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Sam
Daley-Harris
PRESIDENT, MICROCREDIT
SUMMIT
Please
tell us about your organization.
I am involved
with several organizations. RESULTS is a citizen lobby group whose purpose
is to create the political will to end hunger. RESULTS Educational Fund is
not a lobby group, so it does the same thing through more educational means.
And the Microcredit Summit Campaign is a project of the RESULTS Educational
Fund. Its goal is to ensure that 100 million of the world’s poorest families,
especially the women, are receiving credit for self-employment and other financial
and business services by the year 2005.
How long have you
been with your present employer and what is your function?
I have been with RESULTS for 20 years. I am actually a volunteer president.
I work a bit with the current executive director, maybe an hour a week. I mostly
work with RESULTS Educational Fund. I direct its major project, which is the
Microcredit Summit Campaign.
When
and how did you first become aware of Life Coaching?
It was a little over five years ago in conversations with Dave Ellis about our
work that I learned about Life Coaching.
When
did you become a Brande Foundation Life Coaching client?
I have been a Brande Foundation Life Coaching client for a little over five
years.
You’re
obviously a very successful and accomplished person. What prompted you to use
Life Coaching?
I have this habit of getting myself into things I don’t know how to do.
Anyone who’s ever involved in doing things like that needs help and a coach.
For example, I have degrees in music and yet I founded a citizen lobby group
on ending world hunger. The connections are very limited. In the scheme of my
life, I’ve made various leaps like that. I often need to gain fresh insight
on how to make a project happen and how to make it sustain itself and be successful.
How
has Life Coaching affected your personal relationships?
Five years ago when I began Life Coaching I was not married. I had never been
married. I was in my late forties and had no children. I never owned a house
and I worked way too much. Now, the balance in my personal and professional
life has been altered completely. I’m married, I have a gorgeous two-year-old
son and we live on Capital Hill in a wonderful house that we purchased. Things
in my personal life are different now in a very extraordinary kind of unpredictable
way.
Professionally,
how has Life Coaching affected your performance and productivity?
Just over five years ago, after having a string of experiences, none of which
truly prepared me for what I was about to get into, Life Coaching appeared in
my life. At that point I had taken on organizing the Microcredit Summit. A couple
of years later, in February 1997, nearly 3000 people gathered from 137 countries.
They included queens, heads of state, and microentrepreneurs from poor villages
around the world. They came to Washington [DC] to launch a global campaign to
reach 100 million of the world’s poorest women with microcredit. There
was nothing much in my history that had prepared me to organize such a meeting
and to organize it in such a way that people were inspired and moved very deeply.
It was really through my weekly work with my Life Coach that I could see my
way through to do this thing that I’d never done before. I’d never
organized anything that had more than 300 people in the room and now there were
almost 3000 people in the room. I’d never organized anything that had more
than six or seven countries represented and now 137 countries were represented.
I took on areas that I’d never taken on before and had never perceived
myself doing. But I was passionate enough about the goal that I was a great
candidate. My Life Coaching got me through.
The
coach/client relationship in Life Coaching sometimes involves very open, candid,
honest communication about very sensitive subjects. How comfortable are you
with divulging confidential information to your coach?
Sometimes I’m not very comfortable because I’m not necessarily an
easily divulging kind of guy. But I trust my coach completely in terms of the
confidentiality. I often hesitate for an instant but then I realize it has nothing
to do with confidentiality. It’s just more a kind
of shyness.
Is
there any one experience or change in your life that stands out and that you
feel is directly attributed to Life Coaching?
I’ve already talked about the Microcredit Summit and there were others.
The decade of the 1990’s was the decade of UN Summits. The possibility
of summit fatigue was very real and yet we were not only able to launch something
that was powerful but we were also able to launch a process that gave us the
opportunity for real follow through. My life coach guided me through my blind
spots. He helped me through the areas where I was actually ill-prepared to
succeed. He helped me along the path that allowed me to succeed. It was an
awesome experience.
If
I were a close friend of yours contemplating Life Coaching, what would you
say to me to convince me of its merits?
Most people spend more time thinking about what movie they’re going to
see or what video they’re going to rent than they do thinking about the
direction of their lives. I think this is a little backwards. Life Coaching
is something that you deserve to really give yourself. If you are not interested
in expressing your greatness, you might not need a coach very much.
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