Meet Writer and Coach Steph Balzer

Steph and I are building Second Act, a community for entrepreneurs, coaches, and creative professionals. Learn more about her below, and please consider joining us!

Tell us about yourself.

My name is Steph Balzer. I am many things professionally, and most of it centers around “purpose work,” which is why I named my company Mission. I’m driven by values like curiosity, creativity, justice and empathy, and I am a systems thinker, generally. I think about systems of relationships, people, and productivity, and how elements of our world fit together big-picture.

More concretely, I am a writer and publisher, and I recently founded a journal on coaching called Cento. I’m also a nonprofit professional, teacher and trainer, marketer, coach, and community builder. That last title, community builder, is newer to me, but I realize it is the heart of what I’ve been doing all along, so I am very excited to consider this the super-structure that pulls everything else together. I am, along with you, co-founder of a community for people who are designing the “second act” of their career. Other things about me personally—I live in Las Vegas, near the Arts District and the Strip. I like downtowns and city centers. I’m pretty girly and silly, but also serious and thoughtful. I’m watching Game of Thrones for the first time and it is so intense.

Tell me your thoughts on entrepreneurship and starting your own company?

I don’t know if I ever told you the story of how I started working at the Phoenix Business Journal, where we met? One day, just out of college, I went to the paper’s office to buy a “Book of Lists” because I’d moved to Phoenix and needed to find a job. The office manager at the time hired me on the spot as a temporary receptionist. You could say it was fate or serendipity. From that role, I was offered a temp position researching data on public companies along with Angela Gabriel. Eventually, I said to John Genzale, the editor at the time, “I think I can write stories. I’d like to try.” I’d never taken a journalism class, never identified as a news junkie, but business was interesting to me, so John gave me one assignment, then another. I remember his first piece of advice was not to back into my lede—and I had no idea what he was talking about. From there, I kept learning on the job, working my way up to full-time staff reporter. In total, I worked at the newspaper for about eight years.

I’ve never heard that story—that’s great. To this day, my supervisors on the advertising side at the Journal—Joelle Hadley and Nancy Mitchell—were two of the best managers I’ve ever had.

Oh, same. I am incredibly grateful to everyone at the paper. The professional growth I experienced, and the relationships I built, changed the trajectory of my life. I model so many aspects of my own management and team leadership after Don Henninger and Ilana Lowery, two more of my editors. They believed wholeheartedly in their reporters, and brought a balance of structure and autonomy to the newsroom. Now, every time I mentor someone newer to the creative process, I channel my “Inner Don.” There’s nothing more helpful than to have someone go over your copy line-by-line, or walk through your design choices with you, to help you improve. I remember there would be days in which it felt like the only thing left of a piece that I’d written was my byline, like gah, why is my name even on this?! That was motivation to keep improving. Newsrooms are competitive, but we also respected and supported each other.

Yes, and managing and leading a team is an art.

For sure. You and I were so lucky to have experienced a workplace like that as young professionals. Now we have this shared touchpoint and standard of excellence.

Returning to your question of my interest in entrepreneurship, my favorite stories to write were profiles of entrepreneurs and startups. I came to admire the entrepreneur’s sense of self, and the way they put everything in motion. It was a combination of skills and character traits that felt completely foreign to me as a writer and observer. (By the way, I love those identities too, and I feel like I’ve come home to myself as a publisher of Cento and contributor to Generation Next and other publications.) Leaping ahead, after years of working in nonprofits, philanthropy, and higher education, I began to see that true entrepreneurship would get me closer to what I wanted to create, so it’s like I backed into it and eventually said, “well, why not me?” I’ve always been enterprising. I’m not intimidated to learn on the job, and that’s a big part of it, the willingness to jump into the deep end.

You also work as a coach. How many clients do you have? How many of them are entrepreneurs?

I love coaching, and I believe in it wholeheartedly. Jason Ighani, one of my recent interviewees for Cento, said it was clear that being a coach would require him to be a better person, and I relate to this one-hundred percent. Coaching has taught me to be more present and compassionate, and to believe that others are inherently capable and resilient. In my particular tradition, we say that people are “naturally creative, resourceful, and whole.” This isn’t bullshit, either. You can’t give this idea lip service and be effective as a coach. It’s a tenant, and a mindset, and an agreement with yourself (and it also means that is how you think of yourself.)

But I also quickly realized that, working solely as a coach, I missed project, product, and team work. Now I intend to fold the majority of my coaching into the Second Act community. I am deeply interested in the evolution of the field and diverse voices within it, and how coaching skills and applications can parlay into unique products, sustainable businesses and intellectual property.

I guess I would differentiate what a life coach does from a corporate or leadership coach, is that correct?

Coaches develop niches of practice, and often this is an organic result of who is in one’s network, or where you have credibility, combined with the work you like to do. Your clientele might evolve out of your previous career, say, or as the result of your unique identities or life experiences.

That said, think about entrepreneurship and how it impacts the totality of one’s life—from how we respond to stress and risk-taking, to how we make decisions, to how we manage our energy, money, and time. I see that there are fewer separations between our personal and professional lives as entrepreneurs, so it becomes coaching for the whole person—or it can be. Choosing to follow your own path is an ongoing discovery of what makes you happy and fulfilled, and I like that a lot. It demands growth in such a cool way because you’re always stepping into the unknown and riding lots of ups and downs, a journey that improves with greater self-awareness and quality thought partners like coaches, mentors, advisors, etc. I’m super excited to have more conversations as a coach and a colleague within Second Act.

Building on that, I remember thinking the happiest people I knew were working for themselves.

The university I worked for most recently used the Real Colors self-assessment as a team building tool. If you aren’t familiar, Real Colors divides one’s personality into four types, each coded a different color. Assessments like this can feel a little rudimentary, but what I found fascinating was how I presented as an outlier among my colleagues because I presented with more of an entrepreneurial temperament. This was so helpful to see—literally see, color-coded. At the time, I was in the process of leaving the university and, honestly, beating myself up a bit. Why couldn’t I hang like everyone else? Why wasn’t I happier? After all, it was a good gig, and I knew that many colleagues thought stepping away was bananapants. The assessment reminded me was that I wasn’t defective, just different.

Some people thrive in large organizations, whether corporate, government, or nonprofit. It’s a terrific way to learn, and earn. But some of us need more autonomy and creativity, too.