From Merry-Go-Round to Meaningful: Building a Coaching Practice in the Middle East - Part 2 of 3

Empower World - the first coach training organisation established in Doha, Qatar, the Middle East (as far as we've been able to identify) - opened its doors in 2012 and is still going today. As two women co-founders - we are very proud of what we’ve been able to create - in a place where many businesses struggle to succeed without assistance.

I’ve been an employee in a number of those businesses which have closed their doors. They had strong brands, great reputations, were good sized organisations with sound processes in place – but failed to stay open due to the different ways of working.

But if you want to understand how a coaching business gets built in a place where almost nobody really understands what professional coaching is yet, it goes back to a handful of strangers in a ‘small’ community who found each other via Linked In and organised to meet in person.

In part 2 of Empower World’s story, if you're a coach who has ever wondered whether you have what it takes to build something from nothing, I hope this gives you something to support your journey.

The spark that started Empower World

Qatar is an independent desert nation extending north from Saudi Arabia into the Arabian Gulf. Doha – the capital - sits on Qatar’s eastern coastline, surrounded by a largely flat, rocky landscape. While to the south lie sweeping sand dunes where Qatari families and expatriates often escape for weekends of camping. The Qataris were (are) creating a vibrant and rapidly developing city offering expanding career and entrepreneurial opportunities, together with a variety of traditional experiences including the souqs - which filled all the senses with food, spices, fabrics, artefacts, shisha, and much more. It was a place where tradition and ambition, desert and city life, and cultures from around the world came together.

In 2008, you could count the trained coaches in Qatar on two hands. We started meeting: small, informal gatherings where we compared notes and shared what we were learning.

In 2009, Qatar had a population of around 1.7 million people, and the Qatari population was around 250,000 – a relatively small number. It was also one of the wealthiest – if not the wealthiest population per head due it’s vast gas reserves. It was an exciting time, because Qatar had created a powerful 2030 vision to support its people, ensuring it invested and developed capability across various industries and professions like science, technology, people, medicine, food security etc, to ensure the country’s security and future growth.

I didn't know it then, but I was standing at the edge of my old world, about to be pulled somewhere I had dreamed of: being in charge of my destiny and creating something that makes a positive and empowering difference in people’s lives across many cultures due to Qatar’s large mix of expatriate population.

The invitation that started the ripple effect

Through that web of early connections, I met professional coach Alison Ringrow. We were both recruited by the highly reputable UK Bath Consulting Group onto a programme in partnership with a government organisation to support the development of Qatari national leaders. We were part of a small group of trained coaches identified to support the initiative.

What we both found when coaching young, upcoming Qatari leaders was a genuine, strong desire to do something good for their organisation, country… and the world. It was the same kind of experience with every Qatari national my colleagues and I coached. They all thought beyond themselves. It felt pure, honest and incredibly inspirational. It stays with me.

The Qatari Leadership programme is where Alison and I first talked about building something together. In my first year as a full-time coach, we started taking on corporate work as a pair, including a coach training programme built on the ILM (Institute of Leadership and Management) coaching framework for one of Qatar's largest government bodies. Inpsired by this experience, we created our first ILM-based programme together in 2010/2011, for a small group of coaches.

It was the first domino in the story of Empower World’s creation.

The conference that changed everything!

During our partnership, Alison and I met Caroline Zeitler – an incredibly creative, resourceful coach who invited us to help bring a conference to life: How Women Work, now running for its second year, which was built around developing women professionally through a day of workshops.

My role was small. I spoke briefly - enough to introduce the day's intention. I didn't run any sessions. I felt my contribution on the day didn’t count for much – except, of course, all the work that led up to the day had made what turned out to be a highly successful event – spearheaded by Caroline.

I had no idea that showing up for that brief introduction was about to change the entire direction of my world of work. If there's a lesson in there for any coach reading this: the unglamorous, low stakes "yes" is sometimes the one that matters most.

The conversation that let me know I had to create something bigger than me

At the end of the conference, a senior HR leader from Qatar's only telecommunications company at the time asked whether I would be willing to coach 45 of their senior executives.

Forty-five!

I had never delivered anything close to that scale. I didn't have a team because at this point Alison was scheduled to move back to the UK for family reasons (sadly for me and very necessarily for her). I didn't have a system. What I did have was a ‘yes’ and a thought I’ll figure out the rest.

Building a business rarely starts with readiness. It starts with a "yes" that commits you to becoming ready - fast.

Losing an ally, finding a partner

My first real business collaborator, had to leave, right as the biggest contract of my coaching career appeared. I had to find a team I could trust.

I called Michelle Arscott, a coach I'd trained myself through my second ILM-based coach training programme (a collaborator to this day). And I reached out to Marie Quigley, who had only just arrived in Qatar - who I found, fittingly, through LinkedIn, the same tool that had built the coaching network I found in the first place.

Marie and I met firstly to ensure she and I wanted to work together on this contract, and I remember it less as a business meeting and more as one of those highly engaging conversations - as if we’d known each other for a very long time. It felt familiar, comfortable and exciting too about what might be possible to work together.

The three of us delivered the Telco coaching project – partnering with Qatari nationals and expatriates from different backgrounds and cultures, all under one roof, all at once. It was highly successful according to the corporate client as they continued to re-engage us over many years. Michelle was a fantastic colleague and moving into a different season of her life and another country. But Marie and I discovered something in that project: the beginning of a partnership that would define the next decade or more of both our lives.

After the project ended, I was sitting with something I was carrying quietly since my training in Australia: "I want to build a coaching school in Doha” and suggested to Marie we create one together. The rest is history as the saying goes.

Building something real, one experimental step at a time

We ran our first ICF-approved coach training in May 2012, ten people, all found through our own network. I won't pretend it was polished. I remember standing in front of that first cohort on day one, not sure where this would lead… although I felt confident it would go somewhere exciting.

We had a few hiccups as Marie and I found our way together, a little clumsy at times as we experimented and learned each other’s styles. But something real happened in that room - something transformational, even in its rough edges – like an unpolished gemstone. It led to requests for one-to-one coaching and corporate organisations asking us to work with their teams.

From that first training, we’ve gone on to work with global organisations and major local government bodies in Qatar. It also led to working with organisations across the globe, online and in other countries like the UK – all by word of mouth.

The work has also been highly varied, working in government, law, construction, education, medicine, oil and gas, logistics, telecommunications, sport, science, technology and more in relation to coaching, leadership, teamwork, strategy, innovation, presence, decision making, creativity, team inquiries and so much more – as well as offering our open programmes to the public. Such a privilege to support so many people – to bring out their best.

The ordeals, the heartaches

I want to be honest here too. Growth was never simply linear. There was a lot to learn as there weren’t many courses or resources available to us back then to guide the way of working with corporate clients. Errors were made, but we kept learning and fine tuning how we worked.

And there were upsets along the way - a corporate contract lost in process after months of relationship-building and delivering; differing opinions - not often - but they did happen, which is part of the process of creation. These things never deterred us or dampened our spirits, they just helped us grow stronger together for the 12 years of partnership.

What got us through wasn't certainty. It was returning to why we'd started - and to each other – and the legacy we were creating together. The feedback we received from the people we partnered touched our hearts deeply and repeatedly.

The reward

As Empower World grew, so did our need for a team - both behind the scenes and in front of the room. We built a magnificent support team based in Pakistan (who we couldn’t do without – they are our ‘rock’), something I remain deeply grateful to Tracy Livingston for helping make possible. We also found extraordinary coaches in Doha, people we had trained ourselves, who went on to deliver our training on our behalf, each bringing our shared beliefs to life in their own unique, beautiful and powerful way: notably Katie Mapondera, Melissa Loizou, Siobhain Whitty, Aleksandra Lazarevska.

Marie and kept developing too - working toward and eventually completing our MCC credentials, studying new disciplines (such as coaching super-vision), evolving our courses year after year. All of it in service of the same vision that still guides us: to be a genuine catalyst for change, supporting leaders transform their results by empowering the people around them - for their own benefit, and for the benefit of the wider world they're part of.

We built the business around asking real, thought-provoking questions of ourselves, bringing genuine professional passion to every room we walked into and holding both people and desired outcomes in our minds and hearts.

The return: what I carried forward

In the years before Covid changed everything - which I'll come to in Part 3 - I met more remarkable people than I can properly name here. I lived in Qatar for eight years full-time, and five years part-time, and many of those relationships remain close to me to this day. It was not always easy, but what I loved about creating this in Qatar was the rich culture and the desire of many from different parts of the world who wanted to make a positive difference in their world and the lives of others.

One person who did change the shape of my life significantly is Rachel Petero, a brilliant Māori woman who completed our coach training in our very early years, and who went on to build a vision of supporting 100,000 indigenous women by 2025. She invited me to partner with her when she moved back to New Zealand - and I was in Australia part-time - to run our coach training and leadership programme for Māori, Pacifica and indigenous communities across Australia and Canada.

With Australian Aboriginal family of my own – two Aunties (who two of my Dad’s brothers married) and two cousins - this work was and is very dear to my heart. The women, and later the men, who joined Rachel’s programme, taught me more than I ever could have imagined. I remain humbled and enormously grateful that I was welcomed into their traditions and their lives.

Rachel and I worked together in person for six to seven years in those programmes - until Covid, which in its own way, threw a spanner in that work too.

My intention for sharing this, coach to coach

In Part 3, I'll share what happened when the ground shifted again - first with a global pandemic, shifting partnerships, and later with a war that tested everything we thought we'd already survived.