{"id":13030,"date":"2026-07-03T10:29:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T08:29:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/act.org.rs\/en\/?p=13030"},"modified":"2026-07-03T10:29:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T08:29:18","slug":"interview-on-coaching-with-masa-dordevic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/act.org.rs\/en\/interview-on-coaching-with-masa-dordevic\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview on Coaching with Ma\u0161a \u0110or\u0111evi\u0107"},"content":{"rendered":"

Personal Story<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

How did you get into coaching?<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

I have many years of experience working with civil society organizations in the Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe from the position of a program manager on the donor side. As I grew professionally in that role, I increasingly worked on institutional support and organizational development. Strategic conversations with the leaders of these organizations across the region were always one of my favorite parts of the job. That was when I became aware that directors of non-governmental organizations are often alone in thinking through both operational and programmatic development over the longer term. I tried to be a constructive conversation partner for them, even though I was on the donor side, and that required both honesty in analyzing the situation and respect for their autonomy in decision-making.<\/p>\n

When I myself became familiar with the coaching process and its effects from the position of a client, I realized that I would like to learn and one day provide that kind of support for personal and leadership development. And here I am, and this work brings me great inner satisfaction.<\/p>\n

About Coaching<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

What is coaching, actually?<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

As a coach certified by the International Coaching Federation (ICF), I would first cite the definition of this largest global professional association of coaches: coaching is a partnership with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The coaching process often unlocks previously untapped sources of creativity, productivity, and leadership.<\/p>\n

Coaching takes place through a series of coaching sessions whose content is completely confidential. Coaches ask questions not to obtain a desired answer, but to encourage you to engage in meaningful self-exploration aimed at reaching new levels of awareness of your own qualities, strengthening your sense of choice and self-responsibility, as well as achieving better results along your chosen path.<\/p>\n

You can imagine coaching as a car journey with the support of a passenger traveling alongside you. You control the car and decide where you are going \u2014 just as you control your life, your decisions, and your path toward the future you want. As you drive, your coach accompanies you with a high level of professionalism, integrity, and honesty, without judgment, empowering you on the path toward greater self-awareness of what you are doing, what effects it produces, and what you need to change in order to drive toward achieving your goals.<\/p>\n

What are the most common misconceptions?<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

Coaching is not the same as training, mentoring, consulting, or therapy, although it is often confused with each of these developmental processes that involve external support. The role of a coach is certainly not to advise you or offer you a solution to your challenge. In public communication and advertising, confusion most often arises because the word \u201ccoach,\u201d particularly in English, is also used by expert trainers who teach certain skills and guide clients step by step on how to apply and integrate them into their activities. A mentor provides expertise, wisdom, and guidance based on their own experience. Therapy deals with healing pain, trauma, dysfunction, or conflicts arising from an individual\u2019s past experiences, usually with the aim of resolving difficulties that impair emotional health and psychosomatic functioning.<\/p>\n

By contrast, coaching focuses on empowering individuals or teams through a process of asking questions that facilitates the recognition of internal signals and insights within one\u2019s own experience and abilities in order to set and achieve desired goals. Coaching is focused on changes in the present and on the future that the client wants for themselves, rather than on understanding the past. The coach is an expert in the coaching process, while you are the expert on your own life journey.<\/p>\n

When is the right time for someone to seek a coach?<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

Any time is the right time! Coaching is a highly adaptable process. Where people find it more difficult to decide to seek out a conversation partner with professional integrity, I would say that the right moment is when we have dilemmas about how to move forward toward certain desired goals or when a blockage arises in achieving some of them. When it is no longer enough to sit alone with ourselves because we feel we are going in circles, not knowing how to think further about it, what to change in our relationship to the situation and other actors, or what step forward to take. When we see certain patterns repeating as we continue doing what we are accustomed to thinking of as an acceptable path toward desired results, while some part of us recognizes that something is not working. The right moment is also when we want to test our own thinking, when we are in two minds, unable to make a decision, as well as when we need to formulate something that comes from within ourselves in a way that another person can understand us, truly listen to us without judgment, and without directing us toward a solution that is acceptable to someone else.<\/p>\n

CSO Experience<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

What is it like working with the CSO community?<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

A professional coach always works with the specific and whole person who is the client, regardless of which sector they come from and what challenges they bring to coaching sessions. CSO leaders are characterized by a strong commitment to their organization\u2019s mission because it is most often also their personal mission. To put it simply, these missions are generally focused on helping, justice, empowering, or protecting certain social groups, local communities, other living beings, and natural resources. These are areas where needs are significant and established public processes are lacking, so the civil society sector is most often the one that begins searching for solutions through direct work in the field. Leaders and their colleagues devote themselves intensely to this process, and burnout occurs very often without being recognized for a long time, because it is not easy to stop and name something we do not know is happening to us when good results are being achieved and there is a constant struggle for continued financial support.<\/p>\n

