Meet My Client: Toi Valentine

[sketch by me]

Toi and I have been working together off and on for over five years. Mostly during times of big transitions in her life. It’s been super cool to watch her go for it.

Toi! Hi! Tell us about yourself. 

I’m Toi Valentine. I’m a designer and strategist, I’ve been working in design consulting for years but I just started my own company! It's called MeTime. We connect parents to short term drop off childcare. It’s going great. I’m doing so many things I’ve never done before. 

That is so cool! What are you learning? 

I feel like I have the grit and tenacity to roll up my sleeves to get shit done. At IDEO, where I worked before starting MeTime, I was given validation that I could do hard things. Now I HAVE to do those things. It feels pretty good! Ownership — it’s funny how natural it feels, it’s funny how I fast I adapted to it. I really thrived as a design consultant when I had moments to be heads down and alone, when I had thinking time. It feels natural to set my own schedule, to hold myself to high standards. At IDEO, I had a team and support, now it’s just me and my business partner. It’s scary. In a good way. 

Well, I have seen you do many scary things. I know you are going to give this your all! What are some things that are helping you right now? 

Having you remind me that I’m awesome. And once a week, my business partner and I celebrate what we achieved each week. We call it wine o’clock — we walk through what our goals are each week. I wanted someone else to hold me accountable. Now it’s a habit and ritual that’s really powerful. 

You and I actually began our coaching relationship before I became a coach. The design firm we both worked at here in San Francisco, Adaptive Path, didn’t have a typical management structure. Instead of reporting to a manager, each employee chose a co-worker to be their advocate. You chose me to be yours. We met regularly to talk about how things were going for you, to help you identify and track goals, to get help or guidance on something you were grappling with, to bring other people into tough conversations if needed. We were cooking along and as the company grew, the advocacy program was discontinued and a more traditional reporting structure was introduced. I was like, hey! you are taking away the best part of my job! And that’s when I knew I wanted to keep doing something like that more formally. You were one of my practice clients during my coach training and then when I left the design firm and opened my practice, you were my first paying client. We’ve worked together on and off ever since. So, thank you! You were an integral part of me learning that I wanted to do this kind of work for a living. 

Thinking of the whole experience of working with a coach, what do you think the value of this process is? 

For me, the biggest value has been during times of transition. Which I think speaks to why we’ve had stretches of heavy working together time, then we take a break, and then I come back. I think coaching helps process the anxiety and facilitate the logistics that need to happen for me to make major changes in my life. So, if I look back at the periods we’ve worked together, all of them have been around changing jobs, moving, relationship stuff, or my most recent transition — leaving my job and starting my own company. I think there's a lot of doubt when you’re going through a change, working with you helped to bring out more confidence in myself and my skills to make that change happen. And you also cheer me on. With change, I am usually thinking about what’s my family going to think of me making taking this huge risk? What’s my employer going to say, my friends? You’re someone who keeps me true to what I really care about and reminds me why I’m doing this. Having someone to cheer you on is really helpful. 

When you think about all the conversations we’ve had, all the coaching homework you’ve done, and the experiments you’ve run in your life — something I’m real big on as a coach — what are some things you’ve absorbed and still think about or rely on? 

There are three things that you introduced to me early on that I have used consistently since then. First is the what’s here now? prompt. Just the habit of checking in with myself and asking what’s here now? in the moment versus letting whatever it is I’m experiencing roll up and up and get bigger and become this massive, overwhelming snowball...having a moment to check myself before that can happen is hugely helpful. It means I’m responding instead of reacting. 

Second is the values exercise. I have always been aware of what matters to me, but I had never written it down. The act of writing down my values and putting them into statements allowed me to use them in a way where I could defend and understand why I was feeling a certain way. There are some moments where I feel guilty about having a feeling, or I beat myself up about it, I can check in with my values and say — nope, I’m following what’s true to me and that’s the way it is. 

Third is the saboteurs (the inner critic). That was probably the one that had the biggest impact on me when I learned about it. It was really helpful to see when and how I was holding myself back in certain scenarios and to be able to name the forces and stories that were limiting me and to understand where they come from. Noticing and naming them made them more understandable, instead of them just being these big, invisible forces in my life. It makes them somehow not just my fault and more manageable. I have been able to use this concept when I’m mentoring people. And when I was leading design teams, that was something I could bring up, like, look, even our team can have saboteurs. 

