Sonia Gavira, owner and founder of valueU Ltd and SoniaGavira.com, is passionate about enabling a brand of leadership that’s relevant in today’s world and ensuring that everyone has access to the best opportunities to become the leader that they want to be. When she was a corporate employee working in marketing, she was amazed that it was only when she achieved a management position and had spent a while working as a manager, that she was then offered some training. And she was one of only a very few women there.
Sonia is passionate about the value of coaching. She has coached recent graduates, Chief Executives, and every level in between. She believes that it’s a privilege to be invited into someone’s life as a coach. Her leadership model is about authenticity, curiosity, courage and being humane. Challenging yet fun wrapped in a lot of care, is how many describe her coaching.
Sonia Gavira, Leadership Coach and motivation expert
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
Hi, well my name’s Sonia, Sonia Gavira, I’m married to Simon and we’ve been together for over 30 years now! We have two sons – Luis who’s 24 and Nico who’s 18, both live with us at home in Broadstone in Poole. We also have a one-eyed border collie called Whisky, and my mum and dad, who are both in their late 80s, live with us too. We moved here nearly 12 years ago from Hertfordshire because I wanted to live by the sea, and we’ve never looked back since! We spend a lot of our weekends on the water, driving ribs as safety boats for the dinghies that race from Poole Yacht Club.
That’s a busy household!
It really is! But we’re super lucky to be able to have all of us under one roof and still have enough space to not get in each other’s way too much! I was born in the UK but both mum and dad are Spanish so again, I’m lucky to be able to speak both languages fluently and both understand and enjoy the cultures in those countries. I think it’s in part what’s enabled me to navigate cultural differences with a little more ease, perhaps than others, which has been useful in my work as I’ve had the opportunity to work in lots of different countries around the world.
Could you provide an overview of your business? What is the mission or vision that drives your work?
So, my company is called valueU as I’ve always been passionate about the value of people in organisations, although you’ll now see me out there under my own name, Sonia Gavira and SoniaGavira.com. In recent years, I’ve been increasingly focused on supporting people, particularly women, to embrace a new brand of leadership. One that’s more people-centric, that’s more about authenticity than authority and definitely one that’s more humane. You only need to look around the world at some of the conflicts to see examples of leadership where being humane has somehow been forgotten amongst other priorities. I’m convinced that the more we can model this in the leadership of our organisations, the more successful we will be as organisations and as people.
And why particularly women?
In my coaching, I’ve found that it’s women in particular – although not exclusively! who will say things like:
“I don’t want my boss’ job, I just don’t want his life” or “I want to make more of an impact, but not if it means living like they do”. They don’t have role models in leadership that they can aspire to and in many ways, it really frustrates me. I want women to understand that they can redefine the rules and do things their way. They can have a life and make an impact at the highest levels in organisations. They have more choices than they believe they have. As I’ve said however, this isn’t exclusive to women, I had a senior man in an organisation the other month, say to me that he was worried that his brand of leadership, which was more people-centric, wouldn’t be accepted or valued in his organisation and that therefore that meant that his career would be limited. I want people to know and dare to embrace and spread a different leadership style, brand or ethos – whatever anyone wants to call it!
I’ve also found more women than men, who are what I call “secretly ambitious”. They do want the top jobs or to run their own companies but aren’t able to articulate it. I was working with a wonderful woman in a relatively senior role at a global automotive manufacturer who was being asked by a very supportive boss, what she wanted to do next. The best response she could come up with was “whatever the company wants me to do”. She’d been in the organisation for over 30 years and was valued but had somehow lost her way. This frustrated her boss no end but also her! What we found was that she did know what she wanted but was afraid to even say it to herself and concerned about what others would think. She had imagined all sorts of reasons for why her career had taken the turn it had, and those reasons were all in her imagination! Now we’re talking about a very well-known and respected automotive brand, and if you know anything about automotive, you’ll know that Engineering is where it’s at. What did she want to do? She wanted to head up engineering! Once she voiced it there were tears and all her limiting beliefs started to tumble out. Well, she recently got in touch, and she’s got a senior role which is a stepping stone towards that role in engineering. It was wonderful to witness her getting back in touch with who she wants to be and then find a way to communicate that so well that she’s now on her way again.
What are the key services or products offered by your business? How do these offerings cater to the needs of your target audience?
I have several services I offer. Firstly, it’s one-to-one executive and leadership coaching – I work with leaders at all levels in organisations in an individual coaching programme designed to enable them to both set and then achieve their professional and personal goals with a focus on how they lead others and themselves. It’s tailored to each individual, so we first have a 20-minute call to check that we’re right for each other. Chemistry is super important. For me, being asked to partner with someone on their journey is a privilege. I get invited into someone’s life and they may talk to me about things that they haven’t even said out loud to themselves. I don’t take this lightly. For the coaching to be effective we need to have mutual respect and trust, and although this grows during the relationship, we need to check that we both think this is something worth pursuing. I won’t be right for every potential client. My clients describe me as challenging wrapped in a lot of care and fun – this isn’t for everyone! Then if we decide to start working together, it’s about defining what success will look like on this journey and then planning the programme from there. Most people will work with me for 6 months to start with and then we go from there.
