I find the process of networking and engaging with others to be endlessly self illuminating. For much of my career a networking event meant dressing in my one ill-fitting suit, cleaned up to an ideal of what it meant to look professional, sweating my ass off from a cocktail of cortisol, caffeine and generalized anxiety.
There’s a lot at stake when you haven’t quite figured out who you are, and the only template is what you’ve been told you should be.
Of all the formats of humans getting together to interact it’s the most psychologically fascinating to me. As I’ve come to see myself as somewhat of a cultural anthropologist on the nature of how human’s come together in the name of commerce, both the words that are reflected to me and through me tell me very different things than the words that come out of me when I am at a sunday picnic or at a hike with friends.
Sure, I’ve traded my trained corporate nature for one of an embodied, experienced professional - but the part of me that recognizes the environment as a stage is eager to come out to play.
It’s show time!
So what do you do?
It’s probably the most esoteric question to be asked as a new entrepreneur. It was only a few months ago where I’d answer with “I’m fun-employed.” Here was an exhibition of the dinner-party-friendly label I had adopted as I navigated the first point in my 10 year career where I was not actively employed by a higher (corporate) power.
Funemployment was the phase of letting myself sleep in more than I used to, cooking for myself and my wife, spending more time with old friends and colleagues, and replaying Final Fantasy VII.
It was a description of the (privileged) levity I was able to embrace from this first time experience of not having someone to answer to. The answer to what I do was an open canvas.
At some point “funemployment” became “funtrepreneur” - where I now embraced that there was some aura of respect that came with choosing to describe myself as someone who had started building something. Even if what I was building was not immediately clear to me.
That was the era of calling myself a Consultant. I had 10 years of experience of scaling, operating, productivity-izing, transformation-ing, data & AI-ing, and many other word-salad buzzwords.
After the initial “kudos for taking the leap” into entrepreneurship and the sense of self-importance this reflected back, the rest of this was received in two ways.
Most commonly, some very obvious feigned interest expressed as “ahh”s and “ooh yeah?“s with maybe a little bit of the “AI is the future” small talk ping-ponged back and forth.
Less commonly would be someone who had been doing the Consultant dance much longer, who would be quick to ask me some very jargon-heavy questions about the exact type of work I do.
As a new, self-labelled entrepreneur this was a hard question to answer. I could speak in terms of what I had done in my career, but there was no active engagement in front of me.
So the internal stage manager got to work, had a word with the internal playwright, and decided it was time to shift the story.
I’m sick of doing. I’m just being.
It was at one of these networking-y shindigs where through this dance of seeking authentic connection matched to a mode of being that might pay my bills I started to talk about my consulting approach in very esoteric terms.
“Change is a dynamic process of transformation. Not a moment in time, not a list of to-do’s. But a dynamic, complex and repeating process.”
I got quite worked up about this. While the stage manager of my career had very rarely let the Ali who thought in terms of depth psychology, mythological storytelling, and human psychological development out to play at networking events, we were in uncharted waters in the career and we needed new material.
I did what any self-respecting Consultant would do. I made a 50 page slide deck that spoke about my propietary framework. I needed to let the world know that my smarts were smarting, and I didn’t do it like those other suits.
I called it the Evolutionary Development Framework. It was the Hegelian dialect mapped to a Mandala of opposing tensions that any business or founder might face as they moved through the process of development.
I started to flash this up on my screen during coffee-chats. It was clear this was not consulting - it was too abstract. I had no clear offering, it didn’t map to something the people I had met with in terms of what they had seen work and resonate.
That was, until someone pointed out that maybe I wasn’t a consultant, that perhaps I was a coach.
Exit consultant stage right. Enter coach.