The coaching industry is on the rise. From life coaching to relationship coaching, sales coaching, health coaching, business coaching. In full swing across the United States, the coaching industry is still in its infancy in Australia, though gaining traction at a rapid rate.Â
Karim Boktor is one Australian coach. Based in Melbourne but conducting sessions that are virtual, Karim is a Breakthrough Leadership Coach tending to clients across the globe. Though Karim has been coaching for five years, his story started much sooner.
As a child, Karim had a severe stutter and trouble retaining information when reading. This naturally impacted his interactions with others, his capacity for learning, and created wounds that took years to fully heal. After working in a variety of industries, as a young entrepreneur remedial therapist, as an owner of IGA stores, as a representative for a pharmaceutical and medical device company who mentored surgeons how to use products, Karim was looking for a solution to his business problems. Though he had a marketing strategy, was dotting his Is and crossing his Ts, something was missing, and soon his businesses spiralled.
‘I needed a solution, I needed to think outside of the box, I didn’t want to give up,’ explains Karim. ‘So I started to learn about myself and human behaviour.’
Karim worked with a Life Coach and noticed that as he unravelled the issues and the supressed emotions of his childhood, his relationships and his businesses flourished. Soon, Karim completed a Master of Business Administration (MBA), and became a Master Trainer in Neurolinguistic Programming, Timeline Therapy, and Hypnotherapy.
Now, Karim works with high profile individuals, executives, CEOs, founders, and business owners from across many industries, to help them breakthrough their business setbacks.
‘My philosophy is there are five key emotions that contribute to your negative behaviour. Every decision we make is based off a negative belief, a limiting belief,’ says Karim. ‘Those negative emotions are anger, sadness, fear, hurt and guilt.’
For his high-profile clients, the reoccurring emotion Karim keeps working through is fear. Fear of both failure and success.
‘They will self-sabotage, they will call it perfectionism. They will find distractions and use excuses,’ says Karim. ‘Imposter syndrome is the same fear. Fear of being found out, fear of being exposed, even though they have people telling them how good they are, internally they don’t see themselves in that way.’
To guide his clients, Karim uses his Boktor Method, a combination of famous methods he discovered on his own journey, stitched together for a singular, fortified path to success.
Earlier in the year, Karim delivered a TEDx Talk in California in the United States. He spoke of his stutter, his willingness to overcome the impairment, and how inside everyone there is a stutter preventing us from chasing dreams, following intuition, and making us second-guess ourselves.
‘It’s about their inner stutter,’ says Karim. ‘The only fear we are born with is the fear of falling and loud noises, everything else is learned behaviour. I have the philosophy that I don’t want forever clients. I help empower them, and if I’ve done my job properly, I’ve gotten to the root core of their problem.’
For more information, visit www.karimboktor.com
