By 19, Marcia Reynolds was in prison, a clever student who made a bad decision. But then a fellow inmate gave her a second chance. She discovered coaching and went from strength to strength, teaching coaching and coaching leaders in over 43 countries. Liz Hall reports.
Being incarcerated at 19 after abusing drugs led to a life-changing encounter for Marcia Reynolds, setting her on the path to coaching.
For Reynolds, who was to become a behavioural scientist, executive coach, coach trainer and the fifth global chair of the International Coaching Federation (ICF), it was this experience of turning her life around that sparked a wish to support others to do the same.
“What drove me even to be on that path to coaching started early with the desire to be of service to people in a different way, helping them recognise their block, and their possibilities.
“Curiosity about how do people really learn and change their behaviour sustainably” is the golden thread through her work and research.
Reynolds was one of the first 25 people in the world to become an ICF Master Certified Coach. She’s taught coaches and coached leaders in 43 countries, and Global Gurus has listed her as one of the top five coaches in the world for more than five years. She’s the author of books including Breakthrough Coaching: Creating lightbulb moments in your coaching conversations (January 2024), which introduces a coaching method based on psychological safety, and put her on the shortlist of thinkers for the Thinkers50 2023 Marshall Goldsmith Coaching and Mentoring Award.
Reynolds has a doctorate in organisational psychology and two master’s degrees, in communications and adult learning. Through her company, Covisioning, in addition to teaching and consulting, she coaches executives globally. Clients include the Hershey Company, Ernst & Young, Medtronic, Maersk, Sanofi, Cornell University, The Discovery Channel, Dignity Health, Center for Disease Control, American Express and
National Institutes of Health.
These days, she tends to coach executives in not necessarily global companies, such as physician leaders or HR leaders in hospital corporations. It’s always leaders, or up-and-coming leaders. Sometimes she is hired to be the ‘coaching element’ on leadership development programmes.
Nowadays she does more coach training than coaching. She’s on faculty for coaching schools including in the US, the Philippines, China, Malaysia, and Russia.
Life-changing encounters
Of her early experiences, she explains: “I wasn’t the normal kid: I was a good student, always straight As, top student, top athlete, all this stuff. But it was almost like too much. And I finally got to a place in high school where I couldn’t be the best any more. And no matter how hard I worked, I went into this dark place, which led me to meeting people that in order to fit in with [involved] a path of drugs.
“I ended up in jail, turning 20 in there. People say, ‘oh, well, it looks like jail turned you around’. No, jail did not turn me around. It was the women in the jail that did, and I’m very fortunate to have had that.
“[These] women were very tough and very strong but still knew that their life wouldn’t be abundant, they’d probably end up incarcerated much of their life. And for a lot of them, it was the safest place on the planet, which is very sad.
“I’d become friends with a particular woman, and one day, I was doing my normal feeling sorry for myself, and that I’d ruined my life, I’d never amount to anything, boohoo me. And she got up. She pinned me against the wall and said, ‘you have no idea who you are. You’re strong, you’re smart. And for some reason, you just deeply care about people. When you get that in here (pointing to her heart), you can do anything out there’.
“The meaning behind that was that I had privilege she’d never have. I was the one who could go out and make a difference, where many of them couldn’t. She saved my life. She gave me a second chance. And that made me feel like I had to give back.”
Reynolds went straight back to school, graduating summa cum laude. She tried to get involved in running programmes for the prison but was shunned for her past.
“I recognised, well, ‘I’m not going to change the criminal justice system’. And they’re not going to let me back for many years into the system at all. So I’ll try to make a difference (generally) in the world. I landed first in a hospital corporation and then in high tech.
“The work was about relationships, communication, leadership, recognising possibilities, and it came from that, ‘I have to make a difference in some way’. It took me years to figure out how to make that difference. But it also led me to researching what really works. You just can’t tell people to change.”
