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Join for freePosted: Tue 6th Oct 2026
Do you ever feel pulled in a million directions, constantly flipping between running your business, building a pipeline of work, supporting your team (if you have one) and keeping on top of the day-to-day?
Running a small or medium-sized business can feel relentless – constant decisions, competing priorities, and the pressure to lead with confidence even when you feel overwhelmed.
In this interactive Lunch and Learn, leadership and life coach Anika Roberts shares how coaching helps business owners strengthen clarity, confidence, and emotional intelligence to lead with more ease.
Experience a practical coaching tool – The Inner Boardroom – that reveals how your internal decision-makers shape your leadership style.
Discover how leadership coaching transforms clarity, confidence, and decision-making
Experience the Inner Boardroom tool to understand your internal decision-makers
Learn how small mindset shifts can create big results in your business
Anika is a leadership and life coach who helps business owners and senior leaders step into their power with clarity, confidence, and emotional intelligence.
She blends practical coaching tools with deep self-awareness to help leaders navigate overwhelm, strengthen decision-making, and lead with more ease.
As a former small business owner herself, Anika understands the emotional and practical realities of running a business and brings that lived experience into her coaching work.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Beth: Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s Lunch and Learn. My name is Beth, and I’ll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
I’m very pleased to introduce you to Anika Roberts, who is a business coach. In this session, Anika shares how coaching helps business owners strengthen clarity, confidence and emotional intelligence to lead with more ease.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat or in the Q&A, and we’ll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. As always, the session will be recorded, and we’ll send the recording along with a few follow-up resources later today. Over to you, Anika.
Anika Roberts: Hello everybody, nice to see you all. Thank you, Beth; I really appreciate that intro. I’m hoping you can all see my slides.
Today’s session, as Beth said, is about how leadership coaching transforms you and, by extension, your business as well. I’ve been a leadership coach for just over 10 years now. Before that, I worked in the employee engagement, team building and facilitation space, and I also helped businesses look at culture change.
I worked at a Big Four firm and in the public and private sectors, and I still do some of that alongside running my coaching business. That’s enough about me, though. What I’d love to do today is give you a real flavour of what coaching feels like, so please join in and give it a go.
We’re going to do a powerful but simple, practical exercise called the inner boardroom. I’ll walk you through it, and you’ll have an opportunity to join in and interact in the chat. I think it will not only leave you with a powerful tool to take away and use whenever you need it, but also give you a flavour of what coaching feels like in practice – and specifically what coaching feels like with me.
I just need to flip screens to make sure my slides move up. There we go. The thing I love about coaching, and the reason I got into it, is that as a coach you get to work alongside people who are often at a crossroads.
My coachees often come to me when they want to make a big decision and don’t quite know where to go, or when they’re stuck and need a little bit of support and a sounding board. That helps them get unstuck and into a place of calm, centred confidence and clarity, so they can tackle whatever challenge they’re facing.
Hands down, the best moment of coaching for me is when that penny-drop moment happens in a session. That might be through me asking the right questions at the right time, or just being that sounding board and listening so the coachee can unstick themselves. That’s what coaching is all about.
As a coach, you ask the questions, and the coachee does the work and comes up with the solutions. You give them the framework and support to help them get to the best solutions for themselves.
When that coachee sees the solution that’s best for them and moves towards it, they step out of their shadow and into their power – I love that phrase. Seeing them come at things with renewed clarity and confidence is the beauty of it, and that’s what I want to share with you today with this simple but effective tool.
It’s not a one-and-done. Coaching takes longer – it’s bit by bit, and it’s not an instant fix. But these tools do help you get started on that journey, shift the dial and be more conscious of the way you lead yourself.
The first thing I wanted to ask you – I’ve just seen people in the chat, fabulous – is to put in the chat what your role is. Are you an entrepreneur? Do you run a small or medium-sized business, or are you here as a team member?
