My Interview with Steph Balzer of Cento

This month, I had a special opportunity to chat with the mission-minded coach, writer, and strategist Steph Balzer as part of her coach interview series. She created a welcoming space for me to share my background and perspective on coaching. The Steph Balzer interview, below, was originally posted on her Substack, Cento, which explores how we shape communities and how they shape us. -Farah

The Steph Balzer Interview: Farah Hussain

DATE: May 13, 2024

As immigrants to the U.S., her parents instilled the values of stability and hard work, and demonstrated how to carve one’s own path.

Farah pivoted from a career in technology to coaching. We spoke about this, and the intersection of personal and professional identities, among other topics. Check out Farah’s business at Coaching with Farah. Connect with her on LinkedIn. —Steph Balzer

Tell us about yourself.

My personal story begins with my parents, who are immigrants to the U.S. My father arrived in 1968 to study chemical engineering at New Mexico State University. He went on to establish his own remodeling business—he built something from nothing, and unrelated to his degree. My mom came to the U.S. in 1981, newly-married to my father. In India, she had completed her master’s degree and was teaching, but here she adopted a more traditional role, managing a household and raising me and my three siblings full-time. When I was in high school, my mother launched her own business from home—a daycare that she ran for nearly a decade—before returning to teaching once again. So, entrepreneurship was central to both my mom and dad’s stories, despite that it looked different in each case.

As immigrants, stability has also been important to my parents. They emphasized hard work and being the best you can be within your chosen field. If you look at my LinkedIn profile, you will see that I’ve done just that—I’ve steadily grown a marketing career in the tech sector.

Yet, even as I was following this stable path, I continued to deepen my interests in mentoring, career advising, and coaching. (I even created a program in graduate school for peers to advise one another.) After becoming a certified coach, I worked with clients on the side for several years. I remember thinking, sure, I enjoy this, and these skills are going to help me become a better leader of people, which they absolutely did. But then I began to wonder why coaching couldn’t be my full-time career? After all, it spoke to my heart and had a positive impact on others. Eventually, I made the leap.

Since then, I’ve leaned into my intuition with every step, which is so different from the structured and logical approach that guided me previously. And that’s what brings me to today.

What is your training and certification as a coach?

I am trained and certified with the Co-Active Training Institute (CTI), and also hold a Professional Certified Coach credential through the International Coaching Federation. Additionally, I’m certified in the Leadership Circle Profile, with training in Positive Intelligence and Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching. I have an MBA from Babson College and a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College.

At some point early in my twenties, I was at a conference where coaches were sitting at tables in an open space, and I met with one out of curiosity. That was my first glimpse into coaching, though it wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I began training with CTI.

What are you like as a coach?

Many of my clients have described me as gentle but tough. One client wrote in her testimonial, “Farah holds your hand but she also makes you work!” Another said that I “pushed her to be better, but in such a kind way.”

Organically, most of my clients are women of color, and they’re women who have achieved a certain type of professional success. They’re already people leaders, managing teams. They’ve risen the ranks and are beginning to come up against their own perceived limits in confidence, or are ready to shift behaviors that aren’t working for them anymore.

I heard you pause when you spoke about women struggling with confidence. What happened in that moment?

Here’s why I paused—when women approach me for coaching, they’ll often say they’re struggling with low confidence. But recently, I completed some qualitative market research of 22 women executives of color, directors through CEOs. What they shared is that they are confident in themselves and in their competence. They know their capabilities. But their challenge is in navigating certain professional contexts, especially contexts in which they do not have a sense of belonging.

As women executives, we invest so much mental, emotional, and physical energy trying to mold ourselves to be seen and heard—even though we already have a seat at the table. Why? Sometimes we are the first, or the only, women at the table. We are entering spaces that are not designed to include us.

As a result, many women feel they must work extra hard or take precaution with their words or tone. They want to speak freely, but they have seen the consequences of doing so. For them, the coaching question might be, who do you want to be in environments like this? Or how can you be who you want to be? What needs to happen to make this possible?

Beyond this research, I have noticed a few trends in my coaching as an executive leadership coach. There are many women who have a large scope of work and feel they have to manage every aspect of that scope. They don’t leverage their teams to the extent they could because they don’t want to burden others, so instead they burden themselves. Or they might have a “helping” mindset that is making it hard for them to scale themselves. Regardless, they aren’t showing up in the way they want anymore.

Returning to something you said previously, I’m curious that you described your coaching style as “gentle” because I have a gentleness to me, too, yet I hear many more coaches speak to their “boldness” as an asset. Can you say a bit more about what you mean by a gentle approach?

I am bold when I need to be, but it’s not often what I lead with. To me, gentleness involves not diving in to “save the client” when they might be stuck. Faced with many demands, leaders can lack the bandwidth to process their work and lives. In the coaching context, gentleness can look like holding time and space for them to work things out on their own terms.

What do you wish everyone knew about coaching?

Coaching is not about training you to fit an expected mold. At its core, coaching is about grounding you in who you are because, when you operate from that place, you have executive presence.

What is your vision for the coaching industry?

One of my dreams is that the industry better reflect the communities we live in, so it’s a message of diversification. For nearly three years, I served on the board of a new nonprofit that focused on diversifying the coaching industry, specifically in terms of race. I am now a faculty member in a beta coaching certification program for people of color. The challenge that I see is how to create sustainable business models to scale the industry’s diversification faster.

One thing that I like about Cento is that you’re bringing diverse voices together. Maybe it’s the marketer in me, but I like that you’re telling stories. People learn so well through stories.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.