How To Create A Niche And Overcome Health Challenges For A Successful Career

By Doug Bennett aka The Goals Guy® with special guest Donna Grote McGrath

Is one of your overarching goals to reach the pinnacle of your career? If it is, it might be time to start weeding out any potential obstacles.

I had a particularly interesting conversation about this with Donna Grote McGrath, a leadership coach and someone whom I like to call the Mary Poppins of in-house lawyers. Donna is a woman with a single purpose – to bring fun and energy back into the in-house legal world. So far, she’s been rocking and rolling in this niche.

During our conversation, she shared how niching down changed the trajectory of her career and how underlying health problems could stop you from achieving the results you want. 

You can hear my conversation with Donna on the latest episode of my Goals Do Come True podcast by clicking here.

In this blog, I’ll be sharing Donna’s insights into creating a niche for yourself and navigating health challenges – either on a personal level or as a business owner.

Understanding and pinpointing your niche

Donna’s journey to finding her niche began by identifying a problem – a huge vacuum that needed filling. 

Donna: “I stepped away from practising law because I saw a lot of people going through the same challenges that I had already gone through and overcome. My experience birthed my niche – solving problems for the people who are in the same shoes I once filled. 

I took a look at all the skills that I had beyond coaching and I realised that I wasn’t just a coach. I discovered and honed in on my real talent: putting structures around problems and even better, building relationships with people. 

Since I had the experience and had worked closely with in-house lawyers, I understood their actual problems and how different they could be from the problems that solicitors in private practices face. Having this background and understanding really helped me niche down and to a large extent, bolstered my credibility.”

Identifying the spoke in the wheel

While niching down can bring you one step closer to your career goals and help you achieve better results, there is one sneaky problem that most people don’t seem to notice until it’s much too late: their health.

Donna has worked with many brilliant clients and she shared that, in many cases, dealing with health challenges could heavily impact your career path and experiences.

The key step – it may seem – is to spot these symptoms early on and start working around them. 

Donna: “I start off with every single client by giving them a leadership assessment upfront. Part of that assessment is to explore any potential underlying health issues that could be causing their experiences to happen. 

I’ve asked a couple of my clients to get checked and some of them come back with the discovery that they were actually undergoing peri-menopause. I encourage these assessments because I wouldn’t want to take on a client if the programme is unlikely to yield any tangible results due to an underlying problem. I typically recommend to my clients – and just about anyone – to look out for symptoms and book an appointment with a specialist.” 

Experiencing these health challenges could heavily impact your capabilities and prevent you from smashing your career goals. It certainly helps to spot them early and prevent them from playing boss with your mojo.

Businesses can step up and make the difference

As a business owner, the secret sauce to creating a legacy that sticks is by cutting your team members some slack and focusing on creating a psychological safe space for them. 

Donna: “Get your HR and your legal team integrated into your business and get them to help you manage people from top down properly. If you fail to do this, your legacy wouldn’t be as successful as it could be. Who wants to have a terrible legacy of leaving people behind? A legacy of people who haven’t been properly taken care of by their workplace? No one. 

As a caveat, I’d like to say that I don’t think it’s solely the employer’s responsibility. I think it’s the person’s responsibility to inform as well. However, in some cases, the women don’t know about it or feel free to actually say anything. That’s why I think it’s critical that managers get the necessary leadership training to be able to create that psychological safe space and create the conversation.”

Empathy doesn’t cut it

If you had asked me my thoughts on this topic a year ago, I’d have probably advocated for showing empathy. However, as Donna pointed out, this answer is dead wrong.

Donna: “I would say that empathy is probably the worst emotion that you can have in these situations. Empathy in its purest form doesn’t help anybody. What you NEED is to have compassion.

The meaning of empathy is being able to feel your feelings. And if I sit here feeling your feelings, that’s good for nobody. We’ll just sit here wallowing in stagnancy. Compassion is the right word because it’s got action in it. You want to take action to help.

But if you don’t have the ability to help, change and transform, then chuck empathy out the door because you wouldn’t be able to help yourself or anybody else.”

Having reflected on what Donna said, how do you feel about your career trajectory? Are you ready to shake things up by niching down? Are you willing to play your part as a business owner? More importantly, are you keeping tabs on your health and ultimately preserving your mojo?

If you’re in a position to get things back on track and start smashing your career goals, why not click here to book a complimentary discovery session with me and find out how I can support you?