Or maybe it’s life coaching you’re after today. What role do you have, and what do you want to learn about how coaching can help you in that role?
We’ve got co-founders, the Long Run Club, a director of a new start-up, self-employed, growing a small brand and property deals for investors. That’s a whole breadth of different businesses.
The reason I ask is that, in life, we have lots of different perspectives and roles that we play. We might be daughters or sons, parents or colleagues – we navigate lots of different roles.
But as an entrepreneur or business owner, you have an additional level of roles to navigate. There’s the visionary: where are you going with this business, where do you want to grow, and what do you want to do? That’s the excited part of you that really pushes the boat out and drives you forward.
On any given day, you might also have to think about how you’re going to build your pipeline so you can continue to be successful. If you have a team, you might be thinking about how to help them work through a conflict, or just how to inspire them. Then you get down to the real nitty-gritty, like dealing with your emails.
As a business owner, you jump between all of those different roles and back again, all in a day. It can feel quite lonely and quite overwhelming sometimes, and you can get into that paralysis – I certainly did.
Over lockdown, in addition to the coaching and consulting I was doing, I ran a business called Mummy Made This. I had very young children at the time, as you can see, and I did something completely different: selling toys to keep children entertained and happy, but not always in front of screens.
It also gave parents a bit of time back to have a cup of tea in peace while their toddlers ran around and had fun with the play tables we ended up building. So I remember really clearly that overwhelm at times, and that constant flipping between all those different roles at once.
The tool we’re going to look at today, the inner boardroom, helps with some of that. It deals with all those different perspectives and the tensions you hold that sometimes cause overwhelm and inner conflict, and take you away from clarity. This exercise is designed to help you step back and find the calm and confidence to take control again.
That’s what today is about, so let’s jump straight in. I’d like you all to imagine a boardroom that you are the CEO of – you’re the CEO of your life, arguably the most important role that each of us has.
Really take a moment to imagine a beautiful room – maybe big windows, maybe art on the wall, whatever floats your boat. There’s a big table with comfy chairs around it, and you’re the CEO at the head of the table, in control, with these different perspectives around it.
The different roles or perspectives that sit around that table are all there for a reason. They’re all good at what they do, and they’re there to help you make decisions, guide you, push you out of your comfort zone and keep you safe.
Sometimes those perspectives come into conflict with each other, or one is louder than another, when actually they need to work together rather than one of them running the show. Your role as CEO is to hear those different perspectives and take them on board. Then you decide which perspective you really need to push, or which two need to work together better.
We’ll get into the detail now. Grab a pen and a piece of paper if you have one, or use the chat or an online notebook – whatever works for you. We’ll have a look at the different board members that sit around your table.
In a normal coaching session, we would explore all the different board members: their roles, the voices they bring, their strengths and their weaknesses. We’d do that in more detail than we have time for today.
Today, I’d like you to pick the three or four loudest perspectives that sit around that table. I’ll take you through my own example as we go, just to bring it to life a bit.
Around my table, I’ll often have a strategist or visionary who gets so excited about what might be. They plan the future and figure out where we’re going, what we can build and how we can do it. They get really into that visionary dreaming and planning state, and they’re really good at pushing me outside my comfort zone.
That perspective is often there, and it’s the exciting space I like to be in. I also have the executor around the table – the perspective that gets into the nitty-gritty of the framework I need to get to where I’m going. That’s the actual to-do list: the individual steps that will get me where I want to go and help me plan it out.
Another perspective that can be quite loud for me at times is fear. I know fear wants to keep me safe, keep me in my comfort zone, and sometimes keep me playing small. Through doing this over and over again, I know that, as CEO, I need to listen to that voice but then say, ‘Okay, I still need to do it, even if it’s hard.’
So I’d invite you to think about the three or four really strong perspectives that often show up when you have to make decisions. What are those sitting around your inner boardroom today? Just make a note, either in the chat or on a piece of paper, to get clear on what they are.
