Marcia Reynolds Quotes

People need to feel seen, heard, and valued to have the desire to grow.

Coaching should be a process of inquiry, not a series of questions.

You don’t empower people by giving them tasks and homework. Personal power comes from within, when people feel seen, cared about, and respected.

You don’t have to have all the answers. You are a good coach if you share what you hear and see others express with no attachment to being right.

Coaching mastery isn’t just about improving skills; mastery also requires that you quickly catch internal disruptions and shift back to being fully present with your clients.

No one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone.

The Discomfort Zone is the moment of uncertainty when people are most open to learning.

Effective leaders help others think more broadly for themselves.

A common mistake leaders make is to recap the steps the person is going to take instead of letting the person do it.

The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn’t gold.

we make up what we believe to be true based on our education, past experiences, and our hopes for what will transpire in the future.

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There isn’t one right way to coach; coaching is a spontaneous process between the coach and client.

As long as the question furthers the conversation, it shouldn’t matter how it is structured.

If it’s a choice between a difficult truth and a simple lie, people will take the lie every time.”1 The truth often hurts before it sets you free.

Reflections followed by questions prompt us to stop and question our thinking and behaviors. This disruption initiates a shift in how we see ourselves and the world, or at least how we are framing a dilemma. We see a new way forward with a stronger commitment to taking action than if we were told what we should do by an expert.

Choose to be the master of your mind, not the victim of your reactions.

Being a transformational leader increases productivity and bottom line results whether people decide to stay or go because the motivation to succeed is internally based on individual growth not externally based on organizational goals.

A coaching session can be compared to the creative process of freestyle rap. Neuroscientists at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders scanned the brains of twelve professional rappers with an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine. The scientists discovered that although the brain’s executive functions were active at the start and end of a song, during freestyle, the parts of the brain responsible for self-monitoring, critiquing, and editing were deactivated. In this context, the researchers explained that the rappers were “freed from the conventional constraints of supervisory attention and executive control,” so sudden insights could easily emerge.1 In other words, the rappers used the executive functions of their cognitive brains as they started rapping to deliberately set the intention of the composition up front. Once they had a sense of where they were going, they switched off their inner critic and analyzer. This allowed for more activity in the inner brain, where the eruption of new ideas—creativity—takes place. As they moved to closing out the song, their cognitive brains came back online to provide a consciously designed ending to the composition.