March 28, 2018
Hosted by Doug Caldwell, editor and publisher of CentralValleyBusinessTimes.
AUDIO: The business coach who had to coach herself to success
LISTEN to the interview here
~ Odette Peek was slammed by the universe at what she thought was the top of her game. Divorce, then sudden death of both parents. Then physical paralysis that lasts a year and a half. What a way to start a new business. But for Odette Peek, it has provided the foundation she needed to become a widely regarded and highly successful business coach, author and public speaker. “The reason why I became successful was I just really shared my story with people. And they understood and they came from this place of, ‘wow, if you can do it, maybe so can I,’” she says.
Ms. Peek started her current business, www.odettepeek.com, eight years ago. She is also an author of two books, “Profit Domination: How Successful Women Get on Top and Stay There,” which is based on what she calls her 201 “rules for the road,” and “Paralyzed: Getting Past the Excuses of Why You Aren’t Successful.”
Ms. Peek says her moving into coaching and public speaking was an evolution prompted at least in part by the low wages paid in working with the elderly, which she had studied as a possible profession. “It was really around what kind of lifestyle I wanted to live as opposed to the career that I chose,” she says. “The lifestyle was just around the flexibility of freedom, of time, money, space.” In her coaching, as in her own life, Ms. Peek says she’s found that people ask the wrong question. “When I talk to people one of the first questions I say is ‘what’s your big vision for your life.’ Hands down, eight out of ten people cannot answer that,” she says. “That’s the question you’ve got to ask yourself.”