Have you ever wondered what the benefits are of 1) coaching yourself and 2) getting coached? Natalie Bacon’s life has completely transformed from applying coaching tools, and in this episode she shares how yours can, too.
Coaching is different from therapy, and in this podcast you’ll hear why that matters. You’ll also learn some truths about coaching that most people don’t talk about, as well as how to find the best coach for you.
I share personal stories about using coaching tools for challenges as well as goals. You’ll hear about her transformations that can help you discover what coaching tools are best for you, given your life.
If you want to change your life for the better, this podcast episode is for you.
If you’re a mom, you’re in the right place. This is a space designed to help you overcome challenges and live your best life. I’d love for you to join me inside the Mom On Purpose Membership, my community for moms where we take this work to the next level.
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Show Resources:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hi there. Welcome to the Design Your Dream Life podcast. My name is Natalie Bacon and I’m an Advanced, Certified Mindfulness Life Coach, as well as a wife and mom, if you’re here to do the inner work and grow, I can help. Let’s get started.
Hello my friend. Welcome to the podcast. I’m so happy to be here with you today to talk about how to coach yourself to grow. I am creating this podcast episode because of the requests and questions that I get around coaching. What is coaching? What should I ask? There was one specific question that came in recently about coming to Ask Natalie Anything, which by the way, I am hosting one more in less than a week. Head on over to Nataliebacon.com/asknatalie, I would love to see you there so you can try out coaching, see if it’s a good fit for you, and get some good help while you’re on that call.
One of the questions that came in about Ask Natalie Anything in response to an email invitation was, what should I ask? And I loved that question so much because as someone who has been coaching herself, getting coached and is a coach for several years now over five years, I forget that sometimes it can feel a little bit like a bubble, and I never want it to feel like a bubble. If you are new to this podcast, if you are new to coaching, this podcast episode will be really helpful so you can get a better understanding of what coaching is. It is something that is specific and useful, and I think before I knew what coaching was, I didn’t realize that it really is its own specific art and science, and that’s what I wanna talk with you about today. So if you are wondering what coaching is, how do I coach myself to grow and what should I look for in a coach? How can coaching help me? This podcast episode is for you and this way, when I get asked about coaching in the future, I have this episode to send anyone who is coaching curious. So if we take a step back and we think about sort of the typical modern day problems that we face in motherhood, I think there’s the pressure to do it all. This is a big one. There is the fact that we are taught the mindset we need to do everything for everyone always. Then there’s the primitive brain, which you may or may not have heard me talk about before, but there’s many parts to your brain. The two parts that I often talk about are the primitive brain and the prefrontal cortex. Also, I refer to it as your lower brain and your higher brain or your toddler brain and your adult brain.
The toddler brain, this primitive brain wants immediate gratification. It wants to have pleasure in the moment. This is why we scroll when we quote unquote know better or we overeat or overdrink when we quote unquote, know, we shouldn’t be. It also wants to avoid pain. This is why it’s so hard for us to feel our feelings in our bodies without reacting to them. This is why it’s so hard to stop yelling that lower brain. This is why we are sometimes judgmental or care so much about what other people think. This is why we want approval from others and to be included, which leads of course, to the comparison trap, keeping up with the Joneses and always seeking that external validation. I think that the most helpful piece, at least in my experience of all of this with the primitive brain specifically, is just understanding it and knowing that every single healthy human has it.
And so the goal with coaching is not to get rid of it, but instead to know how to manage it. I felt so much personal kind of, um, clarity relief and just so much more control over my own life when I realized, oh, this is just part of the human experience and I can manage it in a way that isn’t so bad. Another problem is that the most popularized resources in my opinion, are diagnostic and past focus. So that’s therapy or passive, like reading books and listening to podcasts. So if I am casually out and about talking about therapy, most people know exactly what I’m talking about. If I’m talking about reading a book or listening to a podcast or even taking an online course, most people know exactly what I am talking about. However, when I talk about coaching, most people, you know, don’t really know what I’m talking about.
