An enlightening conversation with Amy Sandler: professional speaker, executive coach, and corporate mindfulness trainer. Amy was one of the first 30 people chosen by Google in 2007 to deliver the mindfulness based emotional intelligence training program Search Inside Yourself. She is currently serving as chief content officer and coach at Radical Candor. 

An early adopter of mindfulness and spiritual development in executive coaching, Amy has since built a career from sharing these practices. In this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, she explains how important it is to catch what a purely rational approach to coaching would otherwise miss.

Of course, encouraging CEOs to open their hearts and invest time and energy on spiritual development can be a challenge. During their discussion, Amy talks about how she meets these people where they are, often using data and science to justify more spiritually-inclined activities.

One of the topics Amy discusses with Coaching.com CEO Alex Pascal is her work with Radical Candor, which basically asks “how can I succeed at work without being a jerk?”. According to Amy, it’s all about finding the right balance between caring for people and challenging them. 

Care and challenge may look different to different people, though. Talking through the Radical Candor framework, Amy shares examples of how obnoxious aggression, manipulative sincerity, and ruinous empathy show up at work.

Relating these ideas to the coaching industry, Amy and Alex talk about the paradox that coaches face: coaches have to be liked to keep clients; however, being liked isn’t always the same as being effective and achieving results. 

To learn more about how Amy herself is working to overcome people-pleasing and perfectionism through her own personal spiritual curriculum, listen to the full episode.