What are they trying to tell you, and what is their role for you? For everybody, it’s slightly different. I’ll give you another couple of moments to get clear on the top three or four perspectives that are really loud around your table at the minute.
Thank you, Pedro, that’s really helpful – visionary, executor, CFO. Absolutely agree, Claudia, it is overwhelming when we try to fill more roles. And it can be really lonely in that space, having to do it all on your own without a sounding board or a network.
I guess that’s what Enterprise Nation is there for – to provide that network and build that support. Anybody else? What are the three main perspectives that you often notice around your table?
The next question I’m going to ask is for you to think about a current challenge you might have. It doesn’t have to be big – it could be a business challenge, or a smaller one, like a conversation you really need to have, a decision you need to make or a boundary you need to hold. It could be a new product you need to design, or a really small, contained challenge you’re trying to tackle.
That doesn’t make it easy – it could be just as hard, but it’s just smaller. You’re talking about the mum role and worrying that if you take on too much, you won’t have time. Yes, it’s that constant juggle of trying to figure all of those things out at once.
Think about the challenge that you want to use this tool on. Again, if you feel like it, put it in the chat, or just note it on your notepad or in OneNote. Now you have your roles and the challenge you want to tackle.
To continue my example, I’ve learned over the years that I often find it really hard to sell my services. I have another workshop coming up in November, and I know I traditionally find it really hard to advertise my workshops, get the word out there and really get out of my comfort zone.
When I use this exercise on myself, I listen to the different perspectives around my inner boardroom. The visionary says, ‘This is what we need to do, this is where we’re going. Come on, let’s get out there and run these sessions – we love running them, so let’s just get the word out there.’
The executor says, ‘We have the road map and the advertising plan, all written down and in place. We know what we need to do – we just need to go and do it.’
Then my fear perspective says, ‘We can’t get the word out there – that’s way too scary! People might not come, or what if it goes wrong? Let’s just play small, stay in our comfort zone and stay in our box.’
As the CEO, I sit and listen to all those different perspectives, and I invite you to do the same for your challenge. What are they trying to tell you, and how are they trying to protect you?
In my case, I’d say to my fear voice, ‘Okay, fear, I hear you. You’re trying to keep me safe, and I appreciate it, but I don’t need that right now.’
‘We can navigate that fear, and we’ve got the plan to make it happen. We know we love coaching, we know we can help others, and we know this is going to work – fear is actually keeping us small. So thank you, fear, but we’ve got this.’
By acknowledging that fear but still being able to say, with real calm clarity, ‘I hear you, and I’m still going to do the hard thing,’ I push myself out of my comfort zone with more confidence, certainty, self-belief and clarity. I think I waver less because I’ve already had that conversation.
When fear rears its ugly head again in the process, which it invariably does, it’s not new. I can just say, ‘Yep, I know it’s still scary, and we’re still going to do it. It’s fine.’
I love that this inner boardroom tool allows you to have all of those different perspectives and still do whatever you need to do for your business. It allows you to grow, step out of the shadow and into your power, and expand into the next best version of yourself.
The other thing that often helps me is when I can’t imagine what that CEO needs to say. You might have come back thinking, ‘I’ve heard all these perspectives, but I’m still not clear what the outcome or the decision needs to be.’
The add-on you can use is to think about what a future version of yourself – in one year or five years, whatever your horizon is – would tell you. How would they react, and what advice would they give you?
They’ve already done the hard thing, and they have 20/20 vision. With hindsight, they can look back and say, ‘Yes, you needed to do that hard thing, even though it was hard.’
So those two things – the inner boardroom and that future self – push you and give you the clarity to say, ‘You’ve got this, go and do it.’ They’ve really helped me build confidence and grow out of the space that was keeping me small.
I’m just going to have a quick look at the chat to see what examples people have been putting in there. Accountability partner – love it, and both have the same business. Use AI – yes, that’s a good one as well, just to give you some pointers at times.
