Tag Archive for: Intentional Leadership

Living Intentionally: How an Executive Coach Can Guide You Toward a More Purposeful Life

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living intentionallyOver the coming months, theglasshammer.com will be writing a series of practical and insightful articles to help you thrive at work on your continued professional journey, however you define it. Living intentionally, avoiding burnout, reducing stress and achieving clarity around your professional and personal goals from an executive coaching perspective is our focus. Additionally, we will provide links to resources to really help you take meaningful steps on the journey to what you want to do and be.

We are living in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times regardless of who you are and what you believe. Finding Zen can be elusive as we try not have jitters around markets, layoffs, job hunting, inflation and future client revenue pipelines. It’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of tasks, deadlines, and constant decision-making. For many executives, and perhaps working mothers (and fathers) most of all, the demands of their roles leave little time for reflection or intentional action. Yet, living intentionally—aligning daily choices with long-term values and goals—is one of the most powerful ways to achieve personal fulfillment, effective leadership, and career success.

But how does one begin to live intentionally in the midst of a demanding and often chaotic life? The answer lies in self-awareness, strategic planning, and conscious decision-making. An executive coach can play a pivotal role in guiding leaders through this process, helping them not only survive the daily grind but thrive with purpose and direction.

What Does It Mean to Live Intentionally?

Living intentionally is about making conscious choices that align with your values, long-term vision, and goals. It involves setting clear priorities, staying focused on what matters most, and avoiding distractions that do not contribute to your overall purpose. Instead of letting life happen to you, living intentionally means actively creating the life you want, one decision at a time. Work with our coaches [book here] to help you with the following:

  1. Setting Clear Goals: Identifying both short- and long-term objectives that are meaningful and fulfilling, rather than reacting to external pressures or obligations.
  2. Aligning Actions with Values: Making choices that reflect personal and professional values, ensuring that your actions support what you truly care about.
  3. Prioritizing Time and Energy: Understanding that your time and energy are finite, and choosing to allocate them toward high-impact activities that move you toward your vision.
  4. Self-Reflection and Growth: Regularly assessing your progress, learning from experiences, and adapting your strategies for continued improvement.

Living intentionally is not just about career success—it’s about creating a life that feels aligned and authentic. For executives, this might mean fostering healthier relationships, improving work-life balance, and contributing meaningfully to the larger organization or community.

How an Executive Coach Can Help You Live Intentionally

An executive coach is a trained professional who works one-on-one with leaders to help them achieve their personal and professional goals. Through a combination of coaching techniques, feedback, and structured exercises, an executive coach can help you clarify your vision, set strategic goals, and create actionable plans for achieving those goals. Here’s how an executive coach can specifically help you live more intentionally:

1. Clarifying Your Values and Vision

One of the first steps in living intentionally is having a clear understanding of your values and vision. Many executives are so focused on day-to-day operations that they haven’t taken the time to articulate what truly matters to them, both personally and professionally. An executive coach can guide you through exercises that help you clarify what you value most, whether that’s innovation, integrity, family, or something else.

Once your values are clear, your coach will help you create a vision for the future that aligns with these values. This vision becomes your compass for making decisions and setting goals, ensuring that every action you take moves you closer to your desired outcome.

2. Setting and Achieving Meaningful Goals

Setting goals is essential for living intentionally, but it’s equally important to ensure that these goals are meaningful and aligned with your long-term vision. An executive coach can help you set both big-picture and smaller, actionable goals. By breaking down large goals into manageable steps, your coach ensures that you stay on track and focused on what truly matters.

Additionally, your coach will help you avoid the trap of setting goals based on external pressures or fleeting desires. Instead, your goals will be rooted in your values and long-term vision, making them more likely to lead to fulfillment and lasting success.

3. Developing Strong Decision-Making Skills

Intentional living requires making decisions that reflect your values and move you closer to your goals. However, executives often face numerous decisions daily, and the sheer volume can lead to decision fatigue or reactive decision-making. An executive coach helps you develop the skills necessary to make decisions that are thoughtful, deliberate, and aligned with your larger objectives.

