Bill Fanelli has had several careers throughout his adult life, and he’s grown to be an expert in many areas, including management, leadership, and career coaching. Changing careers isn’t uncommon, but for Bill it came as a surprise when he was offered a promotion he didn’t actually want to take.
Working with a career coach, he realized that what he really wanted to do was be active in adult development and leadership. So he did it. After working in high-powered careers with global companies such as Eli Lilly and Company, he now coaches clients to help them realize their dreams and take steps toward making them a reality.
We interviewed Bill about how coaching can help people create their best future, what “Fill Your Future” means, and why filling your future is a key element at Kenosis.
How Can Coaching Help You Create Your Best Future?
About 23 years ago, Bill was in a management role and started doing manager education and organizational development. He was helping people grow, and was becoming an expert in the language of “Fill Your Future.”
A few years later, he attended a spiritual retreat with Kenosis Founder and Co-Owner Dave Shields, and they discussed Dave’s vision for the business. From this conversation on their drive together, Bill recalls Dave saying, “Wouldn’t it be neat if we weren’t only about the elimination or the healing around mental health, but we could also help people continue to flourish beyond that to really become the person they’re supposed to be?”
Being well-versed in adult and leadership development, Bill knew he could help. Now, 17 years later, Bill is a Career Coach at Kenosis, and he still works in organizational and leadership development, too. He became a career coach a few years ago, and when clients express a need to shift careers, Kenosis associates and other professionals refer them to Bill.
He’s also working to help Kenosis frame out a larger coaching program at Kenosis beyond just career coaching. He notes, “Fill Your Future encompasses all the forms” of coaching, not just for careers.
Bill explains, “People who are wanting to fill their future need coaches because it’s hard to do it by yourself.” It can be hard to determine how you want your future to look. Other times, you know what you want, but may be unsure of how to get there. Either way, coaches can help.
In coaching, Bill has a solid framework of five questions he’s been using for years. They’ve helped him change careers multiple times, and have allowed him to help clients, too.
The questions are:
- What is it that you hope for?
- Why do you hope for that?
- When do you want to get there? When do you want to achieve this?
- How are you going to achieve this?
- Who is going to help you? Besides the coach, who are those other people who are going to help you?
These questions are the groundwork for almost any type of coaching you might be looking for, although each field can add in more specific questions to help you find the answers.
The great news is that you can define your future any way you want. “You define what your future is, and it should be energizing to you,” Bill explains. The future you envision for yourself should challenge you, “but you are the architect of it.”
A coach can then step in and help you figure out how to start constructing your new future. They can say, “Here’s a fundamental process” and that process will be based on Bill’s five questions – or some version of them.
What Does it Mean to “Fill Your Future”?
For some, the idea of filling your future might feel too big, perhaps intimidating. After all, being the architect of your own dream can be daunting!
But what does it actually mean to “fill your future”?
Bill explains the concept is simply, “the process of defining how it is you want to grow.” It’s not overly complicated, although that doesn’t make it easy.
Much like change, filling your future doesn’t always happen as you plan it, or even as you would expect. Bill recalls, “It happened to me. I got that jolt unwittingly many years ago, early in my management career, and I needed it.” Sometimes in order to make change and put yourself on a new path, you need to hear some hard truths. He understands the difficulties that can come up because he’s been through it himself.
In his coaching practice, Bill explains, “It starts with helping people find the hopes and dreams for themselves in their lives.” People from all walks of life and backgrounds have come to him for advice over the years, so he’s familiar and comfortable with the idea that everyone’s dreams look a little different.
“It might be ‘I want to get better in a relationship’ or ‘I want to find and grow a new career,’” Bill notes about some of the hopes people have for the future. It could also be “I want to get better at the job I do’ or ‘I want to be a better leader.’’ There are all different forms of filling your future, and once you determine what it is that you want, you can work with a coach on how to achieve them.
Determining what you want can be a challenge, albeit perhaps fun in many ways. But implementing the processes to fill your future is the real hard work. Bill has empathy for his clients because he understands the struggle. “The fact that I struggle with certain things about getting better helps me with understanding people better and having empathy for when they get hung up. The implementation is the hardest,” he explains.
The best way to start filling your future is to take action. Bill says, “People don’t grow from just the study of books. They grow from life experiences, in fact, they even grow from hardship. We know this empirically.” Triumphs and struggles alike will help you grow into the future you’ve dreamed of.
The important thing is to keep trying, even when you’ve hit a roadblock or feel discouraged. “I’m always trying. I’m not always successful, but I’m trying,” Bill emphasizes.
What is the Significance of Filling Your Future?
Everyone’s vision of the future is unique. We all hope and dream differently depending on the lives we lead and what makes us happy. What’s common among just about everyone is the desire to find “joy, peace, and gratitude.”
Bill says, “That’s not complacency. It’s not happiness. Joy is a different thing. When you see people who just seem to be serenely calm with that nice smile, there’s a feeling of peace there, and everybody wants that. It usually comes with people having a sense of who they are and becoming that.” We might dream of different things, but ultimately, we want to live joyful and peaceful lives.
For each person, what or where that joy and peace comes from is different. But, according to Bill, “The process to get there is similar.” You have to ask yourself what’s going to be fulfilling for you, and that can be your end goal.
Once you’ve determined your end goal, and perhaps even made some progress on achieving it, the question still remains: how will you feel when you’ve attained it? Bill says the best way he can describe it is probably a “sense of wisdom, and then the desire to invest in others. They’re at peace. They’re no longer straining.”
Most of us probably agree: a strong sense of wisdom and peace in our lives sounds delightful. Surprisingly, the hard part isn’t the planning. “Getting better at something, especially if it’s a big goal is hard work. The hardest part is not the plan. The hardest part is the implementation and sustaining.”
Bill is intimately familiar with the hard work of implementing and sustaining new dreams, as he’s been through it more than once. His first career was in public health, and then he started in the management and manufacturing world. He found that he was able to make a big difference, and worked with some great people. He notes, “I learned a lot about management and leadership.”
He did such a good job that leadership wanted him to continue up the manufacturing career ladder, but in a different area. Unexpectedly, he didn’t want to move forward. He was forced to question himself about why he didn’t want to climb the management ladder, and explain it to his wife and his boss.
He says, “I didn’t really know except that I had this visceral feeling. So I had a career coach who helped me kind of walk through that. I redirected my career into this direction of leadership and adult development.” A strong gut instinct led him to a new career, one that he still loves today.