Behaviour change in coaching
When she was involved in training, she’d get very positive feedback but “as soon as the new behaviour got awkward, they’d go back to old behaviour”. This lack of real change prompted her to start researching what it takes to change people’s minds and to create sustainable change.
In October 1995, she was sent an article in Newsweek on what was then a new phenomenon – coaching. She watched a coaching demonstration and was hooked. She’d found what she was yearning for. “I said, ‘something’s different here. What happened to the person when they created the insight and how did that change who they were?’ When you change your identity, then you change your behaviour. Nothing else that I was doing was creating an identity shift.”
She signed up to get trained as a coach right away. Not long after, she read Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence, realising how important emotional states and reactions are to lasting growth.
This fascination in neuroactivity related to learning led her to getting her doctorate “so I could better understand coaching as a learning technology. It’s not psychotherapy. And I would know, I worked in a psychiatric hospital!”
In coaching, both parties are on an equal basis in terms of power but in therapy, mentoring, leadership and teaching, there’s a power dynamic with them on top and the other supposedly learning from them, she says.
“That often creates compliance or resistance that doesn’t activate the brain. The only way to really activate the brain from a telling modality is if people get really excited about what you tell them. Then it may embed into long-term memory, otherwise it won’t.”
Another difference between therapy and coaching, for Marcia, is that in coaching she doesn’t focus on the past.
“As my coach once said, ‘I’m not interested in your history, I’m more interested in your mystery’. Right, and what makes you you?
“In coaching, I’m looking at ‘what’s going on with you today? What is it you really want that you don’t have? And what’s getting in your way?’ That may be an old story, but we’re looking at how that impacts, and what else is possible, right now, to create what you want in the future. And I’m just your thinking partner, I never tell you what to do. I’m just there to reflect and have you look at your thinking ‘out here’ in a way we cannot do for ourselves.
“That way, the client can see the gaps in their logic, the beliefs that are holding them back, the shoulds and judgments of other people that they’re basing my decisions on.
“When the client sees those, something happens in the middle brain and there’s creative insight (‘Oh, that’s it? Oh, that’s it!’) which reorders neurons to a point where it’s a learning that embeds right away. A lot of that is about who I am in this moment; it changes my behaviour sustainably right there. I might still have to muster courage, but that’s another thing.”
She cites a study (Bartolomé et al, 2022) which recorded activity in the regions of the brain associated with problem solving, exploring three different approaches – solitary sorting, receiving direct opinions and advice, and non-directive coaching using reflections and open-ended questions. Coaching led to the highest activity in the region of the brain associated with creativity. Participants generated far more insights they called ‘aha’ moments that enhanced their problem-solving capacity and their commitment to act. The study confirms when you coach a person’s thinking – how they define their situation and who they are being in that picture – the creative insights that emerge accelerate growth. People not only see new ways to proceed but they also then act with more confidence and often, more excitement, with change that is more sustainable than from other forms of problem-solving and learning.
“It was just an incredible result. And the researchers were saying it’s because of the creative insights – what I call the breakthrough moments. But it’s not just a breakthrough, it could even be the moment like, ‘Oh, I should have thought of that.’ Even that is a breakthrough in the patterns of thinking we hold on to.
“I’m looking to have (the client) have a new awareness, not a solution, (they’ll) come up with a solution as a result, in their perception of the situation and that’s the creative insight that changes the brain.”
What does she love about coaching? “Well, because I’m not having to tell people what to do or teach the same thing over and over and over, it never gets boring. Whereas before, the responsibility fell on me to give people the right answer, and I didn’t know if it was always right.
“With coaching, it’s interaction between the two of us …and so many times they surprise me with what they choose and come up with. It’s never formulaic. It may be when you first learn coaching, because you have to kind of know your scales before you can improvise, right? Like any instrument. But once you know what it means to coach, you have to know where (you’re both) going, which ties into what are you going to do next, but in the middle, it’s the spontaneous interaction. That’s never the same.”
