreciative partnership of equals in which the coach works with the client to clarify and advance the client’s self-initiated goals. A coach can act as a sounding board as clients explore possibilities and plan for the future.
Reasons You Might Choose to Work with a Coach
Here are a few examples of goals a coach can help you achieve:
- Identify your core strengths and learn how to best leverage them
- Increase your self-confidence
- Find a satisfying blend of work obligations and personal life
- Overcome perfectionism
- Learn to set boundaries at work and at home
- Thrive in a male-dominated workplace
- Enhance your negotiating skills
- Gain clarity about choices to be made such as which firm is a “fit”
- Master time management
- Improve your presentation skills for interviews, meetings or court
- Tame workaholism
- Address concerns that your success has started to become problematic
What the Coach Brings to the Partnership
- Champions the client’s potential, encouraging stretch and challenge goals consistent with personal strengths and aspirations
- Fosters shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives on the client as a “whole person,” recognizing the influences of the client’s values and roles in all aspects of her life
- Challenges the client’s blind spots to illuminate new possibilities and support the creation of alternative scenarios
The Client’s Role in the Partnership
- Creates the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful goals
- Envisions personal success
- Assumes full responsibility for personal decisions and actions
- Utilizes the coaching process to promote self-awareness, possibility thinking and fresh perspectives
- Takes courageous action in alignment with personal goals and aspirations
W4C3 has more than 40 volunteers who specialize in career coaching to help you navigate law school and your legal career. After reviewing your application, W4C3 will match you with the coach best qualified to meet your needs. I’m a volunteer coach and would be delighted to work with any reader of The Girl’s Guide to Law School.
Take a look at Women for Change Coaching Community. We can help!
More about Kate: Kate McGuinness is a lawyer who spent 17 years in BigLaw before becoming the general counsel of a Fortune 300 corporation. She is an advocate for women and tweets as @K8McGuinness. Her blogs about women’s rights have appeared in Forbes Woman, Women’s Media Center, Jezebel, The Frisky, Role/Reboot, Fem2pt0 and Ms. JD. (These essays are collected on her website.)
She has created Pinterest boards illustrating issues of concern such as advertisements objectifying women. You can find her on Pinterest and LinkedIn as Kate McGuinness and on Facebook as Women’s Rights Writer. After leaving the corporate world, she studied creative writing and is the author of a legal thriller Terminal Ambition, which is available on Amazon. Information about the firms, characters and locales in the novel can be found at Terminal-Ambition.com. Kate is also a volunteer coach with Women For Change Coaching Community and you can find out more about her on her coaching website: CounselorCoaching.com.
Read On:
Want to hear more from Kate? Here you go:
- Kate’s Counsel: Chill Out About Exams
- Kate’s Counsel: Finding Your Way in the Legal Profession
- The More Things Change…
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