A long-time collaborator and friend of Go Aragón, today we want to have a leisurely chat with Marisa Felipe to get to know her a little better, both in her capacity as a professional linked to coaching for many years and in her more creative and literary side.
First of all, how should I refer to your work? Coach, coaching professional…?
Expert in leadership, executive coach.
What is your day-to-day like doing this work? What types of activities do you engage in?
My work fundamentally consists of helping people live their daily lives with less wear and tear, learning to deal with everyday challenges from a place of serenity and acceptance. I do this through leadership training or professional coaching services. My day-to-day is that of any freelancer with different lines of business: I work with executives and organizations, collaborate with educational centers, support NGOs, and also work on my books.
Let’s imagine I have a company, I am the CEO, but I’m a bit lost with my leadership. What can you do for me?
The first step is to arrange a personal interview, which is effectively a coaching session with a dual objective: first, to determine exactly where the «loss of leadership» is occurring, and second, for you to understand my working method. With the information gathered, I develop a program that may be directed either toward specific leadership training, where we will delve into self-awareness, interpersonal relationships, purpose, motivation… paying special attention to those areas that you will have identified as needing reinforcement, or toward an executive coaching process. The essential difference is that in training, there are contents that you must study and practice, while in the coaching process we work more deeply on identifying specific performance leaks and how to find new ways of proceeding that you will need to implement between sessions.
You pride yourself on your good humor and recommend laughter as a release valve for difficult situations. Could you share with us, of course with much humor, a situation where you’ve seen this evidently?
I am fortunate to be from Aragon and to proudly carry that typical Aragonese humor, so using it comes naturally to me. When I finish a more general talk, where the audience is varied, someone often approaches me to congratulate me and tell me that what I do is very good… but that it wouldn’t work in their workplace because «you don’t know how things are in my company.» The truth is, I hear this comment almost every time. So, with my best Aragonese smile, I respond that it is the first time I have heard anything like that; in the thirteen years I have been working with organizations, I have never heard anything similar, and I am greatly satisfied to find an entity with such a personal, distinctive, and characteristic stamp. After this, we inevitably laugh together. Interestingly, after this comment, they often hire my services.
Let’s get more serious. You are a woman. Are there not enough women leaders in Aragon’s business fabric?
No. They exist, and they are there due to talent and merit. I have a very clear stance on this issue: I believe this debate is outdated; individuals, whether men or women, must work on their excellence, on doing what they are supposed to do, and do it well. From there, it is quite possible to encounter difficulties, obstacles, and stones along the way that must be navigated, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. If we focus on whether we have more or fewer opportunities based on gender, we are straying from our path. I am a woman committed to my gender; I work for the visibility of women in leadership positions, and one of my lines of work focuses precisely on female leadership. Additionally, 90% of my clients are women, so I know this context very well, and I believe we spend a lot of time on battles that do not contribute anything to us, while daily life is already intense enough for us to wear ourselves out over such issues. This does not mean that inequalities, outdated behaviors, or ways of thinking from centuries past do not exist, but that is life, and knowing how to lead our daily existence with that is part of the journey. It is true that women, and I am generalizing now, find it a little more challenging to shine; they tend to stay in the shadows even though their achievements and journeys are deserving of recognition, although perhaps they do not care. I believe it is much more productive to seek excellence and let results speak for themselves. What I do miss is that our young women have a clear framework of reference, which we can complete because it is already initiated, in our own way, without impositions, using common sense, and certainly with critical thinking.
You have been training leaders and accompanying change processes for years, yet there is still much social confusion about coaching. From your experience, do you think that people truly understand what coaching is and what it is not, or are we still using the term too lightly?
Many think it is just about motivation or giving advice, when in reality it is a professional accompaniment process that clarifies for individuals how to discover their points of improvement, learn or consolidate skills, and achieve specific goals. It is not psychotherapy or consulting; it is a space where self-awareness, learning, and performance development are worked on. It is interesting because coaching has been established in Spain since the late 1990s, and since then, it has continuously professionalized through associations, federations, schools, and specialized training with specific quality frameworks. In other words, we have over two decades of serious and consolidated development, yet there remains the perception that coaching is something distant from reality or disconnected from everyday challenges, when the opposite is true. The fact is that the data supporting its effectiveness is hard to ignore; I have published several articles analyzing its impact, and the results observed in individuals, teams, and organizations are consistent. Universities such as the University of the Basque Country and the University of Valencia have rigorously evaluated the effectiveness of coaching processes in validated studies, and the University of Zaragoza has several publications addressing its application in educational, social, and organizational fields. Evidence, therefore, exists, and so do the results. In my case, the best endorsement is that 100% of my clients come through recommendations, which reflects not only the effectiveness of the process but also the trust that is generated when working with rigor and professionalism.
In parallel, you write books. When? How do you organize yourself? Or as they say now, how do you balance?
Well, as a good leadership professional, I lead my daily life… seriously, through my work, I accumulate a lot of repetitive material that I organize in notebooks that will eventually become books. When I want to start a new one, I set the goal, define the concrete actions, and get to work. There is no secret beyond fulfilling what I have set out to do. When I write, I am very disciplined: I dedicate one hour a day without interruptions, always early in the morning since that is when I am most productive, and during this initial phase, I write without correcting. After that, I edit and organize the ideas. It is just one of many activities I have in my daily life across various distinct areas, so I have to distribute my hours well among them.
