Steph Lowe / Executive Coach
Coaches @ VCET Series
Steph Lowe is an executive coach in Vergennes, Vermont. Prior to coaching, she worked for 30 years in HR, where she specialized in talent development and organizational culture. In this Q&A, Steph explains how she got involved in coaching, how her style is unique, and how coaching can accelerate your thinking. She also shares her favorite recent memory from VCET and talks about her orchard in Vergennes.
Blaise: Steph! Talk to me about the career that prepared you for coaching.
Steph: I studied industrial labor relations at Cornell and worked in Human Resources for 30 years. I started in compensation and worked my way through all the HR specialties, but ultimately landed in talent development. I was super fortunate to spend a good chunk of my career working for Seventh Generation in Vermont, joining them when they were still small. They prioritized employee development and organizational culture, and I really benefited from that, because they created an in-house focus for me. Ironically, there’s a lot of things about HR that aren’t in any way applicable or even helpful when it comes to coaching. I’ve had to unlearn a lot of things, and I still am, but it helped me focus my interests.
Blaise: What was the moment you decided to get into coaching?
Steph: It was like a slow burn. I don’t think it was a moment. Throughout my career, when I got burned out or uninspired, I took little detours. I became a nationally certified massage therapist and worked up in Stowe. It’s actually what got me to move to Vermont. Then I took a detour into studying meditation, which I still do. Then someone sent me an article in a wellness magazine about how a friend from my hometown had stepped into life coaching. I’m like, ‘What is that?’ I started learning about it and went and worked with a coach. That piqued my curiosity. This was about 15 years ago when I started enrolling in coaching programs. I’ve now gone through four certification programs.
Blaise: What are some of the challenges your clients face?
Steph: I work a lot with leaders in small and growing businesses who are navigating change. Sometimes it’s changes in their team or the organizational structure. For instance, ‘I’m a new leader and I have to build rapport with my team and prove myself to the organization.’ Or ‘We just got a huge new customer, and our sales have doubled, and we have to hire people. How do we maintain our culture while we grow rapidly?’ A lot of the work is about navigating uncertainty while keeping people motivated and connected.
Blaise: What makes you unique as a coach?
Steph: I’m one of those people that wants to get right to the core of an issue. A lot of clients come in and they’re very cerebral; I’m like, ‘Let’s just get familiar.’ Let’s talk about who you are, what matters to you, why this is important to you, and what you want to do in your magical, wonderful, unique life. My curiosity and interest around that very much define my style. I’m not a person who gets squidgy in the face of strong emotions and vulnerability. That’s when I’m thinking, ‘We’re talking about what matters now Let’s do this.’
Blaise: What does a successful coaching session look like?
Steph: Success is entirely defined by the client, but it doesn’t always look the way they expect. Sometimes a client walks away pissed. Or having realized something that now they’re like, ‘Oh, shit!’ They came in wanting one thing, but what they got was something different, which maybe saves five years of wandering off their life. Coaches are people to go see when you have a need – then you solve it and move on. Coaches are not thinking, ‘You need to keep coming to me. We need to keep working through problems.’ Meaningful coaching can happen in just a few minutes.
Blaise: Are there any misconceptions about coaches?
Steph: Some clients refer to me as their therapist. I have clients, including executives, who say to me, ‘Oh, I’ve been waiting for my Stephanie therapy all day.’ I think because coaching creates such a unique space that people don’t usually have, it can be hard to understand and therefore gets lumped in with other forms of support. Therapy is very important, but coaching holds a different space. In fact, coaches are trained to recognize when someone needs support that is beyond their scope of expertise and refer out to a more appropriate resource Another thing is people think coaches are going to give them the answers. I’m here to ask questions. My whole job as a coach, when I’m listening to you talk, is to figure out what question I can ask next to further reveal to me and to you what your thinking is.
Blaise: What are your future goals in coaching?
Steph: I’m in the process of getting an accreditation through the International Coaching Federation (ICF). I have a little more training to do, and then I’ll take the exam at the end of the year. My goal over the next couple years is to have coaching take up far more of my work time than the consulting piece does. I can consult and give people answers all day long, but when people sit down with me, and I help them think through things, that’s when something changes for them. That’s when something’s magical. That’s the work I really want to do.
Blaise: When did you join VCET? How did you hear about it?
Steph: I’ve always known about VCET through the Female Founders Speaker series. I knew it was this cool incubator space for startups, but I didn’t fully realize that it had coworking options for people who weren’t in that space. I had been working out of my home for a few years and was missing people. And a lot of my clients are still up in Burlington, and sometimes they want to meet in person, so I needed some space. I came to visit Peter and Alexa one day and loved the vibe. A couple months later I joined. I hadn’t been in an office in eight years, and I had forgotten that being around others who are so focused helps me with focus and discipline. It helps me when I take my breaks to just go meet somebody new or have a little conversation with somebody.
Blaise: What’s one VCET memory that sticks out to you?
Steph: It just happened not too long ago, maybe it was in May. I was in the office for the day, and I was heading to the lunchroom, and there’s Ema hanging off a ladder. I’m like, ‘What’s up?’. And she’s like, ‘We’ve been waiting to get this light changed forever, and they’re telling us it’s going to be months, how hard can it be to change a light bulb?’ I hung around to hold the ladder and possibly catch her if needed. Another passerby joined in as well. Then this joke popped up in my mind: How many VCETers does it take to change a light bulb? It was a little bit of a hot mess, the wrong bulbs went in at one point, but ultimately it was solved. It was hysterical.
Blaise: How do you spend your free time?
Steph: My husband and I bought a house here in Vergennes about eight years ago. It’s right next door to where he grew up, so he knew the previous owners, and they were selling this beautiful piece of property, and in their retirement, they planted 350 apple trees. And we thought, ‘Oh, we can have a little orchard on the weekends. It’s gonna be so fun. It’s the quintessential Vermont thing.’ My husband works for Lake Champlain Chocolates and my career has been in Corporate America –– we’re not orchardists. If we thought this was going to be just weekends in the fall, we were absolutely wrong. Every season has some degree of work. I pull back on my coaching and consulting to take the lead on running the orchard during the week, and then he and I run it together on the weekend. We’re open five days a week. It’s just this huge amount of work, but by the same token, it’s been so amazing. It gives us a profound respect for people who work in agriculture full-time. It is no joke.
Blaise: Is there anything else that I should know?
Steph: If people are curious about coaching, come learn about it, because it’s too easy to underestimate or dismiss. My personal experience is that coaching leapfrogs and accelerates my own thinking. I get coached all the time. I’m lucky enough to have a fabulous network of coaches, and we coach each other, but I also pay for coaching on my own. It’s amazing how much faster your thinking can move, especially when you’ve got assumptions in there that are holding you back. For people who want to be creative, for people who want to get past stuff fast, there’s something truly magical about it.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
You can follow Steph on LinkedIn here. Reach her via email at stephanie@higherresonance.com.
