What Do Project Management and Mindset Coaching Have in Common?

Anyone who has gotten to know me over the last five years knows that I love project management. For a long time, my single career goal was to be a project manager. Not a Director, or a VP. Certainly not an entrepreneur. Just someone who got to manage projects every day.

So it came as a shock to a number of people when I walked away from that career path in order to be a full-time writer.

I love writing, and in many ways, being a full-time, self-employed content writer was a dream come true. It allowed me to maintain an amazing work-life balance, which is critically important to me as a single mother. And I got to write about project management for a living, so I thought it would be the best of both worlds.

But, writing is a solitary task. Especially when you're doing it from home, alone.

It wasn't just colleagues or coffee breaks that I missed. I missed the team dynamic.

Brainstorming solutions together. Planning and implementing change together. Relying on each other for the success of the whole.

Working together makes us all better.

I tried to find a way to merge that dynamic with my new career as a writer.

First, I hired a virtual assistant and tried out a few subcontractors, thinking I could grow a writing team. But, it's incredibly hard to find people who have both sound project management knowledge and writing skills.

So then, I chose to coach new writers. It seemed like a natural progression.

Except, over the last three months I discovered two things:

1. Coaching writers is primarily done through providing self-led automated products and one-on-one support. So while I successfully created a group, I failed to develop a team. There was a noticeable lack of collaboration, sharing, and support of each other.
2. The most significant thing holding people back was mindset related. It wasn't the technical training that most people needed; it was the mindset coaching.

Mindset is something I've seen people struggle with all my life. In all aspects of life. It's something I used to struggle with myself. So, it shouldn't have been a surprise, but it was.

But what was perhaps even more unexpected was that working with people to transform their mindsets brings them together in a way that coaching writing doesn't.

Suddenly, I went from working with a bunch of individuals to working with a team.

And I've seen it over and over, in group after group.

Whenever someone creates a mindset program, people bond. We bond in our struggles, we bond over our fears, and we bond over our wins. Because they are all related. And because we overcome them together.

You cannot complete a project on your own, in isolation. You also cannot achieve a mindset transformation alone, in isolation.

And all too often, the people we've surrounded ourselves with 'in real life' are not the support system we need in order to change. So we turn to these groups of like-minded individuals.

As a transformation mindset coach, I get to build a community. A community of people who brainstorm together, who problem-solve together, and who share their own fears and experiences to help others grow.

Every day I witness people asking for feedback when they struggle, and sharing their wins when they succeed. And every day I see others rally to them with support or congratulations, as needed.

But it's not just the team dynamic that is similar between mindset coaching and project management. Mindset isn't about technical skill (although there are some involved). It's about change.

Coaching mindset is about being an agent of change. Just as being a project manager requires being an agent of change.

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Acting as a change agent is something I've always excelled at and enjoyed. It's a natural role for me.

I get to focus on the big picture, to lead by example, and to build this amazing community of people who trust one another enough to rely on each other.

This is why I created a group mindset program right from the start. Everyone has their own individual goals and tasks, but they also need to support each other, to rely on each other, and to talk through their progress.

I get to create, plan, implement, and control group programs, each one of which is a project in and of itself. And the group members are my team; we all succeed together.

Just like project management, it's truly a team sport.