And then in Singapore, we all went into lockdown and I was asking God, what does this mean? Do you want me to hold back? And I reflected that I actually took quite a while to actually train and qualify as a coach. And I just felt that, okay, I’ve come this far. Do I want to wait again? And I just decided to do it.
Jenny toh
Today’s episode is with an entrepreneur from Singapore, Jenny Toh.
She is a Certified Life Coach and Founder of River Life Coaching in Singapore. We spoke about how a former lawyer got the inspiration to become a coach, the differences between coaching and counselling, how she marketed herself at the beginning and the challenges she faced as she started her business right in the midst of the pandemic!
Originally from Port Dickson, Malaysia, she was a practising lawyer until she relocated to Singapore. She decided to work as an in-house legal counsel while becoming a mother. Motherhood for her was a steep learning curve, she admitted.
and doing the things to make that change”.
She spent almost 2 years with her first child before she decided to go back to work. It was at work that she first encountered coaching and mentoring as a team lead. She found immense pleasure in mentoring and coaching her own team.
She felt energized each time she coached her team members and she knew it made a difference to the people around her. Despite a good career in the corporate world, she felt something was missing. She had a feeling that she was meant to do something more.
When I coach on these platforms and they are engineers, they are software specialists and they are managers and you know, all, all walks of life and different cultures. And it’s amazing that when I coach them, I can still, you know, help them see that aha moment that, that block, that how to get unblocked from there and how to move forward. So at the end of the day, just that we are all just people and we just need to be heard and understood a lot of times, people may say, I hear you, but they don’t really understand you.
Jenny, a mother of three, said that she didn’t want the what-ifs to haunt her so she took action on her dream. She enrolled in a one-year coaching certification programme offered by an Australian company and trained to become a coach in 2019 while still working full-time.
In her planning, she was going to move into her coaching business in 2020 except that the world literally shut down in March 2020. Bravely, she still launched it in April 2020 and today her business is still thriving. Initially, clients come to her for career coaching but they transition to life coaching once they understand how she is trying to help them.
As a coach, I’m not vested in your life. I just hear what you tell me. And I offer observations from what I hear. And sometimes I hear your beliefs, your mindset on certain things and I can see that that mindset is holding you back. But if I tell you that mindset is holding you back, you won’t do anything because it’s coming from someone else. So you need to, within yourself suddenly realize that, oh, it is me who is blocking myself all along. And how I do that is I ask questions. I get them to think deeper to go there when they don’t want to go there.
Jenny says that once a client has clarity and purpose, change can happen.
She talks about how she marketed herself and how she managed to land coaching jobs through coaching platforms although, in the beginning, she was resistant to the idea. She also explains the differences between coaching and counselling.
Her favourite quote is her own, “Strength comes from the awareness that things need to change and doing the things to make that change” while her favourite book is Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain.
Her proudest accomplishment is in starting River Life Coaching at the peak of the pandemic.