"When I left my corporate career after 24 years at Intel, my LinkedIn profile went blank overnight; the big brand name that was shielding me for many years was there no more. No product launches to repost, no leadership announcements, no corporate news cycle to amplify as if you are part of it. Nobody talks about the impact of this silence and loss of identity as part of career transition, and it is tough on professionals who have been following this template for years.

So I started pouring my random thoughts onto my LinkedIn page instead: a gravel race in Malaysia I signed up for, despite being terrified of stray dogs in Malaysian rural villages – plot twist: I completed it and it was fun! A calligraphy and mandala art workshop that was the first thing in years that made me slow down, breathe, and produce something with my bare hands. An eco-friendly tour and what is the motto of the company (helping communities in rural Philippines to create jobs and provide English classes) – I jumped on the tour while doing backpacking in Asia in my late 40s and it was so cool! The AI workshop for an underprivileged community in Cambodia that I designed from scratch, built the materials, and delivered on my own – without any product or marketing team behind me.

And people started showing up in my DMs asking - Natalia, what is that life outside of corporate? How do I get there if I want to follow the same way? - and it made me think that I could turn it into a calling. I built a solution - Unscript IKIGAI™ - that helps people find ideas around their meaning and purpose in the stage of life they are in, and that was a natural breakthrough to coaching.

One thing that GMC training (and working with Celine Fontaine) taught me was that you do not need a certification to be a coach. You, of course, need to know the ethics, the guardrails, the core competences, but in the end it comes down to two things: be curious and give your presence.

I use it everywhere now: in peer coaching to get through the discomfort of doing it for the first time, because coaching is muscle memory in the end - it's just that the muscle is your empathy and your curiosity. I use it in my fractional sales work, where I've learned that the best sales meeting is never the one where I'm pitching - it's the one where I ask questions and give space.

If you want to be visible as a coach, my only advice is: start with something. Anything. No client will find you while you are waiting to feel ready - you have to be out there, uncomfortable, alone with your thoughts, letting the world look at you and react to what you say.

I am 60 GMC training hours in, on the path to ICF ACC, and 25% through my coaching hours. Come to the session if you're done with "I'm fine" as a full answer to how to get yourself out in the wild wild west of LinkedIn." - Natalia Poliakova  

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