Um, they, they may not be confused per se, but they, they don’t really know what that means, particularly with life coaching or mindset coaching. I think there’s this sense that, you know, your life needs to be really bad or, um, you’re a hot mess or whatever it is. And of course there are different types of coaching. So I’m specifically speaking the through the lens that I coach from. But I do think that because the most popularized resources are kind of therapy or passive learning, we haven’t really gotten to the place where we as a general population in public understand coaching in the same way we understand going to the gym and exercising. I love this analogy so much. We go to doctors and, um, all different types of doctors to fix parts of our bodies that need help being fixed, right? The same is true with therapy.
If you have past trauma or something from, you know, your childhood or, or kind of the realm with which therapy helps, therapy is the tool, right? So if you have a broken arm, going to the gym is not a good idea. The same is true with if you want to work through, you know, maybe an abusive relationship or childhood that you had, and there’s some trauma there that’s not gonna be a good fit for coaching in the same way that going to, you know, um, the gym with a broken arm wouldn’t really help you. Now, I am generalizing here, there probably are coaches who navigate those areas, but in general, stick with me here for purposes of illustration and specifically so you understand what coaching is in the way that I do it. I think of coaching as very present and future focused, and I think of it as mental and emotional wellness.
When you’re starting from a pretty good place in the same way you would think about exercising, you don’t really go to the gym or sign up for orange theory or whatever it is because you need to fix your body. You do it because you wanna take care of your body. That’s the same with coaching. I’m not here to fix anyone. I’m here to help you live your best life, to help you take care of your mental and emotional wellness at the highest level. Okay, so I get a lot of questions about the difference between coaching and therapy, and that I think helps me and a lot of my clients understand whether this is something they might want to try. For the record, I am a really big fan of whatever works, including therapy if it works for you. I had an amazing therapist after a breakup years ago, and she was just spectacular.
She really was fantastic. And then I, I completed therapy. I graduated from therapy just like maybe you would think about going to, um, you know, physical therapy after surgery and, and that whole process has a start point and a completion point, unlike going to the gym where you continue that forever. Just like with coaching, you really can continue that forever. That’s why we have so many people who have stayed, um, inside Grow You from the beginning. And again, not all coaching is the same, but it’s helpful to understand that it’s something that you continue ongoing because you care about your life, the decisions that you make, and it can be really helpful to have a coach who can help you navigate those challenges and live your best life. I also think that another modern problem that we have is that medication can be over-prescribed without other tools.
I e without brain management, this is not always the case, and I am very pro medication. Again, I am very pro whatever works. I was talking to one of my friends who is on anxiety medication and she said, oh, I hate that I have to take this every day. And I said, why? It’s kind of amazing that it’s so helpful for you to take every day. It’s kind of like, and you might not know this about me, but I wear contacts and have a very, um, strong prescription. Um, and I have astigmatism and so I have to get these custom contact lenses. I’m not a candidate for LASIK and all of the things. So every year it is a big expense of mine and I am so grateful that I get to pay for these custom contact lenses and that I wear them every single day.
And I kind of think of medication like that. If you need medication, I personally just think that, um, if that benefits you, then absolutely just in the same way that contacts benefit me, they help me see. What I want to add though is that we need more tools with medication. So I’ve personally seen and lived through being kind of recommended, uh, anti-anxiety or depression medicine, and it was without much inquiry at all. It was before I had seen a therapist. It was right after that breakup. It was before anything. And it was not from the therapist who I was just raving about. It was in a different situation and, um, they’re like ready to write me a script without much diving into what was going on. And even then, I was just so distraught over this breakup and I had enough self-awareness to say like, I am not opposed to medicine.
But also, you know, this is the first time I’m coming in and talking about this. Like, you know, maybe we should have a a couple follow up visits before we’re putting me on meds. Like I, you know, I was just, just a little bit skeptical. And so, um, that may or may not be something that you have seen or experience. I definitely want to add the caveat that I, I am pro medication if it works for you. But as a coach and as someone who has lived a real life long enough to see that sometimes that that script pad is is overused without other tools, I think there is a huge space for coaching. Um, and, and that’s where the coaching tools that I have can really help. So whether you have quote unquote graduated from therapy like I had in the past, or whether you are ready to have just accountability and tools to help you create your dream future for yourself and your family, it might be that everything just looks fine on the outside, but on the inside, you know, you sort of have this is this it feeling and that is where coaching can come in.
