About Me, Virginia Bauman.

Courage in this context is the capacity to do something that might have negative outcomes. What needs to be true in order for you to do the hard thing, the thing that you don’t want to do? What is preventing you from saying what needs to be said? What decision are you putting off?

The prevalence of ADHD in founders is extremely high. And it’s easy to see why: people with ADHD are highly attuned to high-reward, high-stakes work. If you have ADHD, understanding how your ADHD impacts your organization is crucial for self-awareness and leadership. Building the skills to manage ADHD related challenges helps you scale alongside your company while modeling accessibility and inclusion.

High performing teams are composed of exceptional communicators. Do your teams know what high performance communication looks like? How can we make the cost of communication cheaper? What expectations does your org need to create and reinforce to have excellent written and verbal communication standards? How do we think well together as a group?

Do you have conviction in your approach? What are your sources of strength? How can you coordinate actions for greater gains? When in this agenda, I’m often helping my clients understand the fundamental principles of strategy or helping them apply a strategic lens. Strategic thinking can be applied to nearly any challenge but rarely is.

Working with the components of trust, being in integrity with self and the other, treating conflict as a skill to deepen. Relationships are the arteries of our work and life so they feature heavily in my coaching work. Coaching helps cofounders repair a rupture, CEOs build trust with board members, or approach a difficult relationship with honesty and compassion. Strong working relationships make us better.

When there are complex multi-role relationships in the company, such as family or friends, the need to approach these relationships with intention is even higher.

How do you need to adapt to hold the cognitive load, the anxiety, the stress? What sets your nervous system off? How do you take care of your nervous system? What are you learning from your emotions? If you are pushing yourself to operate at the edge of your capabilities your nervous system has a big role to play in your growth. I believe the goal of nervous system work is not to optimize, control, and regulate–it’s to incorporate.

I believe that if you are building in the venture capital ecosystem you need to understand how it works. Planning for macro-environment shifts, raising capital, managing a board, making choices in alignment with the funding strategy you have pursued are all aided by understanding capital systems.

Transitions, in this context, refers to the inner-experience of change. How do you need to lead to bring your team along with a rapidly changing landscape? What moves do you have if people are clinging to a way of working that is no longer best suited to the current moment? If change feels constant, how do you build resilience?