The overall corporate training and consultancy market in India is booming. The entry of many foreign companies and emergence of the startup ecosystem has hugely contributed to the growth in demand for employee training and consultancy services at various stages of operations. Corporate coaching is essential to maintain employee performance and well-being at the workplace and face difficult situations without hesitation. It is the primary duty of an executive coach to help the executives perform better at their job. Because the management of any SME or a large company is exposed to challenging decision making scenarios at every level of company’s operations, building a problem solving mindset becomes necessary.
Inculcating such a mindset in executives is Smita D Jain - an accredited coach with the International Coaching Federation. She is a certified executive coach, personal empowerment life coach and an NLP practitioner known for her innovative techniques in coaching. Acknowledging her prowess, Asia Business Outlook magazine has selected her as one of the Top 10 Executive Coaches from Asia. She understands clients’ challenges in ways that the clients themselves are sometimes unable to comprehend and guides them to the most efficient and effective solutions. Asia Business Outlook magazine engaged in a conversation with her to know more about her life and career and how she has added value to the executive coaching sector.
Tell Us About Your Educational Journey And A Summary Of Professional Experiences That You Have Had In Life.
I am a graduate from Delhi University after which I completed my MBA from IIM Indore. Post my MBA, I worked for 14 years in various leadership roles in Fortune 500 companies. My first job was with KPMG in their management consultancy division. There I helped clients with business strategies and transformation. After that i have worked in different leadership positions in companies like United Technologies Corporation and JLL India. After working almost a decade and a half in the corporate world, I realized that people need more than strategies to succeed, and pivoted to coaching. I have led large projects during my tenure in the corporate world, and always enjoyed mentoring team members, helping them to overcome their challenges and bring out their best, and looked at coaching as a natural progression.
I became a member of the International Coaching Federation and enrolled for my certifications in 2021. Now I am an ICF accredited Associate Certified Coach(ACC), a certified executive coach and a personal empowerment life coach. As an executive coach, I empower executives to communicate their way to influence and emerge leaders. My corporate background has been of tremendous help in coaching senior management and leaders of companies- I have lived their life and understand the pressure and challenges they
face, which enables me to help my clients arrive at practical solutions to their concerns.
What Are The Various Challenges That You Have Faced In Your Career Until Now And How Have You Managed To Overcome Them?
Throughout my career, be it corporate world or as a certified coach, I have found myself fighting a perception battle. At the outset of my career, I had to overcome certain stereotypes and biases on what a woman, married woman and a working mother can or can’t do. After I made a career pivot to coaching, I again had to overcome biases-especially in case of executive coaching- about my non-HR background, previous experience in coaching, shift from consulting to coaching etc. Despite the challenges, I have always focused on helping my clients arrive at a solution. Once I got my first set of clients, the word of mouth spread, and I got more clients. The glowing testimonials and client success stories on my website are my biggest achievements as a coach. Apart from the external challenges that I mentioned, internally moving from a high-pressure structured job to an unstructured entrepreneurial quest was a challenge initially. If you don’t structure your day, you risk falling into chaos or worse, procrastination. I overcame that with discipline and determination. Persistence and consistency are my mantras to keep going day after day.
In All The Years You Have Worked Until Now, What Kind Of Professional Expertise Have You Gathered That Affects The Final Delivery Of Your Services?
Firstly, I come from a corporate background. Having worked in that high-pressure environment, I understand and feel what my clients go through, enabling me to equip them with practical, implementable quick wins and solutions. Secondly, I would like to emphasize that I am a certified executive coach, personal empowerment life coach and neuro-linguistic practitioner. I am emphasizing this because coaching nowadays is unregulated,and it is very easy for someone to call themselves a coach. I have gone through certain rigours and training to earn this certificate and become an accredited coach with the International Coaching Federation which is the apex membership organization for trained professional coaches. My clients know that they are in a secure and confidential environment while working with me. Most importantly, I have my own ‘Empower Yourself’ methodology for coaching.
My approach is solution driven and my Empower Yourself Personal Clarity and Executive Performance Enhancement Coaching Programs don’t leave it to the clients to think of a separate problem to discuss with me session-by-session. My clients get tangible results and reach their objectives within nine weeks of the Empower Yourself Program. With Empower Yourself coaching program, clients will achieve their goals, within a definite, reasonable time-frame. My results speak for themselves. In my first live-learning session as a coach, my name came up in the Top 10 trending speakers for June 2021. I got a special commendation from an Indian corporate for a session I held with their employees. I was an invited panellist on the subject of corporate mental health with a leading OTT channel. All this within my first year of coaching.
Smita Das Jain, Founder & CEO, Empower Yourself
An IIM-Indore and SRCC alumna with more than 14 years of corporate experience in leadership roles with Fortune 500 companies, Smita is an ICF accredited Associate Certified Coach, an NLP Practioner, a writer and a speaker.
My corporate background has been of tremendous help in coaching senior management and leaders of companies
As a Personal Empowerment Life Coach, Smita’s Empower Yourself Personal Clarity programs enable her clients find time to transform their passion into profession so that they work because they want to, and not because they have to. As an Executive Coach, Smita’s Empower Yourself Performance Enhancement Programs enable executives communicate their way up to influence and emerge leaders. Smita is a TEDx speaker and an expert speaker on various platforms, corporate conferences and OTT channels. She is also a bestselling author. Smita is extensively quoted in the media and has been featured in leading newspapers like ‘The Pioneer,’ ‘The Daily Guardian’ and ‘The New Indian Express’ for her work.
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