Your coach will help you create frameworks for evaluating decisions, ensuring that you prioritize what matters most. This process helps you avoid being swept along by external pressures and stay true to your vision.

4. Enhancing Time and Energy Management

For many executives, time is their most precious resource, and managing it effectively is crucial to living intentionally. An executive coach will work with you to assess how you currently spend your time and identify areas for improvement. They can help you establish priorities, delegate tasks more effectively, and create strategies for eliminating distractions and minimizing time-wasting activities.

By optimizing how you manage your time and energy, you free up resources to focus on the activities that truly drive your success and align with your purpose.

5. Improving Self-Awareness and Emotional Intelligence

Self-awareness is at the heart of intentional living. Understanding your strengths, weaknesses, emotional triggers, and behavioral patterns allows you to make more informed decisions and respond thoughtfully to challenges. An executive coach helps you increase your self-awareness by offering feedback, encouraging reflection, and guiding you through tools like emotional intelligence assessments.

By improving your emotional intelligence, you become better equipped to handle high-pressure situations, build stronger relationships, and lead with authenticity. This, in turn, contributes to a more intentional approach to leadership and life.

6. Creating Accountability and Sustainable Change

Living intentionally requires ongoing effort and commitment. An executive coach provides you with the accountability needed to stay on course, ensuring that you continue to make progress toward your goals. Your coach helps you set milestones, track your progress, and celebrate successes along the way.

Furthermore, a coach encourages you to reflect on your challenges and setbacks, learning from them and adjusting your approach as necessary. This continuous cycle of reflection and adaptation ensures that living intentionally becomes a sustainable practice, not just a one-time goal.

The Power of Intentional Leadership

Living intentionally is a transformative way of approaching both life and leadership. For executives, the demands of leadership can often push intentionality to the backburner, but making deliberate choices aligned with your values and long-term vision is the key to sustaining success, happiness, and personal fulfillment.

An executive coach can be an invaluable partner in this journey, offering clarity, guidance, and support to help you create a life that reflects your highest aspirations. Whether you’re looking to refine your decision-making, manage your time more effectively, or develop deeper self-awareness, working with a coach can provide the tools and accountability you need to live and lead with intention.

By investing in intentional living, executives can build more balanced, impactful careers while enjoying greater satisfaction and well-being in both their professional and personal lives.

By Nicki Gilmour, executive and leadership coach, founder and CEO of theglasshammer.com

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Erica Klinkowize: EVP, US Treasurer, TD Bank

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Erica Klinkowize“I thrive on change as opposed to shying away from it,” says Erica Klinkowize. “By honing the skill over the years of accepting that nothing will stay the same, I have been able to weather storms and adapt.”

Previously profiled in 2022 as the CBNA Treasurer for Citi, Klinkowize has since continued her transformative journey in the financial industry, bringing her passion for complex challenges and people-focused leadership to her current role as EVP and U.S. Treasurer at TD Bank. She speaks to how she views resilience, adaptability, and intentional leadership as foundational to her career evolution.

Thriving in Transformation

Energized by opportunities to make an impact, Klinkowize is as much a leader who embraces challenge as she does change. Consistently choosing to push her boundaries throughout her career, Klinkowize acknowledges, “I’m not drawn to easy paths.” This penchant for challenge has defined her career and leadership, from her years at Goldman Sachs and Bank of America to her current role as EVP and U.S. Treasurer at TD Bank.

“I gravitate towards these challenges. Whether it’s transitioning to Citi when they are in transformation, or specifically taking this position at TD to help enhance and build out the US Treasury organization, I strive to make a visible positive change.”

Klinkowize’s passion for transformation is matched by her deep interest in the complexities of the financial industry and the dedication of those who thrive within it.

“Treasury is an unbelievably exciting space. There are an incredible number of topics, a multitude of risks you’re managing,” she explains. “I’m constantly learning and leading.”

Beyond the intellectual demands, Klinkowize is inspired by the people she gets to work with, “they are very passionate, and it resonates with me. I want to support them and help them as they navigate a very complex environment…there is so much to accomplish, and there are so many people to help.”

