Month: May 2025

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Empower. Inspire. Celebrate. What it means to Mindbeat coaches

28 May 2025

Each year, International Coaching Week invites us to pause, reflect, and shine a light on the powerful impact of professional coaching.

This year’s celebration took place from 12-18 May. The theme was ‘Empower. Inspire. Celebrate.’, capturing the essence of what great coaching is all about: empowering people to step into their potential, inspiring growth through meaningful conversations, and celebrating the wins-big and small-that come from committed personal and professional development.

At its heart, professional coaching is a relationship grounded in trust, curiosity, and a deep belief in what’s possible. It creates space for clarity, courage, and change. For those who coach and those who are coached, it’s often a journey that goes beyond skills and goals. It’s about discovering what truly matters.

To mark International Coaching Week 2025, we invited two Mindbeat coaches to share their own stories of how their practices have evolved and what Empower. Inspire. Celebrate means to them. 

Alex Carabi

My coaching practice has evolved in many ways, but the most important change has been this: I used to see my role as ‘me’ doing the coaching to help the client ‘over there’ to change. 

This meant I invested considerable mental and emotional effort into effecting change. I was placing pressure on myself to meet specific metrics of success, and I relied on the client’s feedback and/or their results to bolster my self-esteem.

Today, I have a radically different stance. Now I see my presence, curiosity, compassion, and intuition as more than enough – they are the whole enchilada. By bringing those qualities to the coaching session, without force, effort, or trying to get anywhere or achieve anything, that’s when the magic happens. 

It’s not ‘me’ doing anything; I am simply a channel and a vehicle for life’s intelligence to move through. I trust that whatever doors are ready to be opened will be opened. Sometimes that will look like an insight or breakthrough; other times it might appear as more stuckness and “difficult” emotions. But I trust that whatever occurs is the process the client needs to undergo at that time. What the “right” path is for anyone is well beyond my pay grade. All I can do is align myself with the client’s process and take it one step at a time, letting that unfolding process lead us where it needs to go. That is a beautiful thing.

Anita Sauvage 

As a coach, the words ‘empower’, ‘inspire’, and ‘celebrate’ hold considerable meaning to me: they are the backbone of any meaningful coaching relationship, where people feel valued and supported, and collaboration can flow.

Empowering the people I coach starts with believing in them and helping them to realise their true potential. As a coach, your role is to offer clients the tools and the encouragement to face challenges with resilience, positive attitude and courage, to discover their unique talents, to learn – without judgment – from setbacks and successes, and to achieve their goals.

Inspiring my clients is about holding a mirror in front of them and building a relationship built on authenticity and trust. It’s a collaboration. When you show genuine curiosity and interest about their aspirations, and connect on a human level, it brings a sense of possibilities. Ultimately, it will make them realise that their journey is one of growth.

Celebrating is about creating moments of recognition that acknowledge the value of each client’s journey. As a coach, I believe in celebrating achievements, not just as outcomes but as reflections of determination, effort and willingness to be challenged. Even a simple heartfelt ‘thank-you’ can go a long way and remind them (and me) that growth is a true gift.

So yes, I firmly believe that when you “empower, inspire, and celebrate”, you create a safe space, ideal for self-motivation and commitment. If you apply these values, your clients are more likely to transform challenges into opportunities, questions into breakthroughs, and aspirations into successes. What can be more rewarding for a coach?

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The Hidden Superpower of Performance: Coaching from the Inside-Out

27 May 2025

As leaders, it’s often tempting to search for the next big tool or framework to drive or accelerate performance. But what if the real ‘unlock’ isn’t a new system or process – it’s a shift in how we see people?

The Performance Gap You’re Not Seeing

A saying we’ve heard from the world of Social Workers is one that applies far beyond their field: “All behaviour makes sense with enough information.”  Often, understanding a child’s home life, cultural background and personality characteristics helps explain their behaviour in the classroom.

The same is true in the workplace. With enough context, we can start to understand why a colleague, or even a client, supplier or stakeholder becomes difficult to manage. We can better understand why someone on the team is underperforming or why a peer resists collaboration.

As organisations grow, confidence in leadership often declines. There’s a perception that individual needs can’t be met at scale, and that with an increase in the number of people and the number of processes, there is an associated decrease in the ‘relational closeness’ between people, and especially between individual and their line manager or leader. 

We have some views on how you strengthen your relationships and your ability to coach for performance, not just with your direct reports or within your team – but with your clients and across your relationships. 

What is Inside-Out Coaching?

At Mindbeat, we believe that real transformation starts from within and begins with making sense of behaviour and understanding the Psychology of the person you’re working with. It’s something we see time and again in the companies we support: leaders who embrace Inside-Out Coaching don’t just grow faster, they lead better.

Inside-out coaching means going beneath the surface of behaviour to understand the internal narratives that shape it. It’s about:

1) Unlocking potential

2) Surfacing strengths and self-limiting beliefs

3) Shifting how leaders think before they act

It’s a mindset-first approach to performance, and it works.

Why It Works

One of the best things about building Mindbeat as a digital-first approach to coaching is that we can measure results and ROI in a way that was out of reach in the pre-digital days of coaching. 

Research across Mindbeat coaching programmes shows that high-quality coaching can drive up to 30% year-on-year revenue growth and improve critical leadership and soft-skill behaviours correlated with performance by 42%. One global Financial Services client using Mindbeat’s framework saw individuals on Mindbeat’s coaching programme outperform peers in a control group by 10% in year-on-year revenue.  

More importantly, one of the biggest psychological shifts our participants speak about is a shift in better understanding themselves, their Psychology, and how to better unlock their own performance and that of their teams. This helps create greater confidence, clarity and resilience to lead through complexity and to manage one’s day-to-day challenges.

Building a Culture of Inside-Out Coaching

To truly embed this approach, leaders need to know why they’re on a development journey. It’s not only about improving team performance, it’s also about becoming the best version of themselves.

At Mindbeat, our coaches ask questions designed to probe deeper, uncover and discover patterns of thinking, psychological drivers of behaviour, and then help individuals navigate that insight to improve their performance and lead more effectively.

This can be especially useful in high-pressure transformation contexts. For example, in Private Equity-backed portfolio companies or scale-ups, where the stakes and expectations are high, pressure can create leadership paralysis. By helping leaders explore their internal mindset, coaching builds the confidence to act and the courage to take others with them.

The goal is simple: build capability, not dependency. Grow leaders who can self-coach and unlock potential in others.

Inside-Out Coaching With Clients To Unlock Greater Performance

Inside-out coaching also holds incredible potential to improve and maximise relationships with clients and customers.  This has been found to work best when:

– You find a way to connect authentically as a trusted advisor with your client

– You are able to be curious, and ask strategic questions that get to the root of what’s in their mind, helping you to better understand their drivers, needs and fears

– When your client feels guided, understood and informed – not judged or pressurised to buy your product or service

Questions to Reflect On

1) Do your coaching conversations explore mindsets, not just behaviours?

2) Are you building a culture where questioning, reflecting and being challenged is welcome and growth is expected?

3) What inside-out coaching questions can you ask to unlock greater insight and to influence better performance, with colleagues and clients?

If not, it might be time to reflect on where and how you can shift your focus. When we coach from the inside-out, we don’t just drive performance. We build the kind of leadership that transforms teams, strengthens retention and creates lasting impact with colleagues and clients.

Curious how Mindbeat helps companies embed Inside-Out Coaching at scale?
We’d love to chat — drop us a line at [email protected]