I'm gonna share a sacred moment that emerged during my journey through leadership coaching. I'll tell the story how I was at a pivotal crossroads in my professional life and I just had a lot of chaos in my head and I needed someone to help me work through it. And I remembered that I had had coaching as an athlete in college and maybe that was an option.

So I'll begin at my story. So I'm a nurse by training and nursing is a profession that we hold space for people. We aren't there to cure, but we're there to care. We will hold a hand and sometimes just witness because we aren't sure what else can happen because sometimes we can't do anything for them. And that sitting and bearing witness has always been a really powerful tool for me in my professional and personal life. I don't have the solutions to much. And I always lean back on that.

So when I myself was in professional chaos, I was in a career development program at the Veterans Health Administration on the research track. And so I had opportunities. I had research I wanted to pursue, but did I want to take on a teaching aspect to my career? Did I want to take on a leadership aspect to my career? Did I want to stay in the Veterans Health Administration? Did I want to take my work out into the consulting world? Those are all options on my table. And in addition, I was a mother of two high school boys, happily married. And it was this concept of, can I have it all? Career and a family and the health and the joy of life.

And the moment that drove me towards leadership coaching was when I was not having it all. I had hit a real low point. I had really high burnout, could not make a decision to save my life. And my family told me I need to pull my cookies together.

My experience with coaching had been only at an athletic level. I was a collegiate swimmer and sailor and coaches helped me just do one little thing different. And it sort of always put me so much farther ahead than if I had tried to do the work without someone's set of eyes and ears. And I thought, well, athletic coaching is pretty great. What about leadership coaching?

I reached out to a leadership coach. had a background in psychology, but I wasn't looking for therapy. I was looking for someone to just be present and witness me as I processed my ideas. And it took a bit, one or two sessions to develop trust. And I think trust is at the core of most sacred moments, to be honest. Because you have to let your guard down to get to the good stuff.

I sat with her for two two-hour sessions, right. And she would ask me just really general questions and I would talk and I would talk and I knew I had my armor up. Right. Because I had built protective mechanisms to keep certain things away. Things that had come from my professional past or my personal past that I was like, don't want to go there. That's a little touchy and I’m fine over there. Just can we stay in this lane?

But she kept trying to peel back little pieces of that armor. And at first I wasn't ready and so she didn't push and then in the third session she just kept pushing. I want you to sit with this. I said something. I realized that I did not believe that I had earned my success. I didn't think I was smart enough and lots of other sort of imposter syndrome concepts. And instead of her doing what most people do, which is correct me. No, no, no, you're fine. You absolutely earned it. Of course you did! Look at all the degrees you have. She just sat there and was silent and silence is tough. And I think the silence was what led me to think of this as a sacred moment for… it just opened up my armor. I just experienced and I felt and sadly for her, I broke down, right? I cried and I became angry and all of these things that I had kept inside bottled up that I finally let go.

And it was sacred because she didn't judge. She didn't correct. She didn't bring advice. She just was present. And she bore witness to my revelations. It changed everything.

It seemed so silly. It was like a five minute tantrum, right, on my own, where I was just letting it all go out. And then I started crying and I blew my nose. And she asked me, so what was that? Tell me what that was.

And that was the sacred moment. That I was given the opportunity to dwell, right? To face my fears, dive deep into my mind and my emotions. And I felt completely safe… and I felt completely heard. That was incredible.

And from my side, at first I thought, what was the magic that she just did? Uh, but in reality, it was a lot of what I learned in my nursing profession, which was sometimes our patients didn't want, to be honest, to be told what to do. And they didn't want us to put them on a track. They just wanted a space for us to acknowledge them, the challenges that they had to get where they are today and be present, witness, and then still love them. Because it really does come down to love.

So that was a moment, and it was lovely. And what it did was I then spent the rest of that day thinking deeply, where was all that stuff coming from? Why had I suppressed it? And it really came back to things that I hadn't thought about in years that I had been carrying as multiple bricks in my backpack. And I decided to let them go. I took those bricks out of my backpack, and I felt lighter. I just then moved forward. I was able to say, this is why I think I hadn't earned it. And now I believe I have earned it. And so now I will go and apply for a leadership position because I think I'm actually ready for it. Where before I had talked myself into not being ready and I wasn't going to ever talk myself out of that until that incredible, beautiful moment.

A photo of Dr. Gilmartin’s computer and notes. Together, these represent receipt of online coaching and her self-described rabid journaling.

And due to that transformation, I started talking to people that I worked with about coaching. And I realized I wanted to become a coach. I wanted to train as a coach because I no longer was at the bedside. I no longer was working with patients and getting that lovely spiritual experience where I sat with patients, right, and both in the best moments of their lives and the worst moments in their lives, it filled my cup. And I was missing that as a researcher. And I thought maybe coaching would fill that.

And so here I am now two years later. I have completed a leadership coaching program through the National Center for Organization Development in the VA. And I've been coaching almost 30 different leaders in the VA, 150 hours. And I will tell you that it does fill my cup. So as a professional in the caring field, coaching is caring. You're trying to help people improve their personal and professional performance.

And I have experienced sacred moments with my clients. And what is fascinating about it is this concept that I was not aware of initially called relational flow. And it's a dynamic when a coach and a client, they enter a zone where they are fully challenged at a high level of skill and awareness. That was such an interesting term because, you know, sacred moments are sort of the same, right? Like where you get into a phase where it's just like time sort of stands still and you're fully, fully there and you're experiencing each other's both emotions and you know, the world around you.

What's interesting is I never realized I was trained for that as a nurse until I was just trained for it as a coach. There's a skill to it. When this happens, right, when you have a sacred moment with a patient, like back in the day for me, there was a trust that happened that then when they would ask for something, my advice, they would actually listen, right? When a patient would tell me something, I trusted them. It would change the way we worked.

And in coaching, it's the same way, right? I am there to hold space for my client and, many times it can feel effortless. Like, wow, that just happened. Amazing! But other times, especially if I'm not fully, I’m listening, but I'm listening so hard to try and make sure that they know that I'm present. So they're working hard trying to reveal their stuff and break down their armor. And I'm sitting there trying to focus really hard. It means that I'm not there yet. I was a nurse for 20 years. And my first couple of years in nursing, there was not a lot of sacred moments. It was a lot of panic. But then you get into the groove and you get confident and you can find that space. And I'm seeing that with coaching, right? So I've been doing it for a while now. And you know, within a couple of sessions, we get to a place where we have trust. My client and I can get into a relational flow, which is where the big transformations happen.

So it's interesting. I've been a nurse almost for 30 years now and my training around, you know, holding space for healing, for advocacy, right, for bearing witness, I still carry with me. It is the foundation of everything I do, and it informs my coaching practice. And so I hold space, right, for my clients, not just for physical healing, because sometimes there's that, there's their suffering from pain and things, but more often than not, it's to help them be courageous as they're trying to discover who they are, where they want to go, and what they want to be.

So I'll end the story with, it's been an honor. I decided I wanted to be a nurse when I was like 17 years old. And I still think it was the best decision I've ever made. Coaching has come later in life. And I think it will provide me with the same personal and professional satisfaction over the years to come.

And it's because of that idea of the sacred moment and the relational flow. Because it has to be reciprocal. I can't just give and no one gives back. It's a real incredible thing when we give to each other. And that fills my soul. And that helps me with my burnout, which is a crisis in healthcare right now. My breakdown was not a high point in my life, but it led to me finding my path again.

Taking Bricks Out of the Backpack

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