Successful Maori women are getting international life-coaching qualifications to go back to their communities and help other women in business. The Hinepreneurs are part of a plan to get more indigenous women around the world setting up businesses for themselves.
Read an edited excerpt from the interview below:
Tell us about this coaching qualification that they get. What is the programme?
It’s the International Coaching Federation and so, first off it is requiring 60 hours of face to face training which we did collectively in our own group and then from there we have to develop 100 hours of coaching. There are certain rules to that as well. Then we have to do an online test, to make sure that we have understood the core responsibilities of being a coach. The coaching is not necessarily mentoring. It is really provoking conversations, it’s really about creating awareness and it’s around allowing a client themselves to find their own potentials and solutions and strategies to any particular issue they may have.
What are some of the difficulties facing some of the women who come to you?
One of the key ones is support. Where to find that support, where to find like-minded people to provide that support. Another particular one is in relation to understanding the key fundamentals of business. An idea is always an idea, but until you put it into practice or go through the mechanisms to make sure that it’s a really good idea… for example, one of our primary gaps that we found was financial capability. Through our research we realised that a large number of our clients lack financial capability skills.
Also, not only professionally, but also personally. Our coaches can come along and ask the key questions around why we have those gaps. What are our own behaviours around money? It’s key because it’s what is going on in our inner mind. It’s our subconscious that really holds us back. So it’s really about finding solutions within yourself to move forward.
So it’s not necessarily even business-specific, it’s more about the psychology of a performance in some ways, or the psychology of goal-making or pursuing goals, is that the kind of thing that we’re talking about?
Absolutely. It is anything that is holding a person back. That can be any number of things. It could be, I haven’t got enough hours in the day, what am I going to do with my children this afternoon? Where’s the next client coming from? There are so many constraints that hold us back.
What about the more personal self-limiting behaviours that people can fall into as well?
Absolutely. You said limited behaviours, but limited beliefs is one of the worst things that holds us back. It really goes back to what happened to us as a child. Those things from back there that we keep over compensating for what happened to us. But actually what we have to do is recognise what happened. Acknowledge it, and then move forward. But not hide it. We tend to leave it there and then try to forget about it, but actually you just have to go back, acknowledge that it happened, what do we see instead of that and then go back to where we want to go.
