Alex Counts
PRESIDENT AND CEO, GRAMEEN FOUNDATION USA

Please tell us about your organization.
The Grameen Foundation USA’s mission is to assist people who live in abject poverty by making microcredit available to them.

How long have you been with your present employer and what is your function at your job?
I’ve been with the foundation since it was established a little more than three years ago. My responsibilities are to develop and implement a strategic plan for using the resources of our partner organization in Bangladesh to reduce poverty both in the inner-city neighborhoods of the United States and in developing countries. We use microcredit as our primary tool.

When and how did you first become aware of Life Coaching?
I became aware of it when a friend and professional colleague of mine told me about his experience of Life Coaching and specifically about his relationship with Dave Ellis of The Brande Foundation. It seemed to be working very well for him and he seemed to be getting a lot out of it. I asked if it would be possible to benefit from that myself and fortunately it was. So, that is really how it started.

What prompted you to use Life Coaching?
I had been entrusted with the very big project of bringing the Grameen Bank and its work to the United States. It was by far a bigger project than I had ever been entrusted with before. I knew I had a lot of the skills that I needed but not all of the skills to both succeed in my work and also enjoy myself. I want to really take in all of my experiences in life so that when I retire I’ll remember not only a time of accomplishment but also a time of enjoyment. I felt that to take advantage of this time in my life and to have a trusted and skilled person to be my confidante would be very valuable.

Have your personal relationships been affected, and if so, how?
Well my relationship with my wife has been affected very positively from the perspective of being free of the worry of work much more so than at any other time in my life. So, she gets her husband, not her husband feeling guilty or worried or being a martyr about work. And we’ve also taken some time to think strategically about how we want our marriage to unfold. We’ve taken time out to plan the rest of our lives together which was an outgrowth of the Life Coaching. Now we’re implementing that plan. That was something we never thought of before but once we did it, we saw the value of it. I’d say the quality of our marriage is ten times better than it was three years ago.

Professionally, how has Life Coaching affected your performance and productivity?
One thing I realized through Life Coaching is that I developed some habits, some ways of working, which didn’t serve me or my colleagues very well. Life Coaching helped me develop new habits. And one in particular was the way I dealt with times when things go wrong. In the past, I would become angry and blame my colleagues and myself. When I really looked at it with my Life Coach, I realized that dealing with mistakes that way was not very productive. So, I developed some new habits and some new techniques about dealing with mistakes. I also began to plan more long range about where I wanted my organization to go. Whereas in our first year, we kind of bounced from project to project, now we have a very clear five-year strategic plan that has been adopted by our board of directors. And now I have ideas about ten and twenty year plans. I think the other area that really has made a difference is that I’ve seen the value of paying high attention to detail. There are funding agencies that have given us, in some cases, a million dollars or more and the thing that has convinced them to do so was just our attention to small details in our relationships. In the past I didn’t have the same priority about details as I do after I talked about it with my Life Coach.

The coach/client relationship in Life Coaching sometimes involves very open, candid and honest communication about very sensitive subjects. How comfortable are you with divulging confidential information to your coach?
Well, I tell my coach everything and anything whenever I feel that sharing with him would have the chance of improving the quality of my life. I find my Life Coach to be incredibly trustworthy and someone who can listen to very unusual points of view and situations that might put me in a kind of bad light. He listens to them without any sense of judgment or blame. I know that what I say will never be shared with anyone else. I also appreciate the ability of my Life Coach to not make me feel in any way uneasy about sharing very personal or professional information. I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying some of those things to anyone else.

Is there any one experience or change in your life that stands out that you feel is directly related to Life Coaching?
The one change that has been the most dramatic for me, and I think for my colleagues and my wife as well, is that I have slowed way down. I actually get more accomplished than I used to. I really hear what people are saying to me, and even sometimes what they are not saying to me, and that has made a tremendous difference. I discovered how rapidly I went through life without taking the time to really hear people and to converse with people. At a deep level, my Life Coach gave me some very gentle feedback, and it’s been a progressive kind of improvement in my ability to listen and to take time with people. I have found that my colleagues and my wife are so much more satisfied with the time they spend with me and the projects that they work on with me. I’ve never felt so relaxed in my professional life than I have in the last two years, and yet, I’ve had more responsibility than I ever had before. That is very directly related to the time that I spend with my Life Coach.

If I were a close friend of yours contemplating Life Coaching, what would you say to me to convince me of its merits?
I would say that by working with a skilled and well trained Life Coach you can see the kind of invisible things that trip you up, that make your life less effective and less enjoyable. Life Coaching is a very simple, non-threatening process of revealing those barriers or obstacles that we’ve put in our way and that we’ve never had any knowledge of. It’s a way to have more fun in life and get more done in life. My Life Coach is someone who not only has a special relationship with me, but someone who has become one of my closest friends. So I would say I can’t think of anything that has cost me less and benefited me more in my entire professional life.