For Dr. Nicole Boutilier, a busy physician and health-care leader, the journey to becoming an executive coach grew out of an innate desire to help others build out the depth of their leadership.
“I really was interested in building the capacity of leaders around me – to get them to be their own problem solvers and to trust their own instincts,” she says. “I just felt like it wasn't something that I necessarily knew how to do intuitively.”
Nicole, Vice President Medicine for Nova Scotia Health, has worked in various leadership roles over 25 years as an emergency room and family physician. More recently, she has become a certified executive coach.
And now, in addition to her high-pace career in health care, she is a member of the coaching roster at Vision Coaching, eager to help leaders inside and outside the medical profession reach new heights.
“I really enjoy transformation, whether it's for myself or others or systems. I find it very energizing,” Nicole says. “I found that coaching was a good match for me with that kind of transformation lens to it – the ability to help move people who are looking for a change to a new place.”
Bruce McLeod, the late General Manager of Coaching Services at Vision Coaching and a faculty member at Royal Roads University’s pre-eminent graduate executive coaching program, introduced her to Vision after being so impressed with her as she studied towards her certification in 2019.
“I felt like it was a really transformative type of learning that I went through....It focused me on things that I had forgotten about myself or had buried for a long time." – Dr. Nicole Boutilier, physician and executive coach.
Today, Nicole says Bruce was a motivating force for her and a deep influence on who she is as a coach.
“Meeting him at that time in my life was a very, very positive influence. He influenced how I went through the coaching experience, how I became a coach, and what I took away from that when I started to coach people myself,” she says.
That journey to coaching grew out of a conversation she had at a national medical conference with a fellow physician who had already become a leadership coach. As he shared his experiences as a coach, that ignited the interest welling up within her – and, within months, she had applied to Royal Roads.
Becoming a coach has allowed her to transform her own approach to leadership, and to her own life.
“I felt like it was a really transformative type of learning that I went through. I've had lots of education over time, but I don't think I ever went through something that actually was able to help me really identify what was really important at this stage of my life,” she says. “And I felt like it changed me and my outlook.
“It focused me on things that I had forgotten about myself or had buried for a long time. And really took me from being a busy health-care leader, physician, and mother and it allowed me to set the next phase of my life up for success,” she says.
“It became more than just what was in front of me that day. It really gave me a firm vision of what was possible. It just really helped me focus on that.”
As a coach, Nicole’s areas of expertise include leadership coaching, physician and health-care coaching, leadership development, career transitions and career development as well as personal development, work/life integration, building resilience, preventing burnout and career revitalization.
Throughout the pandemic, it became acutely obvious that health-care leaders would benefit from coaching. And Nicole felt that those who did turn to coaching for help did much better.
“Leaders needed to be able to maintain their own hope and focus in order to help the people that they were in charge of leading,” she says. “And I think the more opportunities that people got to reflect on where they were, how they're doing, what actions they need to take on their own, the better they were apt to do.”
To learn more about Nicole and the Vision Coaching roster, visit the Vision Coaching website.