Coaching model
“I have a very good friend who has a coaching school in Singapore, and he says, ‘Here’s my model of coaching: okay, you got the person, they have a problem. This is what they want to create, instead of what they have, we have to know what that is, and the coaching is all that stuff in the middle that’s getting in the way of getting that.’ That’s it, that’s really my model.
“(It’s about) agreeing to the outcome the person wants that they don’t have now. And it’s the outcome, not a problem, a decision, a different emotion. It’s something we can both see. Then I can help them work towards that. And that can evolve. I have many sessions where it’s evolved. And you know, we didn’t really get to what they really wanted till near the end, but we had a place to start.
“That’s the critical piece, because then when you ask them, ‘What are you going to do next to ensure progress?’ it’s got to tie in with what it is they said they wanted. And then the rest of the coaching is what’s getting in the way, what’s stopping this really smart person from moving forward. What are…the assumptions about the future that they’re making up, the beliefs that they’ve inherited, and haven’t analysed, the doubts that this’ll work, the fears within themselves.
“When we start to really get into what I call brain hacking, we’re hacking the operating system in the brain, to what are those things that are really holding them back – that’s the awareness. Because once they see it, then they know what to do with it. And then we bring it home with, ‘so now tell me the actions you’re gonna take. So that’s the model!”
Achievements
Before launching her own business, her greatest success came from designing the leadership and employee development programme for a global semiconductor company facing bankruptcy. Within three years, the company became the number one revenue-producing stock market success in 1993, increasing revenue by $200 million per year.
She’s also proud of “having been recognised by the ICF in their circle of distinction, which they had for three years, that it recognised my ongoing global contribution to coaching. You know, because it’s always the recognition of the work, not of me I’m aiming for. Do people recognise how that passion is turned into tangible things that help grow good quality coaches around the world? So that and of course, my books.”
Her books
“In the second grade, I won a poetry contest. I always wanted to be a published author. I self-published my first book, but my second, my first published book was Wander Woman (2010). It was based on my doctoral dissertation about the challenges of smart, strong women in the workplace. Because all the books were about women who can’t speak up and were weak. What about the rest of us?
“The day the publisher called to tell me they were accepting it for publication, I just cried. It was my childhood dream come true.
“I only write books about things I think people aren’t addressing, and are causing problems. So Coach the Person (2020) (came from me) seeing coaching go into this more formulaic coaching the problem, not really understanding, ‘how do I coach this person in front of me to think differently?’ ”
Teaching all over the world helps her pinpoint what coaches are really struggling with. She teaches with coaching.com, an online breakthrough coaching programme, for example. At the end of March, it’s launching a deep dive into breakthrough coaching, tying in with her latest book, which offered her the chance to address the things she felt were missing in her previous book.
The new book has more examples of questions to ask, more exercises and resource tools to help coaches get to what clients really want, and appreciate how important that is. There’s also more about coaching to create identity shifts.
“Because there’s no real sustainable change (otherwise). So how do I coach to that in a comfortable flowing way? That goes much deeper in the new book.
“(Exploring identity can be about ) simple things – asking someone, ‘so in this meeting, who are you?’ ‘Well, I’m the leader.’ ‘Well, what kind of leader are you in that meeting? How would you define that?’ They start to add to it when they add the adjective. ‘Well, I’m the patient leader’, or ‘I’m a new leader. I don’t know what I’m doing.’ And how’s that impacting your results?
“I’ve been teaching in China for 12 years. And I’ve coached a lot of female executives. I do a women’s leadership programme online every year. And it’s so interesting, because a lot of them are executives who work for global companies, they’re in a room full of European and American men, and they judge themselves as not good enough. So (I ask) ‘who are you in that room?’
