Hey coaches, Erin here, and today I've got some surprising advice from my mindset coach.
Hi, I'm Erin Power. I'm a health coach, a health coaching educator and mentor, and your host of
Health Coach Radio. This podcast delves into the art, science, and business of health coaching.
Whether you're aspiring to land a coaching dream job or to embark on your own entrepreneurial
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and leave a lasting mark in this rapidly growing field.
It's time for health coaches to make an impact.
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That's right, I have a mindset coach.
I actually have tons of coaches.
I have two business coaches.
So I've got one business coach that specializes in paid traffic funnels.
So paying for ads and getting clients to come through a funnel into my call calendar ultimately.
And I have a second business coach with whom I'm in a mastermind group with a dozen and a half or so other female wellness industry business owners like me at my level.
And my mastermind coach helps me with kind of every other aspect of growing my business and generally building and growing my brand.
And I've recently also joined another mastermind group with another coach, a messaging guru,
who's going to help me position myself as kind of like a uniquely fascinating expert in my field.
I know that sounds so pompous, so much hubris in that statement.
But I do think there's something about being as interesting as possible
if you want to actually stand out in this online space.
And I'm not actually that interesting.
So I'm going to learn how to be.
At least I want to try.
I have copywriting coaches who help me with writing ads that convert and that are compliant
with Meta's advertising policies.
They also help me with, you know, compelling content creation and clarifying my messaging.
And I have a mindset coach.
Coaches need coaches, and I've got a lot of them.
So I attended a coaching call with my mindset coach a week or so ago.
And in that coaching call, I shared two things with her.
So first of all, I shared a win.
Okay, so in a coaching call, whether you're the client or the coach, I think it's always
a good idea to start with a win.
One thing that's going well, because it helps us to train the muscles that recognize successes.
So we're not just in failure mode.
But I think maybe sometimes the coaching relationship can be that way where it's like, I need help with this thing I'm stuck on.
So I'm going to go tap into my coach, which is great.
That's why a coach is there.
That's why you're a coach.
That's why you have a coach.
You lean in for support.
And in doing so, it's worthwhile and useful to just strengthen your connection to what is going well.
Not just the failures, not just the struggles.
And to be really honest with you, the only reason I was on the call with my mindset coach was because I was struggling.
I was feeling big failure vibes.
More on that later.
So my win that I shared with my mindset coach is that I consistently see struggles as opportunities now.
I do.
When I'm struggling, I see opportunity in that.
And I can't say that I always looked at difficulty that way.
And so in, you know, trying to rack my brain to come up with a win, I was pretty excited
to reflect on that and observe that although I'm kind of in the middle of some struggles,
I didn't feel doomsday about it.
Do you know what I mean?
It wasn't the end of the world.
I knew it was temporary and I simply needed to push through it or get through it.
Get through, nevermind pushing through.
Next week's solo episode is loosely titled Lessons Learned from a Slow Month in Business.
Okay, so I'll share more about what I learned from this terrible month I was having.
But that's what brought me to this mindset call of my mindset coach.
And in this moment, I wasn't interested in solving the leaks or the potential problems in my business model.
I was at this coaching call specifically to get my mind right so I could leverage my struggles into
growth. And you know what? I think that's awesome. I can't believe I've become that kind of person.
I wasn't born that way. I'm just like a lot of you. I struggle with, you know,
worthiness and imposter syndrome and all of those feelings that we have that keep us stuck.
But through enough practice and enough failure and enough success,
I feel like I've really developed that part of my personality that can turn struggles into something leverageable.
And anyway, that's why I was at this coaching call.
And that was also the win I wanted to share.
Now, I want to validate that I think that sounds a little bro-y, what I just said.
Kind of makes me sound like a bit of a biohacker, like self-optimization kind of guy.
And I don't think it's realistic to pathologically reframe every struggle into growth and potential.
and I think anyone who tells you that that you should do that every time that or that they do
that every time that they never wallow when they're having periods of struggle and they only
ever are launching forward and forward and forward I think they're lying do you know what I mean you
see these pretty sanctimonious personal growth types who lead you to believe that they're just
always on the upswing even during the low points now I spend time in low points I allow myself
to wallow here and there, some self-soothing. But inevitably, I dust myself off. I bootstrap
myself back up because the only way out is through. And that's not, that's not sanctimonious
self-optimization bro speak. That's just true. Are you a health coach who wants more hands-on
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primalhealthcoach.com and reserve your seat soon. So my win was still
believing that even my bad month was going to be good.
So we start the coaching conversation with the win and then that's sort of your ante. Once you've
anteed up, then you can share your struggle. So my struggle, the thing I wanted help working through
with my mindset coach was to how to deal with my feelings of inadequacy that were underlying this
difficult sort of month I was having a business. There are things I need to fix in my business,
whatever that is. I need to keep, you know, consistent traffic coming through, keeping
people engaged, nurturing, growing. I need to do all that, all that tactical stuff. And I'm working
on it. And I need to work on the way I feel about it. It felt like the opposite of everything I
touched turned to gold. Like everything I touched turned to garbage. That's what I was feeling.
That's the energy I was carrying around.
My self-esteem had taken a hit, just a temporary one.
And just so you know, this just happens.
It's just going to happen.
It's okay.
It's fine.
You'll live.
My coach listened patiently as I tried to describe this.
When I tried to describe it, I tried really hard not to be victim-y about it because I
don't think the victim-y energy is very productive.
So I tried to be pragmatic, allowing myself to feel things, but also just sharing, you know, as directly as possible what I was feeling and why and how that was manifesting in my behaviors.
And my coach asked very curious and exploratory questions to get some inventory of how I was feeling, how I was feeling, how I wanted to feel, and then what was the barrier or the gap in between those two.
That's coaching, baby.
