User Spotlight: May and Virtual Peer

Meet May Ireland, co-founder and CEO of Virtual Peer.

Originally from New Zealand, May now lives in Maine. She’s building Virtual Peer - a group coaching service - alongside her two co-founders and a small team of coaches. Its mission is to democratize access to executive coaching by making it more affordable. Virtual Peer achieves this by bringing people together into small groups to work with certified coaches on shared career and leadership development goals.

May’s favorite thing about working on Virtual Peer is making new connections. She constantly has the opportunity to collaborate with people from around the world. The freedom that comes with being a founder is a bonus, but this can also be a double-edged sword:

Starting your own business is great because there is a lot of autonomy and you create your own structure - but that is also the downside! Procrastination is a demon I fight every-single-day.

Time in Bhutan

A citizen of the world, May spent time in Bhutan supporting the government’s initiative in building a whole new human resource infrastructure based on western concepts of performance. For a Buddhist nation that is not openly competitive, this required a lot of tact, diplomacy, and ingenuity to find ways to sensitively integrate this new way of working into their culture. 

Meanwhile, May’s husband got his big break in a local Bhutanese film called Druk ge Goem (The Guest of Bhutan) and became an unexpected local movie star.

How May stays productive

May has a daily routine she tries to follow, starting with yoga and followed by her trusty cup of coffee. She avoids social media and email and instead focuses on deep work first thing in the morning. She aims to complete one chunky project that requires focus before her day gets swept up in meetings, research, social media, and podcasts.

Her top tip for being productive is structure:

Structure, structure, structure. Being consistent with your planning helps you to get stuff done. It’s so easy to while away the day otherwise.

Before using Taskable, May would try to write everything down in a notebook. But she found this information would get overlooked and would be scattered across multiple pages. WIth Taskable, May brings everything into a single dashboard to see all her to-dos and knowledge in a single view. Taskable helps her keep on top of her big-ticket items daily.

Connect with May

If you are interested in checking out Virtual Peer and trying executive coaching for yourself, visit their website at virtualpeer.co.

You can connect with May on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter.