Episode 316 Transcript — Coaching as a Second Act: Building a Practice Inside or Outside Your Company

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Secondary: coaching for women, leadership career transformation, encore career, coaching side hustle

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Episode 316

Coaching as a Second Act: Building a Practice Inside or Outside Your Company

Business Coaching for Women in Tech: The Quiet Question

Coaching women in tech through their careers, leadership, the ups, the downs, the missteps and supporting them into their next career, including occasionally something completely different, is what I’ve built my second act career around. And today I want to talk to those of you who have quietly wondered about doing the same.

Because there’s a question I hear more often than almost any other, usually near the end of a call, usually a little embarrassed, as if it’s being confessed rather than asked. It goes something like: “Toni, can I ask how you got into this? Because honestly… I’ve sometimes wondered whether I could do what you do.”

If you’ve carried a version of that question, this episode is for you. Maybe it surfaced after a promotion that didn’t feel the way you expected it to feel. Maybe you’ve noticed that the mentoring conversations, the one-to-ones where someone leaves standing taller, are the part of your week you actually love, and the roadmap reviews are the part you endure. Or maybe it’s simpler: twenty years of hard-won experience, and a growing pull toward work that is more meaningful, more flexible, more yours.

Today I’m taking that question seriously, because it deserves better than “maybe someday.” We’re going to look at what a coaching second act really is, the three shapes it can take, including the ones that don’t involve leaving tech at all, what your experience is genuinely worth, the honest gap you’d need to close, and how to know whether this is your thing. Let’s dive in.

Why the Coaching Instinct Deserves Respect

First, I want to reframe how you hold the question itself, because I see so many women treat it as an indulgence. A daydream for later. Something slightly unserious next to the real career.

Here’s how I’d rather you held it: the instinct is data.

When the part of your work that consistently lights you up is developing people, when colleagues seek you out for the conversations that matter, when you leave a mentoring session with more energy than you brought into it, that’s not a quirk. That’s information about where your zone of genius actually is. And you’ve probably noticed the same thing I talked about in my episode on the leader as coach: the leaders who are drawn to these conversations are often already halfway to the skill, they’ve just never been given the structure for it.

I’ll tell you my own version, briefly. I didn’t leave tech because I failed at it. I reached the C-suite seven years after my PhD, without an MBA, and what I discovered at every level was that the moments I found most alive were never the board packs. They were the conversations where someone’s stuckness dissolved in front of me. It took me embarrassingly long to treat that as data rather than a pleasant side effect. When I finally did, it became the foundation of everything I’ve built since, including this podcast, and the practice through which I’ve now coached hundreds of women and trained coaches who work with women in tech all over the world.

So the question “could I actually be a coach” is not self-indulgence. For a lot of you, it’s the most honest career question you’ve asked in years. The useful response isn’t to suppress it. It’s to examine it properly, which is what the rest of this episode is for.

The Three Shapes of a Coaching Practice

The biggest myth about coaching as a second act is that it’s binary: stay in tech, or burn the boats and become A Coach. That false binary keeps more women stuck at “maybe someday” than anything else, so let’s dissolve it. In my experience, a coaching practice takes one of three shapes, and all three are legitimate destinations.

And before I describe them, one story that shows how fluid the shapes are. A woman I trained two cohorts ago, a senior engineering manager, enrolled purely as shape one, the internal coach-leader. “I will never charge anyone for coaching,” she told me in week one, quite firmly. By the end of the program her one-to-ones had transformed so visibly that two women in her wider network asked if she’d coach them privately. She took them on, nervously, at a modest rate. Eighteen months later she has a five-client evening practice, her day job, and, in her words, “the most alive I’ve felt professionally in a decade.” She didn’t plan the second shape. The skill opened the door and she walked through it when she was ready. Hold your own plans that lightly.

1. The internal coach-leader

You stay exactly where you are, and coaching becomes your leadership signature. You’re the leader whose people grow, who gets handed the struggling team because you turn teams around, who builds capability wherever you go. Some of the women I’ve trained have never coached a single external client and never intend to. Their organizations, and their careers, are transformed anyway. If this is your shape, certification is genuinely optional, the skill is the point.