A Change Agent with a Vision for Leadership

As a leader, Klinkowize embraces the role of a change agent, acknowledging, “I can’t accept the status quo. I can’t let myself not ask a question.” It’s that continual strive for improvement that motivates her, “it’s less about innovation and more about what else is out there, how can you be better at what you do.”

In driving transformation, Klinkowize underscores the ability to navigate and support multiple levels of change, from the individual to the team to the organization.

“It’s about guiding a large group emotionally and intellectually through change while recognizing you are part of a larger whole. You can’t make a change and think it won’t have downstream impacts—you have to stay mindful of upstream dynamics within the company.”

She continues, “Being a change agent is causing the change, but then also managing the emotional, intellectual, and organizational side. The internal and external clarity on what you’re doing, and how you’re doing it.”

Klinkowize emphasizes that effective change also requires being skilled at collaboration and leading with influence.

“I’m a big connector of people. If there’s a problem at hand, it doesn’t matter if you work for me or not, let’s come together to solve the issue.” She continues, “it’s important to be able to inspire people who don’t work for you, lead without directly managing them.”

Building Resilience

Even as Klinkowize embraces change and the transformation that can come from it, she recognizes that there were times in her career where she felt more like she was weathering the storm than riding on a wave of opportunity.

“I want to be honest and open about my experiences, so that women don’t feel that it was all straight shot up, because it certainly was not.”

She recounts moments in her career that might have deterred others—embarrassing missteps in meetings, even an instance of demotion. But rather than dwell on these experiences, Klinkowize speaks to the importance of navigating those difficult moments and emerging stronger on the other side as key to developing resilience and adaptability.

“It comes from learning and paying attention to how you act in those situations. How you act under stress, under duress, in moments where you’re embarrassed—you keep building up that stamina.”

Klinkowize also points to the power of mentorship and empathetic support in weathering challenging periods. “It’s important to have mentors you trust, both inside and outside of work because you need a voice of reason,” she advises. She maintains that the support of others is critical no matter how high one climbs up the ladder of leadership.

“The more senior you become, the greater the risks in your career. Not everyone will be nice, and not everything will be fair. That’s why resilience and stamina are essential—and why surrounding yourself with the right people matters.”

Intentional Leadership

With her breadth of leadership experience, Klinkowize is thoughtful in her approach to building a team culture, seeing it as a deliberate, ongoing process. When she steps into a new role, she takes time to think about what she wants to bring to the position and how she can improve from her previous experiences.

“As I’m gearing up to start, I’m very intentional about the person that I want to be and the environment I want to create around me. I prepare…I don’t wing it.” This intentionality is evident in the steps she took to establish her team’s culture at TD Bank.

“I made it clear that integrity was my number one standard, setting the tone for everything. I approached it very deliberately—I changed the team name, created a distribution list. Also, I helped craft a story, like an elevator pitch, to clearly describe what my organization does. Everything was very purposeful.”

She notes that her goal is to create an environment where everyone understands their role and feels connected to the larger mission. “I want the rest of the firm to understand what we are becoming,” she explains. By fostering a sense of clarity and collaboration, Klinkowize ensures that her team is aligned and motivated. Her approach underscores her belief that effective leadership is about more than strategy; it’s about creating a shared vision that everyone can rally behind.

A Legacy of Positive Impact

Beyond building the culture, Klinkowize is intentional in striking a balance between driving excellence without compromising the well-being of her team.

“We have to balance how hard we make people work,” she states, acknowledging that while finance is a high-pressure field, it’s essential to create a sustainable work environment.

Klinkowize also recognizes that not everyone will embrace change in the same way, and as a leader of transformation she wants to “help people understand that we will come out the other side.”

Looking ahead, Klinkowize hopes to leave a legacy of positive impact, both in her organization and in the people she leads.

“I want to contribute to the financial safety and soundness of the company, innovate, and bring excellence. I want to continue to be a role model as an empathetic and accountable leader.”

Outside of work, Klinkowize immerses herself in science fiction and fantasy books, cherishes moments with her family and dogs, but admits with a laugh, “I still struggle to find enough time to exercise.”

By Jessica Robaire

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