What’s Beneath the Surface: How Curiosity and Courage Shape Leaders

How Coaching Shaped My Leadership Journey

If you had met me early in my career, you would have found someone committed to creating and building, originally through fashion design, and eventually through people. A leadership role in retail became the unexpected gateway into the work that would define my career: developing talent, strengthening leadership capability, and helping organizations bring out the best in their people.

Very early on, I had a leader who helped me see the impact of the “people side” of business. Although I was a Regional Retail Sales Manager, I found myself drawn to coaching, developing others, and building environments where people could succeed.

That clarity led me back to post-secondary school to obtain an education in human resources and, shortly after, into my first HR leadership role covering Western Canada. I was still in my twenties, responsible for the human resources in two-hundred stores across four provinces, and it was in that role that I was formally introduced to coaching, long before it became widely recognized as a core leadership skill.

Discovering Coaching as a Leadership Discipline

Our Chief Human Resources Officer had implemented an internal coaching program, and through that experience I learned something foundational: leaders achieve better outcomes when they create the conditions for others to think, decide, and act for themselves.

This “coach approach” has been the throughline in every chapter of my career.

That early exposure to coaching reshaped how I thought about leadership and strengthened my commitment to developing others. As I continued to move through my career, that philosophy became the foundation for the work I would lead at a broader scale.

Later, as AVP of Learning and Development, Leadership and Inclusion for a financial institution, I led the design of multi-level leadership programs, from emerging to senior leaders and partnered with the CHRO on succession planning for key roles.

During that time, I engaged The Humphrey Group and incorporated their leadership sessions into my programs. Their communication models were simple, practical, and immediately usable and I watched leaders transform their presence in real time. Years later, when I stepped into consulting, I joined The Humphrey Group team to bring that impact to a wider range of organizations.

Today, as a coach and consultant, I support leaders who want to strengthen their impact, navigate complexity, and lead with clarity and confidence.

What Coaching Is and What It Isn’t

Coaching is not about providing answers. It’s about expanding awareness so that individuals can make intentional, aligned decisions.

Over the years, I’ve learned that:

• Most people underestimate their capability.
• What holds them back often sits “below the line of visibility.” These are the beliefs, assumptions, and old stories that quietly shape behaviour.
• Advice can solve a moment, but curiosity transforms a mindset. When leaders feel safe to explore what’s beneath the surface, they discover new possibilities and build the confidence to act.

Whether in a coaching session or a leadership workshop, I watch closely for the cues — the small language patterns, the shift in posture, the hesitation before someone responds. These moments often reveal more than the content itself. My role is to help leaders explore what’s beneath that moment so they can decide what they want to do with it.

The Stretch Zone: Where Real Development Lives

Growth rarely happens within familiar patterns. It requires stepping outside the “square” of your current habits and comfort, and into a space where new behaviours can take root. This is where courage joins curiosity. The courage to tolerate discomfort and stay in the unfamiliar a little longer, trusting that growth is happening even when it feels uncertain. Sometimes leaders tend to step out, briefly, because discomfort feels unsafe.

Coaching helps them stay in that stretch long enough for new behaviours to take hold. One senior leader I worked with had begun to contract her presence after being passed over for roles she believed she was ready for. Together we examined her strengths, the internal narrative she had built, and the moments that triggered self-doubt.

Through small, intentional behaviour shifts, she began showing up differently and within months, others noticed the change. Her influence grew because she reclaimed it, not because anyone handed it to her.

Values, Alignment, and When Letting Go Is the Right Move

Sometimes coaching reawakens connection to an organization. Other times, it reveals a deeper truth: the leader’s values and the organization’s values no longer align. This misalignment often shows up first as frustration, disengagement, or a sense that something is “off.”

When leaders understand the values gap clearly, they can make informed decisions — whether that means recommitting, reshaping their role, or choosing to move on. All are acts of leadership.

Looking Below the Line

Leadership growth doesn’t begin with tactics; it begins with awareness. When leaders understand what sits beneath the surface — the assumptions, the stories, the patterns that influence how they show up — everything changes.

This is the core of the work I do at The Humphrey Group and in my own coaching and HR consulting practice: helping leaders bring clarity to their internal landscape so they can communicate with intention, align their actions with their values, and lead with a presence that others can trust.

Confidence, influence, and authentic leadership don’t come from becoming someone new. They emerge when leaders uncover what’s already there beneath the surface and choose to lead from that place.

In many ways, I’m still creating and building, just in a different form. What began as an interest in clothing design evolved into a career dedicated to developing people, strengthening leadership, and helping others uncover what sits beneath the surface of their own potential.

What might become possible for you if you looked beneath the surface of your own leadership?

Dive Deeper

Coaching and mentorship are closely connected: both support growth through reflection, relationship, and practice. Read our blog, .Mentorship at The Humphrey Group: Growing Leaders from Within here.