Ben Black | Founder & Physiotherapist

Lexington Health

Industry: Healthcare

Business Size: 5 – 10 employees

The Challenge: Ben was struggling to find balance. Working 60/70-hour weeks running the business he founded 10-years ago, he wanted to gain time back. Time to spend with his growing family, time to also explore new ideas to help the business grow.

Scope of work:

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Executive Cowekljfaching
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Leadership Diagnostics
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Business Planning & Support
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As a small business owner working an average of sixty hours per week, I felt no end in sight.

I was struggling to prioritise and structure my thinking effectively, resulting in a significant amount of time being channeled towards work, taking me further away from the goals I had for my family and myself. I needed to find a way to ‘get time back’ so that I could be more available and present with my family. To find a way to improve how and where I focused my attention, to more effectively prioritise where I spent my time as well as become a better leader for my team while continuing to grow the business in alignment with my hopes and aspirations for the future.

I had been exploring the idea of engaging a leadership coach to help me for some time, though didn’t know who or where to go to get started. I was determined to make a change to the way I had been operating for the last 10-years, breaking some habits that were no longer serving me, while creating new ways of working.

So I began working with Gayle
from Thriving Minds Global.

We spent our initial coaching calls getting super clear on what it was, exactly, that I wanted to focus on and the reasons why these goals mattered most. This has always been a challenge for me as I tend to have many ideas of how I can improve, do things better, or differently however never felt I had the time, space, and sometimes processes to leverage, to bring them to the forefront. Gayle didn’t just help me put goals on a page, she helped me tapped into why these goals are important to me, what achieving them would mean for my family and I, and what would be the risk if I didn’t invest the time and energy into making these changes now.

One activity Gayle invited me to do as part of our goal setting journey, was to write a celebration speech for my future retirement party. I was asked to think ahead into the future, 10-15 years out, and to imagine I was sharing my speech with my closest family and friends. At first, I didn’t really know what to expect from this exercise though after spending time embracing the task at hand, I found myself writing a speech that had themes of regret and apology, as well as gratitude and praise. But it was the regret and apologies that stood out to me. I knew that if I didn’t spend the time now making changes to the way I work and show up at home, then I will be apologising to my family, my friends and myself when I retire.

“This exercise really helped crystallise the ultimate motivation behind why I wanted to achieve my goals and became the primary thread in all of our future coaching sessions.”

Since then, Gayle and I have been meeting monthly for almost a year which has been hugely rewarding both personally and professionally.

Gayle provides support and helps me realise the positives of what I am already doing and brings awareness and focus into other areas I may have deficiencies in so these too can be addressed. What has been most helpful is being able to compartmentalize each of my goals so I can focus on one at a time, rather than being distracted by all the other noise that exists when you are running your own business and leading a team. Gayle further helps with reinforcing strategies towards the achievement of my goals with follow up emails and shares other material along the way to further help me grow as a leader.

I feel I’ve made significant progress since we began our sessions and can successfully say I have been able to ‘get time back’, which I am now spending at home with my family.

I can see the business is working more efficiently thanks to the systems and processes the team and I are starting to embed and I don’t feel I need to look so far forward, worrying less about the future and more so trying to enjoy the journey along the way.

My advice for anyone looking to engage a Coach, whether you are a small business owner or in a leadership position within a company, is to connect with Gayle from Thriving Minds Global. Gayle has taught me that it is okay to be vulnerable and open to learning and growing, and to believe that anything is possible.

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