Also this concept of giving myself time in coaching to reflect on everything in a non-biased way, where I’m not judging myself has been a big deal. Because like 99% of the time when I tell myself I’m not judging something, I am. Something about coaching, when you explain it to someone who is not in those moments, an outsider, it feels more like I’m just giving you the facts, and I’m pushing away my emotional connection to them. But when I tell you, Pam, about something, I can connect to the emotion in it without judgment. So that’s something I continue, like every time I’m talking to someone in a difficult conversation, I think about it like it’s a coaching conversation, which some friends have not enjoyed. Ha!

You have referred a lot of people to me over the years. What makes you refer people to coaching? What makes you an advocate for this kind of work? 

Omg I should be your agent! I notice people complaining about the same things over and over. I realized it wasn’t actionable, my friends are not accountable to me. [Laughing]...It sounds like I was sick of my friends. It’s not that, but it’s like, when I felt like I didn’t have advice, I would refer people to you. I strongly believe someone should have some kind of support in their life. Coaching feels really approachable. 

There are things you do, best practices, that if I had never known about coaching, I would never think you actually treat it as this relationship building service. My background is in designing services, and the more we’ve coached together, the more I view what you do as a service. I mean, I’ve even asked you to be a research participant for me on some of my design projects — the service of coaching is an amazing analog for other services. So not only have I learned as a client of coaching, I’ve also learned as someone who designs experiences. 

You have a formal process — it’s like dating in the beginning — you’re trying to understand what a person is looking for, they’re trying to understand what you offer — it’s just like, let’s just get to know each other, there’s no commitment yet. But, if we’re going to do this, we have to commit to one another. We’re not messing around here. I think that I appreciated that because to me you’re not selling to people. That’s something I could see people being scared of when they start coaching, feeling like, OMG, I’m going to feel like I have to talk to her for the rest of my life, she’s going to sell me more sessions! It’s not like that at all. It’s really tailored. You do a really good job of understanding if you’re the right fit for someone and if you can give them what they need right now. I send people to you who I know, after following up with them, that you gave them some recommendations for other coaches. Maybe what they were looking for wasn’t what you do — maybe they needed a career coach or a leadership coach or something, so I appreciate that you do that. When I recommend people to you it doesn’t feel like I’m pitching a sale. It feels like a people-driven experience. 

That’s a cool way to put it, I love that! 

As a coach I am always looking for ways that my clients are transforming… what’s the transformation that’s happening in this session? or in this client, in general? When you think of when we began and where you are now, what’s the transformation that’s happened for you? What are the ways you’ve changed?

The obvious one, is that I’ve been talking to you about feeling ownership over my life since 2014. It’s something that has come up a lot, but I stayed in design consulting because that felt safe. The transition to starting my own business was the hardest and years in the making, but everything felt like it was falling into place when I decided to do it. You supported me in feeling confident in this so I didn’t feel regrets after. Or during. 

I’m really good at blaming and criticizing myself for things that are out of my control. I still have a long way to go, but how I talk to and think about myself has changed. I come with more empathy and self-compassion for myself, which is so sad because it’s part of my job to empathize with other people 60 hours a week. Now it’s more of a natural process for me than it used to be. 

Hooray! 

Plus, I learned how to say no! That was something I never knew how to do before working with you. And the moment I started saying no to things, my life became much richer, emotionally. 

Well, it has been so cool to be with you and watch you over the years. We’ll talk about something you’re wanting, and even if it was five years ago, all along you’ve been stepping toward making it real. It kind of doesn’t matter how long it took, right? You did it when you were ready. You’ve been thinking about it and contemplating it and then when the opportunity came, you’re like I’m taking the leap, I’m doing it. It’s been really cool to see all the ways you have kicked ass and become kinder to yourself. I’m your biggest fan, Toi! 

I sometimes tell people that. Pam seems to love everything I do! Anytime I’m concerned about something or doubt myself I just have to share it with you. 

Keep it coming, lady! 

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This originally appeared in my Summer 2019 newsletter. To get this delivered directly to your inbox, sign up at pamdaghlian.com/newsletter. And psssst! If we have worked together and you want to have a conversation that ends up in my newsletter, let me know!