Personally, I greatly enjoy working with clients from the CSO community. It fulfills me to observe how they gain insights into their own experience and decide to take steps forward, as well as how aware they consistently are of their most important values and how much they care about the wider community.<\/p>\n

What problems arise most often?<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

The causes of burnout in the CSO sector can be numerous, and it is always some combination of unfavorable external conditions and the need for personal development in order to find responses to concrete leadership challenges at various stages of an organization\u2019s development. What is often seen is that thoughtful structuring of processes and human resource management lag behind programmatic work and fieldwork, as the most direct expressions of commitment to the mission. This works somehow for a while, and usually works successfully, but then problems emerge: exhaustion, lack of clarity in processes, staff turnover, and changes in donor priorities.<\/p>\n

Such leaders often carry the burden of implementing a multitude of activities, ranging from everyday logistics all the way to the strategic leadership of programmatic work and management of the organization. Practice shows that managing people and processes is learned in an ad hoc manner, on the go, because there is most often no previous life experience of leading people through more complex processes before establishing such organizations. Learning to use leadership tools is not easily accessible to small organizations in the local language, unlike the availability of development programs in larger corporate systems. There is no organized transfer of knowledge in the process of developing an association; everything depends on personal initiative. This leads to a situation in which the need to develop leadership tools and competencies is often recognized only when larger problems and dissatisfaction arise.<\/p>\n

I want to emphasize that there is no typical set of topics and challenges that we jointly reflect on in the coaching process for leaders in this sector because, as I mentioned, the client brings their own priorities into coaching. Still, if I had to single some out, I would say that we most often touch on the need for change and planning steps, structuring processes, better division of roles and transfer of responsibility, clearer and more regular communication within the team, and a constructive approach to difficult communication. This often leads to greater awareness of the need to gradually reduce leaders\u2019 involvement in everyday activities with the aim of freeing up energy and time for the strategic priorities of organizational development, as well as for a more balanced private life.<\/p>\n

What do people gain most from the process?<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

Although the effects of coaching are always individual, what people most often take away from the process is a safe place where they are fully accepted and the benefit of dedicating time to what they had previously postponed, deeper self-awareness, clarity of insight, a stronger sense that they have choices, and greater readiness to try small steps that lead them toward solutions.<\/p>\n

What coaching truly does is help people move from a reactive relationship with a situation, including postponing dealing with it, toward actively shaping that situation. This usually leads to more thoughtful decisions, more measured action, and often better results, but it all begins with how they think about themselves and the breadth of personal choice available to them.<\/p>\n

This is also consistent with broader research on coaching, particularly in the areas of self-awareness, goal clarity, and behavioral change. For example, many clients come with a desire for a particular situation to change, but what changes most is the way they see themselves in that situation and how, with greater ease, they begin turning those insights into concrete actions that move them forward, toward solutions that are genuinely aligned with their values and the needs of the specific situation.<\/p>\n

EXPERIENCES within ACT<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

What would you say to someone who is afraid to start?<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

I would tell them that people do not enter coaching because something is \u201cwrong\u201d with them. Coaching is not about fixing someone; it does not mean they have to change something, but rather that they are given space to see whether they want to change and how they might do so. It is actually a process of restoring choice where they may no longer feel they have it. In working with leaders in the nonprofit sector, I often see that they are already accustomed to being there for others \u2014 for their team, beneficiaries, and donors \u2014 but they rarely have space for authentic reflection in the presence of another person. Coaching gives them exactly that: an opportunity to pause, look inward, see the bigger picture, and regain a sense of choice. And they can move forward with a small step; they do not need to have all the answers in advance.<\/p>\n

So far, 6 leaders from ACT partner organizations have completed the coaching program with me, I am currently working with 8 leaders, and another round of coaching for interested partners is planned from September.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Personal Story How did you get into coaching? I have many years of experience working with civil society organizations in the Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe from the position of a program manager on the donor side. As I grew professionally in that role, I increasingly worked on institutional support and organizational development. Strategic…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13031,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[190],"class_list":["post-13030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/act.org.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/act.org.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/act.org.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/act.org.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/act.org.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13030"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/act.org.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13032,"href":"https:\/\/act.org.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13030\/revisions\/13032"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/act.org.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/act.org.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/act.org.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}