2. The portfolio builder

You keep the career and build a practice alongside it. A handful of paying clients in the evenings or carved-out Fridays. A coaching side hustle that is real, revenue-generating, and completely yours, while the salary keeps arriving. For many women this is the destination in itself, extra income, deep meaning, no cliff-edge risk. For others it’s the bridge: the practice grows until the day the second act funds itself. If you’ve listened to my fractional leadership episodes, you’ll recognize the shape, this is the coaching version of the portfolio career, and it’s never been more normal.

3. The full second act

Coaching becomes the career. Your own practice, your own clients, your own calendar. This is the encore career version, and it’s the one I chose. I won’t pretend it’s the easy option, we’ll talk honestly about the business side shortly, but I will tell you it’s the best professional decision I ever made.

Here’s what I most want you to take from this section: you do not have to know which shape is yours before you start. The training is identical for all three, and the decision about shape can be made later, with real information, from inside the skill. If you’re currently weighing whether to stay, go, or redesign your career, notice that coach training doesn’t force the answer, it makes every branch stronger.

What Twenty Years in Tech Is Worth as a Coach

Now let’s do the asset inventory, because this is where most of you dramatically underestimate your position.

Think about the coach you would want if you were choosing one. Someone who has actually sat in the rooms you sit in. Who knows what a re-org feels like from the inside, what it costs to be the only woman at the table, what the politics of a promotion round actually look like. Someone whose advice-free questions are sharpened by the fact that she genuinely understands the terrain.

That coach is rare. And you might be her.

The coaching market is full of people with certificates and no miles. What it is desperately short of is women with real senior tech experience who also have professional coaching skill. Your decades in the industry are not the thing you’d be walking away from. They’re the moat. They’re why a director facing her first executive team would choose you over a generalist, why an engineering leader in burnout would trust you to understand rather than just sympathize. When I look at what I changed my mind about across seven years and nearly 1,500 clients, one thing I never changed my mind about is this: lived experience of the client’s world, combined with real coaching skill, is the most valuable combination in this profession.

Let me make the credibility point sharper, because I want you to feel the asymmetry. When I started out as a coach, the majority of my fellow coaches were lovely, capable people whose professional background was, broadly, adjacent: HR, teaching, wellness. Wonderful humans, real skill. But when a burned-out VP of engineering goes looking for a coach, whose profile stops her scroll? The coach who writes “I help people find balance,” or the one who writes “I spent fifteen years leading platform teams through hypergrowth, and I coach women doing the same”? You already know. I watched this play out in my own practice: my tech background wasn’t incidental to why clients chose me, it was the reason. And the same will be true for you, whether your niche is engineering leaders, product women, founders, or women navigating the exact career stage you just lived through.

There’s a second asset you’re discounting: your network. Twenty years in tech means you already know hundreds of the exact people a tech-focused coaching practice serves. Not as prospects, as colleagues who trust you. Most new coaches spend their first two years trying to build the credibility and access you have sitting in your contacts list right now. I’m not saying your first clients will all come from your network, though for many of the women I’ve trained, they did. I’m saying the cold-start problem that kills most new practices largely doesn’t apply to you.

So you are not starting from zero. You’re starting from twenty years of credibility that cannot be bought or shortcut. What you’re missing is one specific, learnable layer, and I owe you honesty about it.

The Honest Gap: Mentoring Instinct Is Not Coaching Skill

Here’s the truth: being good with people is not the same as being a coach. The mentoring instinct, the wise counsel, the generous advice, all of it is genuinely valuable, and none of it is coaching. If you heard Episode 314 you know the distinction: advice creates dependence, coaching creates capability. The move from one to the other isn’t a vibe shift. It’s a trained skill, with structure, with technique, and crucially with feedback, because the habits of a lifetime of successful advice-giving don’t dissolve on their own. Believe me, the more senior you are, the more the advice habit has been rewarded, and the more deliberately it has to be unlearned in a coaching seat.

