Helping people get out of the rut gave Maria her own business

CLIMBING the corporate ladder for 15 years, Maria Chapman was managing a team of 80 people at Eir, on a good salary, and juggling family life while raising three young children.

However, after doing a Diploma in Life and Business Life Coaching about ten years ago, she loved it so much that when the opportunity for redundancy came up a few years ago, she decided to take the entrepreneurial step and establish her own business.

Fast forward a couple of years and Maria Chapman Life Coaching is a December 2020 winner of the South Dublin County LEO bus-stop campaign.

“This week the poster goes up at 13 bus shelters, a pic of me and the business and how LEO supports small businesses,” said Maria.

“They have given me great support, just fantastic and I haven’t even used more of the services like mentoring.”

The mentoring aspect is something Maria already has extensive knowledge of considering it is essentially her bread and butter.

Although, her official business premises is in Clondalkin, at Somers Psychotherapy, Orchard Road, and Covid-19 has drastically limited face-to-face contact with therapists, this has not negatively impacted the work Maria conducts with her clients.

“It has been difficult for therapists working in addiction and other areas, but to be honest most of my meetings are all online. One or two prefer face-to-face, but online meetings have worked.

“A client who started with me in March, said she’d prefer face-to-face. I said we will try one session online and we are still online now. Another client does a session with me after work in her car. Some of the benefits are the convenience, and not having to find parking in the village.”

Maria’s services include coaching in personal life, career, return to work and parenting, but it is the life coaching that has taken up most of her time, often with people who feel undervalued in their current job.

“People who feel stuck in a rut, procrastinating, with self-doubt. It can be very difficult when you are so close to the problem, you don’t know where to start.

“What I do, is take a step back with them. Make a goal from point A to B. Build a pathway and I walk closely with them. I have a good bit of accountability. At the end of a session, I say what are we going to do by the time we meet again. It helps to provide a little push but ultimately people are doing it themselves.”

A common theme amongst clients is deep seated feelings of inadequacies that everybody is cognisant of in their lives.

Maria continued: “Pretty much every client, whether they had a terrible childhood or a good childhood, they took on terrible limiting beliefs ‘I’m not good enough’, ‘what will people think of me? It stops you reaching your full potential.

“We do have to look back, but that voice in our head that feeds us BS ‘don’t you always fail? One client discovered he had a real fear of failure, and he had no idea. These fears are there because we work on auto-pilot, get into a habit.

“The coaching is to get them to ask about it, trying to unpack it. What I find is that coaching spans a person’s life. It is in the personal life as well not just work.

“One client last January wanted to change a long-time job, but she is actually still in the same job and much better. It is in yourself. We make our own reality. It is how you react to the situation. If you switch jobs, will you bring the same stresses with you?”

Visit Mariachapman for further details on her services.