Happy to connect – fabulous. On the point of accountability partners, I love that too, because sometimes you can only do so much yourself. Having a coach or any accountability partner is so powerful to keep you on track and help you do the stuff that’s hard.
If you’re interested, I can reach out to you this time next week. First, think about the challenge you’ve put down on paper and your different perspectives: what is one small action you can take to get you closer to solving it?
I’ll give you a moment to think about one small, immediate thing you can do this week. Then, if you want me to be your accountability partner, I’m very happy to do so.
I would email you a week from now and say, ‘You know that thing you said you were going to do? How’s it going?’ No guilt, no judgement – I know how hard it is to juggle building a business, family and all the other roles we play.
It would literally just be a friendly check-in to give you that accountability and help you grow on that path. Two new messages: follow-up, getting distracted. It sounds like there’s a bit of doubt that used to escalate.
‘It’s hard to get on top of all the tasks that need doing and planning – it just seems like a daunting task.’ Yes, Chris, that definitely resonates as a challenge. I don’t know if you have it as well, but there’s that shiny object syndrome where you get all these different emails and think, ‘Oh, maybe I should try that.’
Keeping focused can be really hard at times, especially when you’re building a business. Getting kids back to school – yes, I hear you; I have three kids and getting them to school can be hard. Prioritising marketing tactics before really knowing what works – yes, some of that is definitely trial and error.
We have a few more moments, so have a think about the action you want to take. It doesn’t have to be a big thing – it could literally be using AI to give you a flavour of which marketing tactics really work, and doing some of that research. It could be for any challenge you’re trying to solve.
On getting distracted, I don’t know if any of you have read the book Atomic Habits – it’s one of my new favourite books, about how you get out of bad habits and into good ones. It’s very powerful – great book, isn’t it?
Create some sort of plan, Chris – love it. Even just getting started and moving forward – love it. Lots of great actions there, and loads of you have read that book; it’s a good one, isn’t it?
As I say, anybody who wants me to email them as an accountability partner, just let me know. Maybe that’s the first action you take – sometimes that’s the hardest. That was all I wanted to do in terms of taking you through the inner boardroom coaching tool.
The last thing I want to leave you with is how you can connect with me. I’ve seen some connections come through on the Enterprise Nation site, so thank you for those – I’ve accepted them, and it’s really lovely to connect.
You can also find me on my website at www.arpartnersconsulting.com, or email me at anika@arpartnersconsulting.com. I offer a free chemistry call, which is typical in coaching, for those of you who have done coaching before. It’s basically a free 20-minute to half-hour call to see whether the chemistry between the coach and the coachee works.
You’d come to me with any challenges you face and goals you want to work on, and we’d work out whether we’re a good fit. There’s no obligation – it’s just to get to know each other a little more. If that’s something you’d like to book, you can do it on my website, or reach out on Enterprise Nation and we can coordinate it.
This is the workshop I was talking about that’s coming up in November. It’s called Step Out of Your Shadows, Step Into Your Power; it’s 90 minutes long, and it costs £35 – the sign-up link is on my website if it interests you.
I’ll stop there. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know, and if you want me to get in touch and be your accountability partner, I’m here. I’m going to stop sharing – there you go, Beth, over to you.
Beth: Thank you, Anika. Just to echo that, we have shared Anika’s LinkedIn and Enterprise Nation profile, so please do feel free to connect with her there. If you want that accountability partner, you’re very welcome to send your email address here or over the platform.
If anyone has any questions, please put them in the chat. Anika, in the CEO boardroom, how do we distinguish between a decision that needs more extensive analysis, like the inner boardroom, and one where we simply need to make a call?
Anika: That’s an interesting one, because I think it also depends on who you are and how easy you find it to make decisions. Take my husband, for example – with the whole sales bit, he’s like, ‘Why are you making this into such a big deal? Just do it, it’s fine,’ whereas for me, it’s a big thing.