I’ll tell you what this unlearning actually feels like, because I remember it vividly from my own training and I watch it in every cohort. Somewhere around week three or four, you’ll be in a practice session, your practice client will describe a problem, and you will know the answer. Twenty years of experience will be sitting in your chest absolutely desperate to say “have you tried.” And your job, in that moment, is to hold it, and ask a question instead. The first few times, it’s almost physically uncomfortable. And then something shifts. You watch your practice client find an answer that’s better than yours, better because it’s hers, built from context you couldn’t see, and something she’ll actually do. That moment, and every coach I’ve trained can tell you exactly when theirs happened, is when you stop being a mentor who asks questions and start being a coach.

This is exactly why I built the training the way I did. Inside Ignite Coach Academy you learn a complete diagnostic framework first, how to recognize where any person is stuck, including the counterfeit states that fool even experienced leaders, and only then the craft of moving someone, question by question. And you don’t learn it in theory. There are fifteen practice coaching hours built into the fourteen weeks, real coaching, observed, with mentoring from Master Coaches who tell you what’s working and what isn’t. That’s the piece no book and no instinct can give you: skilled eyes on your actual coaching.

Which brings me to the objection I know is sitting in some of you right now: “can I really do this?” Let me answer it directly. You need no prior coaching experience, none, the program assumes you’re starting the skill from scratch. The practice hours are built in, so you’re never left to find your own guinea pigs. And you are mentored throughout, so the moment something wobbles, someone experienced is there. The women who ask “can I really do this” are, almost without exception, the ones who take it most seriously and do it best. The ones who worry about being good at it are precisely the ones who become good at it.

The Business Reality, and the New Bonus for the September Cohort

One more honest conversation, because I promised you the whole picture. If your shape is the portfolio practice or the full second act, coaching skill alone is not enough. A practice needs clients, and clients need to find you, trust you, and pay you. Positioning, pricing, the first conversations, the pipeline, this is the part nobody romanticizes and everybody eventually faces. I’ve watched too many well-trained coaches stall here, not because they couldn’t coach, but because nobody taught them the business.

So here’s something I’m announcing today, right now, on this episode. For the September cohort of Ignite Coach Academy, I’ve added a brand-new bonus: How to Build Your Coaching Business and Side-Hustle. It covers exactly what it says, positioning yourself, finding your first paying clients, pricing with confidence, and building the practice around your life rather than the other way round, whether that’s three clients on the side or a full second act. It exists because of everything I’ve just described, and if the business question has been the thing holding your “maybe someday” in place, as of today it’s answered.

And if the fear underneath is really about the leap itself, go back and listen to my episode on bravery, grit and confidence, because everything I said there applies here: you don’t need the deep-end plunge. Fourteen weeks of structured training, with practice and mentoring, is precisely the small-denomination, confidence-building route into a second act. That’s not an accident. I designed it that way.

The Timeline: Certified by Year End

Here’s what you need to know: the next round of my Ignite Coach Academy coach training program starts on Monday 14 September and runs for fourteen weeks. Enrollment closes on Friday 11 September, that’s ten days time if you’re listening to this episode on release day. There are two paths: training plus certification as an Associate Coach, which is what I recommend and what most of you considering a practice will want, or training-only if the skill inside your leadership is the whole goal. Everyone gets the Self-Coaching and Coaching in Your 1:1s module, everyone in this cohort gets the new business-building bonus, and there’s a payment plan if that helps. Enroll this week, and by the end of December you are trained, practiced, mentored, and, if you choose the certification path, a certified Associate Coach with the business foundations to match. The question you’ve been carrying quietly could be answered by Christmas.

All the details are at the link in the show notes. And if you’re standing at the edge of this genuinely unsure, don’t wrestle with it alone, book a complimentary chat with me at tonicollis.com/lets-chat. No pitch, just an honest conversation about whether this is your next step. It’s the conversation I wish someone had offered me when I was carrying the question.

Thank you for listening. And remember, keep leading. Bye for now.