What do you want?
Where are you now?
And what's this no man's land between the two?
And what's the next step we can take to get you closer to your desired outcome?
So coaching 101.
So how I was feeling was directionless, sluggish, pessimistic, irritated,
a lot of those kind of low vibe feelings, you know?
What I wanted to feel was the exact opposite.
I wanted to feel the exact opposite. I wanted to feel directional. I wanted to feel energetic.
I wanted to feel optimistic. I wanted to feel delighted and inspired by what I was doing.
So we had that sort of inventory. How do I feel now? How do I want to feel?
And after a moment of thinking, she said to me, do you mind if I share an idea with you?
And this is a great coaching tactic, by the way. As a coach, we can offer suggestions,
resources and anecdotes. We can. You know, I teach advanced coaching strategies at Primal Health
Coach Institute, and there's a lot of question asking, a lot of active listening that's very
crucial in the motivational interviewing skill set, the active listening piece. And the way active
listening is often taught is this method of asking for more, asking for more, asking for more,
teasing out what is already known and understood from within the client rather than teaching and
telling and talking, but we can do some teaching and telling and talking as well. You're allowed.
We can offer suggestions. We can offer resources. We can offer anecdotes. Absolutely. But we never
want to set up the coach-client relationship as this like boss subordinate paradigm.
You know, like there's some hierarchy. So by asking permission to share an idea,
The coach keeps the client in a leadership role.
So my mindset coach said to me, would you mind if I shared some ideas with you?
And by doing that, she was keeping me in the leadership role.
She didn't say, here's what you need to do.
She said, would you mind if I shared some ideas with you?
Small change of language, but language is very crucial in this relationship we have.
Jot that down, baby.
Use that in your coaching conversations.
So she said to me, is the weather nice where you are today by any chance?
And I looked out the window and I said, well, you know what?
Actually, it is for the first time all summer.
We had kind of a rainy summer and it was kind of miserable and hard to get outside.
But today is quite nice.
And she said, is there any good nature around or like a hiking trail?
Preferably something she specifically said, preferably something that's pretty epic and like vast.
Great words, epic and vast.
And as it turns out, I live in Alberta, which is epic and vast.
So she said, I think, tell me what you think, but I think it would be really helpful to you
to feel a sense of awe and smallness.
Because right now, everything feels hard.
And everything feels so important and close to you and so inflamed and just irritated.
I used the word irritated when I described how I was feeling.
It was just a word that came up.
It's like, it's all right there.
So close to you, like stuck on you like a burr.
You can't shake it off.
That's what it felt like.
It's really cool to anchor into feelings like that and actually give them a little visualization.
And, you know, she was speaking the language of nature, which is a language that I really like to speak.
So, yes, a burr stuck to me, irritating, inflamed, annoying.
She said, I wonder if getting out to some place where you are very small will offer you a perspective on how small everything actually is.
Because it feels big right now because it's up close right in front of you.
But if you are able to expand your horizons, everything will feel smaller.
She said, and I wonder if feeling a sense of awe will shake up your viewpoint.
literally first of all literally changing what your eyes are focusing on from computers and
frowny faces you know that that thinking facial expression you might make when you're peeved and
just like kind of clenched to looking out exploring horizons he says i wonder if a feeling of a sense
of awe will shake up your viewpoint and remind you what is vastly possible in the universe
in the universe. My mindset coach talks about the universe a lot, even though I don't really
understand what she means by that because I'm not really, I don't speak in the language of the
universe very much. It's okay. But she was framing it in the context of terra firma, really. So that
I understand. Standing amongst the mountains and seeing all the other vast mountains around me.
It's an interesting anchor idea to offer perspective. I really think, I think it was
neat. Even as a visualization, whether or not I actually literally went out to the mountains
to hike and look at the viewpoints, imagining that, framing it in that way was genius.
So I closed my laptop. I got in my car. I drove west out to the Rocky Mountains and hiked up a
steep hill until I was totally out of breath. And I sat at the top of this hike, looking at peaks
still much higher than I was and recognize that while what I do matters so much to me,
it's just not everything. It's literally not everything.
And you know what? On a very simple level, moving my body like that energized me. So deep breathing
as I moved up that hill, drove oxygen into the dusty, tired corners of my brain and my cells and
my lungs, you know, you know, that posture you might take when you're working and ruminating
on something. Again, it's that sort of anterior squeezed in constricted body language where you
have to release all that if you're going to walk up the side of a hill
to breathe and expand. It just made me feel better. Breathing made me feel better. Who knew?
It made me smile and lighten up my facial expression. When you have a smile on your face,
It's actually very hard to feel anything but content and delight and optimism.
It's hard to smile and feel those pessimistic, irritated feelings.
It's just nearly impossible to be smiling and breathing and rosy-cheeked and sun-kissed while also feeling like a grouch.
When you're struggling in your health coaching business or your practice or whatever you're doing
or any, I don't know, anything in your life, understand that most of your struggle
is your own mood. You are not objectively failing. Like using the example that I'm using here,
slow business does not equal failure. Slow doesn't mean it's stopped. Slow business doesn't mean I'm
out of business. Objectively, it's nothing. Unless I consciously decide I've failed.
And those decisions can be easier to decide into when your mood is low, when you haven't been
breathing, when you've been stuck in a dark room, when you've been frowning all day.
So changing the environment, changing your facial expression, changing the stature of your body,
changing your scenery can change your perspective immensely. And so my mindset coach helped me to
learn that I get to decide how I feel about my job. And I can change the way I feel about it if I want
to. This podcast was brought to you by Primal Health Coach Institute. To learn more about how
to become a successful health coach, get in touch with us by visiting primalhealthcoach.com forward
slash call. Or if you're already a successful health coach, practitioner, influencer, or thought
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Thanks for listening.