🧭 Katia Verresen: Leadership Coach and Founder of Foundations of Inner Power
Hello, It’s Julia, Founder of The Switchboard, a newsletter exploring the ways we communicate and connect at work and beyond. Thank you for being part of our community. I’m grateful to you for reading, reacting and commenting. If you enjoy this edition, consider sharing it with a colleague or friend.
In This Edition
💥 Why focus on helping people find their power
🧭 How to find your inner compass
💃 Why you need a dance party button, a legit bubble machine and confetti
What inspired your career path to coaching?
I began my career at a law firm. Then, I worked for Guy Kawasaki at Garage.com, a financial marketplace between investors and entrepreneurs. It was an extraordinary experience. What I noticed working with this community is that at one moment a person can be on top of the world and then in another moment, the same person can be in a completely different mindset, yet they are the same person. I started to get very curious about why these two modes were happening and to better understand the role of emotions in how we get things done.
Then, two major world events happened: the dot com crash in 2000, followed by September 11th in 2001. The United States was frozen and the economy was drastically impacted. I was seeing people who were in positions of leadership who were frozen in fear — there was an inability to address emotions, in particular, that fear, and a lack of resources to support them. Those observations led me to start my coaching practice.
Since then, I’ve named these two emotional states as abundance and scarcity modes. The abundance mode is when we have psychological safety, and we meet our emotions. Scarcity is when we have a physiological reaction, a fight or flight response to experiences that don’t allow us to be in a state of flow. My work has evolved from there.
How do you describe your coaching work today?
Coaching is active. It’s about developing a kind observer who notices the scene in the movie of your life and determines what state you are in, helping you to press pause. Then, with very simple tools, you can learn to shift from reactive to creative mode.
An emotion chemically lasts 90 seconds. It’s letting you know at this moment, what am I picking up, are my needs met or not met? There’s a huge amount of inner power in being in relationship with your emotions. That’s what I help leaders do today.
Why do you choose to focus on helping people find their power?
Power is the electricity that allows you to create your vision. There are two types of power: inner and external. Inner power focuses on managing your thinking, emotions and energy levels. This compass is your Inner Power which comprises your Physical Energy, Emotional Energy, Mental Energy and Creative Energy. We all need to have the instruction manual and know how to use it. You need to start with the inner power, the outer will always match. This helps us direct that movie of our life.
Many people have complicated relationships with power because when they think of power — they think of command and control it. They assume power is a dirty word, but many Business Schools are working to change that. I’ve worked with Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business to study and teach about power.
As a coach, you've become known for your annual review process. What is it about this topic that inspires you?
This idea as many of my ideas do, came to me in my dreams — three dreams in three nights. In December 2017, I recorded a Facebook Live teaching the method. I learned that many people would use the same videos to create a yearly ritual review process. In 2020, I started re-doing the video and giving it a yearly update. It’s now a yearly tradition. So many people tell me how this process has changed their lives, so they do it every year.
I believe we are all born creators and can design for anything. We can’t control but we can create. To do that is to have an intimate relationship with your life — most people live beside their life, not in their life. That’s the reason why most people want more time.
To look at your calendar, see the photos you took and what you’ve lived through is needed in order to create what you want next. You need that time to process, contemplate, and have gratitude to see the patterns of your life.
Over the years, people have thought they had a horrible year, but by focusing on those key moments of reflection, they’ve found meaningful insights in their year, this gives them energy for the next year and to set themselves up for success.
A life well lived is one that you’ve gotten to savor with life lessons through wisdom. When something really difficult happens, there are resolutions and outcomes, you want to have the space to see them, not just register them, you don’t want to miss the easter eggs.
Around the world, we tend to be willing to pause and reflect in December and people give themselves permission to reflect. In many traditions, winter is about going down to the roots where the sap is going down. It’s internal — a time for introspection, the more you do and the brighter spring is going to be. There’s rejoicing that happens with it as well.
What is your favorite daily hack or ritual to support career and life?
In my teachings, I focus on a way of life — it’s about developing yourself as an observer of watching life to notice what’s going on and choose to fill yourself up. Instead of asking: do you have time, instead, I challenge people to look at how much energy they have.
Based on that, I call it the confetti approach — if you have 5 minutes to fill yourself up in a delightful way, because if it’s fun, we’re going to do it. Choose to fill yourself up in those 5 minutes — listen to your favorite song, dance or bounce. All of our micro-decisions have a huge impact on our ability to replenish energy. Pause and check yourself up, then fill yourself up.
[Cue Props: Katia brought out a few items for an impromptu Show & Tell]
I have a 30-second dance party button, a legit bubble machine, and real confetti!
These are super simple things that enable you to shift yourself and that delight allows us to move forward with the fun.
We are trained to push through effort —doing that depletes our energy and puts our system in a stress response. Too much is depleting. You want to build resilience to the main goal. The Navy SEALS mantra is “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast” — that’s the definition of getting rid of unnecessary effort. Once you have more energy, you can handle more — better conversations, psychological safety and a better state of mind.
What resources do you recommend for people to focus on their growth, what would you share?
Deb Liu’s Take Back Your Power and Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act are two of my favorite books. I also highly recommend First Round Review. To learn more about my approaches, I wrote this article on The Remarkable Advantage of Abundant Thinking and The Brain Hacks Top Founders Use to Get the Job Done.
About Katia
Katia is the Founder of KVA Leadership. She coaches C-suite executives and rising stars, from the earliest startups to Fortune 100 companies, to achieve their full human potential.
Through her Foundations of Inner Power fellowship program, she is creating a global community of leaders who can dream and create Better Than Imagined.
She runs a global practice and has worked closely with leaders at large tech companies, venture capital firms, foundations and startups.
Thank you for tuning into this edition of The Switchboard. This career profile is based on a live interview conversation. I’m grateful to you for reading, reacting and commenting. If you enjoyed what you learned, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend. Signing off for this edition. — Julia