Jameel Spencer

Coaching in the Clear

Jeff Hunter:

Hi and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter, and you are listening to coaching in the clear, the podcast committed to help you learn about coaching. We're going to help you better understand the value and the application of coaching by having in depth conversations with the people who use coaches to unleash their potential; the founders, leaders and managers who are shaping our world. Coaching is more popular than ever and we believe that sharing in depth, personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their potential while creating market leading big change businesses. Coaching in the clear is a production of Talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity.

We send out a weekly newsletter called the Sensemaker, where we offer our latest thinking about issues affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content, and enable you to unleash your potential. Learn more and sign [e-mail]. We are launching coaching in the clear with Jameel Spencer. Jameel has been a force in the world of fashion and brand management for over 20 years. He has worked with some of the biggest icons in pop and hip hop culture, helping them build successful businesses before co-founding his current venture, Rightful Place. Rightful Place scripts narratives for brands and personalities so that they can achieve their full potential. We have a very powerful episode ahead, where we will talk about his introduction to coaching the lessons learned from some of his favorite peers and role models. We will then turn to our current climate of racial inequality and the ways we can keep intention at the forefront of our business practices and daily lives.

Jameel, thank you so much for being with me today on coaching in the clear, I really appreciate your time. I know you're incredibly busy and I very much appreciate you making the time to speak with me.

Jameel Spencer:

Nope, no worries. I appreciate the opportunity. I always love to speak to you.

Jeff Hunter:

Thank you, sir. All right, so let's just start at the beginning. How did you decide to start working with a coach? Just take me in the audience up to that point.

Jameel Spencer:

So the reality is that I didn't decide, it was actually something that was decided for me and interestingly enough, like most things in life, had I been given the choice I probably would have chose not to, because I'm probably more about what I didn't know and what I thought that coaching meant. But what I experienced was amazing.

Jameel Spencer: So at the time I was, running the fashion division at an IP holding company and we were going through some changes in terms of, you know, growing from a really small company to a much bigger company. And what it took from a culture standpoint to effectively run a larger organization was significantly different than what our experiences had been. And so our chairman had the idea to go out and seek coaching and because I was part of the management team I, you know, was a part of that. And so, it wasn't something that I chose to do.

I will say that once I did it, I really embraced it and found that it was really an extension of how, you know, we continue to get better in life. And so, you know, I'm an athlete. I was an athlete in college. I continued to work out every day to work on my body, you know, I try to work on my spirituality and so why wouldn't you work out your career and your ability as both a manager and an employee or an entrepreneur or whatever it is. And so what I experienced was something that I did not expect quite honestly.

Jeff Hunter:

So I've been talking to a bunch of different people and one of the things I talk about is I say, in order for somebody to be great in the coaching experience, they probably need two attributes. At least this has been my experience to date, which is that they need to be hungry and they need to be humble that they want, they are curious and they want to learn about themselves and they want to learn about the world. And they also show up with a bit of humility about it. They understand, they don't know everything, they understand they're missing things, and they use the coach effectively to help them get to clarity. And I have to say, of all the people I've worked with, you demonstrated both of those characteristics as much as anybody I've ever worked with. What is it you think, that makes a person have those attributes; want to be hungry to get better, hungry to improve, but also have a level of humility about themselves and what they do and don't know, and an openness, therefore, to want to get better and improve.

Jameel Spencer:

Ah man, I would say it's just living life. I think the more you experience, I think, you know, when you're younger your focus is on maybe going out and you know, accumulating things and, you know, it was all about you and making your mark in the world. I think that as you get older and you've had more experiences and you, you realize that, as much as you think you know, you don't really know anything at all. And that, you know, being open-minded is probably the most valuable trait that you can have if you're trying to be successful in life. So I think that, you know, humility and hunger come with experience. And so you know, I think that when, like I said we tend to be really full of ourselves when we're younger.

You know, if you can see that right now in the COVID area, that era that we're living in, you know, young folks are out at the beach and they feel like they're invincible. You know when they have someone in their family, they get sick, then they become open to the fact that, hey this thing is serious. And I think that's like everything else in life. So I think that it's more about just experiencing things, you know, seeing what doesn't work and realizing that you never have all the answers even when you think you do.

Jeff Hunter: Yeah. So I know a big part of your identity, a big part of the way you think about things is you're a father and you're very proud of being a father. And I know that your children are very active in sports themselves, very accomplished. How do you coach them? And I'm sort of fascinated about how parents coach their children in the midst of so much change and so much confusion. How do you coach your kids?

Jameel Spencer:

So, the irony of how I coach my kids is that it has nothing to do with, or maybe it's more of a reaction to how I was raised. And so I was raised, my mom was, you know, 18 years old and the freshmen in college when she had me and so I grew up without a dad in my household until I got older. When she got remarried, I had a stepfather who actually really, really showed up for me. And I don't think I even really appreciated it as much until I got older and had my own kids. But the reality is that the way I show up and coach my kids is more of a reaction of what I didn't have growing up. And the good news, and this is one of the things that actually was an unlock from the work that I did with Talentism, quite honestly, is that I do it unapologetically because I realized that, it's not about them liking me, right?

I...