To fulfil our purpose and dreams then firstly we must wake up. When we wake up, we need to experience change if we want to get to where we want to go.

As I write this article, it is 2025 and I am still working on myself every day to fulfil my why and help people like yourself.

I am fulfilling the commitment I made to myself when I made the decision to start writing and sharing my knowledge with the world. I am not only talking the talk, but I am also walking the walk by continuing to take action.

I had changed my thinking, and I started to think like a highly effective leader, and I started to live like a highly effective leader.

1. Developing Myself

Since then, I have invested many hours in working on myself and I have invested a lot of money in improving myself for the good of others. I especially have worked on developing my character every single day.

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I did a coaching diploma that helped in starting up my coaching business, well it wasn’t until February 2024 that I took that step with a company called The Educator’s Coaching Academy.

I heard about this course through a very dear friend who is also a coach and lives in Canada, her name is Hope Paterson, and I highly recommend her as a coach for anyone starting a new business.

She put me in touch with the owner of Educator’s Coaching Academy, Sam Moinet who is also from the UK and we got on so well that I told him I wanted to start the course ASAP.

So, in February 2024 I started a 13-session coaching diploma that would last the year due to the performance evaluations and the extra competency lessons we had to take. Anyway, it wasn’t cheap, but I knew I was making an amazing investment.

I can honestly say this was one of the best, if not the best investment I have ever made in my life. I knew that I was doing something that can only make my life and the lives others better.

In the beginning though, I was extremely nervous and doubting myself on whether I had made the right investment. But this is just natural, and I knew I had to overcome that doubt and ensure I went through with the first session.

I knew I had to meet the other people who had made the same investment as I had and hear what their initial thoughts were.

I had invested in other personal growth programmes in the past that I didn’t even start, and on some occasions, I couldn’t get refunded due to the terms and conditions. But I knew I couldn’t do that here.

So, after the first session, I had come to realise that the principles of coaching were aligning with the leadership principles that I had been studying, sharing and practiced in my life for the last 9 years. This was the confirmation I needed to tell me that coaching was the right path to take for my own business.

2. The Change I Needed

I knew for a fact that coaching was the change I needed to make so I could have more of an impact in the personal and professional lives of people in similar positions to me. Middle managers who had their own teams, but were struggling to build trust, increase their influence and grow the culture.

During my time as a middle manager, I had discovered two things:

1. There is a big difference between management and leadership.
2. It was my job to serve my team as middle manager, not the other way around.

When I took my first middle manager position in 2009, that is when I started studying leadership. This is when I discovered that the middle managers I had worked for previously and was now working alongside were not leading their teams. They were managing their teams.

There are so many middle managers around the world who do not lead their teams, they manage them which is very much out of alignment with leadership principles.

I too was out of alignment when I started my first role, but I was constantly learning and eventually would change my ways as a middle manager. Middle managers who claim to be a leader but is not practicing leadership principles with their people represents a character flaw.

3. Helping Others

This is one of the main reasons I wanted to become a leadership coach for middle managers. I had my own experiences in this area, and I had been around so many other middle managers who said one thing and did another.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the middle managers I worked with were nice people and had nice families, but they were not leading and influencing their people in the right way. I wanted to help them in realising this and help them to develop their character and build their integrity.

So, I started by coaching middle managers, and the first middle manager wanted coaching because she didn’t feel ambitious in her current role. Her role was as relationships manager within her department, but she didn’t feel like she was leading her team or making decisions well.

This was a great opportunity for me to help the lady, and it was a great opportunity for her to work on and improve herself.

One of the main issues that she had was the relationship she had with her project leader, and she was struggling to figure out how to improve that relationship.

So, I asked her questions open questions on this, for example, “What do you feel is the main issue with the relationship?”, “Who’s responsibility is it to make the first move in improving the relationship?”

4. Action Taking

After some excellent conversation and answering my questions, she took it upon herself to make the first move because she knew the project leader wouldn’t.

So, the main action from our first coaching session was for her to set up monthly one to ones with her project leader so she could discuss ideas/plans, and to give her an opportunity to get her point across and convince the project leader to implement her ideas.

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This would make her feel more fulfilled in her current role.

For our following sessions, we continued to talk about issues, but things within her personal and professional life were improving through my coaching. When I saw this happening, it gave me the feeling of fulfilment and that I knew I had made the right changes in my own life to help others.

I knew that all the investments of time and money I had made were right. I knew all the studying I had done on leadership and coaching was right and I needed to continue that study.

Seeing others improving their own lives from either reading my books, reviewing my content or taking my coaching was the signal to the world that I was transforming myself. I knew the small steps I made every single day were the right steps and that practice makes progress, not perfect.

We need to change ourselves, not wait for things to change for us.

I welcome hearing how this post has influenced the way you think, the way you lead, or the results you have achieved because of what you’ve learned in it. Please feel free to share your thoughts with me by commenting below.

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All the best,

Tom (Lead, Grow, Influence)