“This one woman said, ‘Well, I don’t know why they listen to me. I’m just a Chinese girl.’ ‘I’m like, really? So do you hear how you’re defining yourself? You walk into that door as a Chinese girl?’ I said, ‘Why do you think they want you in that room? What was the reason they elevated you to this position?’ She said, ‘Well, I have a knowledge of the Chinese market that they don’t have, and they may never have.’ ‘Oh, okay, you’re Chinese market expert, not Chinese girl.’ And she goes, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s who I am: Chinese market expert.’ Then we could take a look at how she can be an equal contributor.”
Elevating consciousness
“It’s still amazing to me how many people really don’t know what coaching is. I occasionally go out and date and (her date) is like, ‘What do you do?’ And I’ll tell them, and they have no idea what I’m talking about! I’m like, ‘Forget it’.”
Her vision is that “everyone in the world understands not just what coaching is but the impact that coaching provides. Not everyone’s going to be a coach. But we can all bring some coaching approach to our conversation, where I’m just really curious because I care, about how you think, how you see this, what you want.
“I think coaching uplifts our consciousness and connects us. So I’d like to see coaching do that more.
This is particularly pertinent for Reynolds in these times of war in the Ukraine and in Israel as she has Ukrainian Jewish roots.
“The person who was most significant in my life was my grandmother, an immigrant from Ukraine. She never saw our family again; they were probably killed because they were Jewish merchants, in addition to being Ukrainian. And so she came here (the US). She was smaller than me, and I’m a very tiny woman, and she was the most powerful woman I ever knew.
“There’s a lot going on in the world right now. So I also have that, you know, being Ukrainian, being Jewish. It’s like, what my grandmother came over here thinking she was running away from seems to be following her.
“And she came over here, raised five boys – my grandfather died when I was very young – she was just tough, very independent. You know, it’s funny, I just went to my 50th high school reunion and, and on the page, they had (my) relationship status as ‘independent’. Not even single – independent. And I’m like, yeah. There’s a light and dark side to that but (my grandmother) demonstrated that no matter what happens, you can find a path forward.
“When (her grandparents) got to Phoenix, they bought chickens, and overalls and they sold fresh eggs door to door, sticking the eggs in their pockets, and then built a big business based on that. I recognise that some people don’t have privilege; that it’s much more difficult. But that she had that inner strength she pulled out to create in the world. That’s the energy she gave me.”
Reynolds is still based in Arizona, where she now lives right in the desert at the base of mountain.
“I was already out this morning with the full moon going for a little hike as the sun rose and the coyotes were out. And oh, it was just awesome. It was like my morning meditation. I’m enjoying that.
“And then I get to sit down and talk to people all over the world about what I love!
“In coaching, this is what we can do: try bringing more people together through conversation and care, to see if we can impact some of the divisions.
“Coaching can help us, before we judge what someone’s saying, to try to understand what they mean and what’s important to them. For us to not immediately judge what someone is saying, to receive it as this is just how they see the world right now, and I’m trying to understand it, then I might just share that back: ‘So here’s what I hear you saying’, and then ask questions. The person feels seen, heard and valued, I don’t care who they are. And if we could do that, how that would change things. If we’d just stay present and curious with people, what a difference that would make.
“And understanding that we quickly judge because the brain does that to protect you. It’s the brain’s primary purpose, not to make you smart, caring and all of that. It’s like, well, thank you brain, but I don’t need protection at this moment, you can go to sleep. So again, don’t judge yourself for judging. We all judge, nobody’s judgment free…and just to recognise, oh, look, there it is. I don’t need to protect myself. Let me come back and be present and care about the person in front of me.
References
- Bartolomé G., Vuka S., Nadal C. and Blanco E. (2022). “Right cortical activations during generation of creative insights: An electroencephalographic study of coaching.” Frontiers in Education, 7:753710
- Reynolds, M. (2020). Coach the person, not the problem: A guide to using reflective inquiry. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
- Reynolds, M. (2010). Wander woman: How high-achieving women find contentment and direction. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.