For me, doing the research and the nitty-gritty and juggling a thousand balls and three kids is really my comfort zone – I love that stuff. And he’s like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that, I can’t do that.’
So I think it depends on your nature, your experience and the things you love and find easy versus the things you don’t. A big decision for one person can be a really easy, small one for somebody else.
Beth: Absolutely. How can founders build confidence when they regularly have to make difficult decisions, often alone?
Anika: That’s a hard one, because I think some of it simply comes with practice. Exercises like the inner boardroom can help you become really conscious of your blind spots and the bits you find hard, so you do it anyway.
Having a network of like-minded people, such as Enterprise Nation or any entrepreneurial network, is gold dust. We are a different breed, and suddenly you have people who know your pain points and the struggles you have every day. It’s different having those supportive voices around you rather than trying to do it all on your own.
A coach is always great, too, whether it’s one-to-one or group coaching. You have that ability to take stock and have a sounding board to say, ‘I’m really struggling with this, help me unpick it,’ and then make the choices you need to make. So those are the things I’d say.
Beth: That’s great, thank you. I appreciate this is quite broad, but what role do you think emotions play in business decision-making?
Anika: I think emotions used to get a bad reputation, and we always had to be ‘on’ and very driven by the head and by logic. I feel like we now have more and more role models, coachees and entrepreneurs who still do all of that, but are able to combine it with something else.
There’s one lady out there who calls it Leading with Heart. She uses her femininity without being overly emotional – her instinct, her feminine guidance, I guess. It doesn’t have to be just women who do this; men do it too.
It’s about using that instinct to guide good decision-making and clarity, as well as having the facts, the data and everything else we need to be successful. So I think you need both – that’s where the power is.
You trust your gut, who you are and the experience you bring, stepping out into your power and being the best version of you. But you also need to rely on the facts and figures, what works, the marketing tactics and all of that.
Beth: Absolutely, it’s nice to know there’s a role for both and that you don’t have to shut that off. What small mindset shifts have the biggest impact on leadership, in your opinion?
Anika: When I work with boards and leaders, it’s often two things. The first is being able to acknowledge that you don’t need to know it all. You have a powerful team of people around you who will help you, and your job is to orchestrate that rather than do it all.
As an entrepreneur, that’s hard, because at the moment you do it all. But as you build your team, I think that’s one powerful part of it.
The other powerful mindset shift is that growth mindset: it’s okay to learn, and it’s okay to make mistakes. You pivot quickly and say, ‘Okay, let’s learn it and figure it out,’ rather than getting stuck worrying about having to do it all perfectly by yourself. That’s not worth it.
Beth: That’s really good to know – Claudia says, ‘Well said, we are constantly learning indeed.’ We’re short on time, but I’d love to keep you for one more question to round off the session, if that’s okay, Anika. With your experience, what are the biggest leadership challenges you see small business owners face?
Anika: When I was leading Mummy Made This, and in my coaching business now, I find it’s constant distraction. Because we hold so many roles at once, it’s so easy to jump from one to the next and not actually get anything done in any of them.
It’s hard to keep that focus and stay on track while pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, doing the stuff that needs doing first even though it’s hard. You’re doing it all on your own at times and feeling pulled in a thousand directions, and on top of that, you still have a life to lead and kids to manage.
So I think it’s that constant pulling in different directions, holding the line and figuring out how you keep going. What is your north star, where are you going with this, and how do you make it all come together?
Beth: Absolutely, brilliant – thank you so much. There are some lovely comments in the chat, so please do connect with Anika after this session. As a reminder, we’ll send the recording later today, so you can go back and revisit the session.
Thank you so much for joining us, Anika, and thank you, everyone, for spending your lunch with us. We’ll see you in the next one, so bye for now.
Anika: Really loved it. Take care, bye.
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