Ep. 117 - Unlock Your Success, Unlock Yourself - with Samhita Jayanti

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Samhita Jayanti is the Founder and CEO of Ideamix, a coaching company that matches both individuals and organizations with coaches that are best suited to their needs.

Sam is also a person who truly understands the uncertainty of modern life — the good and the bad — but few people have developed better tools and techniques for taking it all on. And luckily, she’s willing to share what worked with her, while providing us with a better understanding of what coaching really is and how it can play an important role in unlocking our success, which will look different for everyone.

Where You Learn the Most

“Follow your curiosity. It’s where you learn the most.” —Samhita Jayanti

Sam embodies and embraces the nonlinear career and life journey that I’ve been talking about on the show for the last couple of years. She lived in seven countries before the end of high school, flirted with the world of finance, pivoted publishing (which in the end wasn’t the right long-term fit), then shifted to consulting where she cultivated entrepreneurial skills as part of that experience by building out this firm’s US business. She subsequently took her talents to the tech world before venturing out on her own entrepreneurial endeavors.

And looking back at her journey, Sam identifies three themes: she had the privilege and opportunity to try a lot of different things; she followed her curiosity, which led to both her greatest challenges and triumphs; and she was always seeking more mentorship. And this simple recipe consistently brought Sam learning, fulfillment, and purpose.

The Origins of Ideamix

In her 30s, Sam was dealing with a lot at once: the challenge of growing a commercial business and managing a team in a start-up like culture, caring for her family as a mom of 3 kids, and the difficulty of maintaining any work-life balance as a result. She didn’t have the skills she needed to solve these problems... but she also didn’t really know where to learn them.

So she looked to coaching for guidance, and it was transformative. And time and time again since, she has been able to lean on this type of resource to transform her life for the better.

But it wasn’t easy work. And it wasn’t easy to find the right support in the first place. That’s why Sam and her co-founders started Ideamix, a coaching platform founded by women with a strong core belief in the power of the individual, the transformational impact of coaching, the importance of a learning mindset, and the multiple, diverse, and deeply individual definitions of purpose and success.

The Secret to Sam’s Success: Her Career Mashup

“Fundamentally, I think everything that we do, whether it's how we define our mission, how we run our business. How we serve our stakeholders, which are coaches on the one hand and, um, companies and individuals on the other is informed by all of my various and in some ways career experiences where I hopped around lots of industries and did lots of different things. That experience was invaluable because it gave me such a diverse set of skills of people that I worked with. And as a result, an ability to organize, collaborate, manage very different people and very different streams.”

And the only way to keep your head straight through all of those gears that have to shift many times over the course of every day is that collective set of experiences that you've been through before.

What is Coaching?

Coaching is simply strategic planning in partnership. It is the process of defining a set of goals — and you may not even know what those goals are when you start this process — and then working backwards from there to create a plan through a combination of self-assessment and habit building. And your coach, ideally, has the expertise and experience to help you along that path.

Critically, coaching is NOT therapy. You don’t go into coaching sessions to talk about the problems that are top of mind. Which isn’t to say therapy isn’t a fantastic resource that can help you unlock a better version of yourself but it’s important to remember the two aren’t the same.

We will all have points in our lives, whether it's in the course of our professional development or in navigating personal life transitions, where we will benefit from objective advice. And that’s one of the positive aspects coaches offer: advice and expertise from someone who can see your situation more objectively than a loved one or someone who is close to you might be able to.

Coaching: Common Myths & Misconceptions

A coach can’t just tell you what to do. There needs to be an agreement and a clear set of expectations between the coach and the coachee.
In an organization, there are actually three stakeholders in a coaching relationship: the coach, person being coached, and the coachee’s manager. You need the commitment of the manager as part of the process.
Coaching builds, but also needs a level of self awareness and people come into a coaching process with very different levels of self-awareness and organization. It's getting someone to get those two features working really well together, their own self-awareness and investment in the process and their organization to keep it moving forward and make it just a really productive coaching process for themselves.
Coaching is a process more than it is a solution. You’re training your analytical muscles with training wheels (your coach) so that you can use them to solve more problems in the future. But depending on what habits you already have, that may involve a lot of unlearning, so the process will be more difficult for some than others.

Human-Centered Management & The Future of Work

We’ve all heard about coaching before. But what I love about Sam’s approach with Ideamix is that she clearly conveys a very human-centered approach. And when she describes how coaches fit into the organizations she works with, how there has to be buy-in from every stakeholder, including the coach, the person being coached, and the coachee’s manager, what I hear is that organizations need to practice Human-Centered Management.

We all need to be constantly growing in the modern world of work. And we all need support in doing so. It doesn’t necessarily have to be through coaching, but Sam offers an existing blueprint to address one of the key issues that we identified in the State of Work and Career Success 2022:

The leading contributor to career success is that dimension of planning, particularly with the help of mentorship and sponsorship, but only 11% of the people we surveyed have access to some sort of mentorship or sponsorship program.

So if you are one of those individuals where there isn’t availability of these types of resources, coaching can be a path to helping you.

And as a leader, think about how coaching can help your workforce ultimately be more engaged, productive and more likely to stay. In the end, it’s about supporting all of your workforce to not just perform better at their job but also feel more successful and fulfilled.

Definition of Success

“Living a fulfilling life. There is such a unique and idiosyncratic definition for each of us, and for each of us at different life stages... If you can be happy, then you've achieved success in my view.”

Best Work Advice

Remain open to people and experiences.
You'll make some mistakes along the way, but the experience will be rewarding and [offer] a lot of growth for you.

Key Takeaways

All of us are outcomes of our experiences and we all develop pathologies, good and bad, over the course of our lives. Sometimes even a very positive habit can turn into an impediment in a different context. Coaching can help you identify and unlearn things like that.
It's extremely difficult to have an objective and enlightened view of yourself. Sometimes, you need someone to look from outside, someone who has an objective lens into your behaviors and your goals.
The unique, collective set of experiences that you go through will uniquely prepare you for the future of work. You will make mistakes, but you’ll learn from those mistakes as long as you keep moving forward.
We will all have points in our lives, whether it's in the course of our professional development or in navigating personal life transitions, where we will benefit from objective advice.
Coaching is strategic planning in partnership. It is the process of defining a set of goals and then working backwards from there to create a plan, then helping you grow into a person who can achieve those goals through a combination of self-assessment, self-awareness, and habit building.
- Coaching is NOT therapy.
Coaching is most successful when the person being coached is invested in the process and possesses a certain level of self-awareness.
Coaching is a training process more than it is a solution. You’re training your analytical muscles with training wheels (your coach) so that you can use them to solve more problems in the future. But depending on what habits you already have, that may involve a lot of unlearning, so the process will be more difficult for some than others.
There are a lot of factors that go into finding the right fit between you and a coach, such as your area of need and their personality.
For companies struggling with the uncertainty and the directionality of the future of work, coaching also has a valuable role to play in talent recruitment, development and retention such as working to help people come into a new organization and ultimately succeed.