I spent over 11 years in quota-carrying sales roles before I ever thought about coaching anyone. Field sales, general management, government sales, supply chain consulting. Different roles, same core job: carry a number, hit it, figure out what works when it isn't working.

Even back then, I couldn't leave well enough alone. I read every sales book I could get my hands on, on my own time, long before anyone was paying me to think about coaching. It wasn't part of my job. I just wanted to understand why some approaches worked and others didn't, and I was never satisfied with "that's just how it's done."

That habit is probably why, when I moved into a coaching role, it felt less like a career change and more like finally getting paid for something I'd been doing for free. There was no program handed to me and no playbook waiting on a shelf. I was responsible for making the people I coached better at their jobs, and it was on me to figure out how. Over the next four-plus years, I built the programs, competitions, and coaching approach to impact employees.

That's not actually what makes my approach different, though. A lot of trainers used to carry a quota. What I did with those four years is the part most people skip.

I put real pressure on myself to actually learn the training and development side of the job, not just the sales side. I read the research. I studied the methodology. Then I tested it, constantly. I tried different formats, different coaching structures, different ways of giving feedback, and I measured what actually changed behavior versus what just felt good in the room. Some things I tried failed. I threw them out. Some worked better than anything in the textbook, and I kept building on those.

That's where Level 3 comes from. In the Kirkpatrick model, Level 3 is behavior, whether someone actually does something differently back on the job. Almost nobody builds coaching to that standard, because it's hard to measure and harder to design for. I spent four years obsessed with getting there anyway.

I've shared that work outside my own company too, presenting my Coach and Compete framework at the ATD International Core 4 Conference and the ATD Kansas City Chapter Conference. Coach and Compete came directly out of that experimentation: structured competition, embedded coaching, and a Play Tape method where people assess their own performance.

When I'm not working, I'm at home in the Kansas City area with my husband and our new baby. Most days that's the best reminder I get that real development, whether it's a person or a sales team, takes patience and shows up slowly, not all at once.