Then I also offer a group programme called the Rising Leaders’ Circle. One of the things that many leaders will say is that “leadership is lonely”. Sounds a bit cliché, right? Well, it can be, but it doesn’t have to be. What I offer is a group where there is an opportunity to meet weekly with like-minded women and do some peer coaching. Our sessions vary – once a month there’s a topic that I will speak on for a bit and then we have a group discussion and share our perspectives and questions. This year we’re going to start with the 12 habits in Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith’s book “How Women Rise”, delving into habits that can both enable or get in the way of women getting to the top in their organisations. I’ll speak on one of the habits and then the idea is that we all talk about how the particular habit gets in our way, what different choices we want to make and then get some accountability from the group. It means that we have the support to make the changes we want to make in our lives. In other sessions, members bring either opportunities that they have or challenges that they are facing, and they get support both from me in the form of coaching questions, and peer support from the others. There’s nothing like a community that has your back and that’s what we aim to do in the Rising Leaders’ Circle.
I also offer courses on topics like Emotional Intelligence, Stress and Resilience and my favourite which is all about Motivation. I‘m licensed to use and train others to use a tool called Motivational Maps. It’s a simple yet effective tool that asks you to answer a small number of questions online and gives you a report which tells you how motivated you are, what it is that motivates you, what that means for you and even how satisfied you are in each of the motivators. I start all my coaching programmes with this too as it talks about motivation in terms of energy – what is it that gives you the energy to get up in the morning and do your best work? As a coach, this is a goldmine of data and leads to discussions around values, beliefs, conflicts and, importantly, wellbeing also.
Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
Before I started coaching, I had a career in marketing up to Marketing Director level and then started to do some interim and consultancy work in Marketing Strategy, and what I found was that in just about every project I worked on, 20% of my time would go on the marketing and the other 80% on what I found out was coaching the person and the team that had hired me. This was at a time when coaching was quite a new thing in the UK and there was a lot of media attention and criticism. There was a lot in the media saying that consultants were now branding themselves as coaches and earning lots more money with no real qualifications or regulation. So, I thought, well I’m not going to be one of those, I’ve got too many other letters after my name to not get qualified in this. Well, I spent nearly 2 years qualifying to coach and qualified as a Master practitioner in NLP and coach. I looked out for a course that was accredited by one of the coaching bodies and went for one with International Teaching Seminars that was accredited by the International Coaching Federation. I remember walking out of the doors of a hotel in London on the last day of the course and saying to myself “Ok Sonia, you are no longer a marketer, so you are now a coach!” And the rest is history!
In what ways does your business stay abreast of industry trends and innovations? Are there any recent developments or technologies that have influenced your approach to your work?
When I started out coaching, I wanted to make sure that I not only learned to coach but also learned different approaches and schools of thought. At the time NLP was also popular so I trained with some of the best – Ian McDermott, Robert Dilts, Tim Hallbom and others. In the last couple of years, Neuroscience has been a focus, so I went back to ITS who offer an Applied Neuroscience diploma and trained with Patricia Riddell, a well-known neuroscientist, whom I also met whilst on my MBA at Ashridge 24 years ago. To keep up my accreditation with the ICF I have to continue to devote time to learning and improving my craft and that’s a great excuse to keep going on courses! My approach is relational and people-centric, so I focus on continuing to learn about what makes us human and what that means.
What are the upcoming projects or plans for the future of your business? How do you envision the company evolving and growing in the coming years?
COVID really changed the coaching industry. Before COVID, it was really hard to convince people to have an online coaching session and after COVID, most sessions have gone online. And it’s not just been coaching sessions, leadership development and management development programmes have also gone online or have adopted a hybrid format. There are disadvantages to this – something different happens when people get into a room together and this is missing still in the online world. But there are lots of advantages too – mainly it saves a lot of time, coaching sessions can happen from anywhere, and you can get people together from around the world (as long as you can manage time zones!) at a fraction of the cost.
There are lots of people in organisations and people who run their own companies who don’t have easy access to leadership programmes or to a network of like-minded people in other organisations who can come together and support each other easily. We tend to work with people at the most senior levels of organisations and leave until later those who are the future leaders. We give them leadership roles but only support and train them once they have been successful – it doesn’t make sense! I want to make it possible for everyone to have access to the tools and support they need to be successful in their careers and their lives. To build a life and a career that they love. I want people in their first management and leadership roles to feel they have the tools and the support they need to succeed. I want those in more senior roles to have the opportunity to be the leaders they want to be. So, I will continue to promote my coaching programmes, and my leadership membership and I’ll be launching a new leadership programme which will be available for individuals to buy or have their organisations buy for them, which will include some self-paced learning AND some of the peer support and coaching that my membership provides. It will focus on the mindset and beliefs you need to be a successful and happy leader and has 6 core principles which I believe every leader needs to embrace and demonstrate: clarity, care, curiosity, collaboration, courage and challenge.
I also plan to enable more coaches to use the Motivational Maps tool and hope to be able to offer some hours towards accreditation with the ICF if they join me on the programme and become licensed practitioners. It’s going to be a busy year, but what’s new?