Coaching can really help you change and improve your mindset so that you change and improve your life. I like to think about it as ending unnecessary suffering. Keyword is unnecessary. I think that we will experience challenges and circumstances in our lives that we want to feel really sad and devastated about and surprised and shocked and have grief and all of those things that are part of the human experience. The part that coaching can really help with and end is the unnecessary suffering. It’s the overwhelm, the self-pity, the feeling like your life is happening to you, the feeling like you just gotta get to the next season in order to feel happy. When you’re in that place, I like to think about it as a little bit of unnecessary suffering. And so through coaching you can really help yourself feel better. Coaching also helps you manage that primitive part of your brain so you do more of what you want and less of what you don’t want.
So if you’re overeating, you will learn about that through coaching and be able to manage that primitive brain, manage that urge, manage that desire so that you kind of calm your toddler brain down and you, um, stop overeating or if it’s drinking. The only reason that I was able to really stop drinking was because of coaching, not because of the specific coaching that I got from a coach, but it’s because I’m always applying these tools to my life, meaning I am questioning the kind of standards by which I live and questioning whether I want to keep doing in the past what I’ve always done and thinking about my future. And I really thought about my future as a mom, and I just decided the future of me as a mom was a non drinker. Without having that tool to kind of question my past and decide about my future intentionally, I don’t think I would have made the decision to quit drinking because prior to understanding these tools, specifically with drinking, I would’ve thought, okay, either just everyone drinks or you have a drinking problem and so you quit and you’re sober.
And I didn’t fit into that bucket, so I probably would’ve just kept drinking. And how cool is that that I decided to create my own rule that for now I’m not drinking, it doesn’t serve me, I don’t wanna drink. My life is better without drinking, and if I change my mind in the future, I can do that. That is the power of coaching my friends. It is not the common social narrative. And so coaching really helps you feel empowered to live the life that you want on your terms in a very real and practical way. I think that coaching helps you have fewer regrets and make better decisions because you uplevel your thinking. You think critically at a higher level. Now this doesn’t mean you’re overthinking. This doesn’t mean you are worrying. This means that you kind of manage that primitive brain to calm down with the worry and the fears and the insecurity.
You allow those feelings to be there, but then you use your higher brain, your prefrontal cortex to make decisions and then you have your own back regardless of the outcome. Now, this doesn’t mean you don’t make mistakes, it doesn’t mean you don’t get it wrong. It doesn’t mean you don’t repair all of those things because you’re human, but it does mean that you won’t look back and think, oh my gosh, how could I have done that? I am so horrible. You won’t shame yourself about a past decision. It’s the difference between, yeah, I made a wrong call there versus I am bad without coaching. I think shame kind of spirals, and it really takes over. And so we start to do things in order to improve and increase our goodness. So we look for external validation and we try to perform and take action to make us feel better inside. Instead, coaching helps you feel better inside and then just take the action that you want to take, some of which is gonna be amazing. Other times you’re gonna mess it up, but your goodness is untouched. Coaching separates out actions from who you are, from your identity.
It will also help you apply what you learn passively in a way that actually changes your life. So I remember in law school when I would listen to audiobooks and podcasts, I was such an avid podcast listener, but my life didn’t change at all. I was not applying the tools to my life, so my life stayed the same. Coaching is the application of the passive learning. It helps you create the real change in your life. It’s kind of like the difference between listening to podcasts about exercise and actually going to the gym or reading a book about skiing versus going on the slopes or reading a book about recipes and cooking versus getting in the kitchen. It can be really helpful to learn. I’m all for learning. I always have audiobooks queued up, but I don’t mistake that for the application piece. I don’t mistake that for coaching.
So that brings me to what is coaching. There are many types of coaching. I am only going to talk about the type of coaching that I do, that I’m trained in, and that is causal coaching. There kind of is another branch of coaching that I’ll just briefly mention here so you can kind of understand the difference and understand what causal coaching is a little bit more clearly. The other type of coaching is telling you what to do. So you wanna know how to do something and someone will say, go do X, Y, Z. Okay, that is all based on actions. That’s very different than causal coaching, which is getting to the root cause of why you’re taking the action or not taking the action you wanna take, and then helping you decide what’s the best next action. For example, if you wanna stop yelling at your kids, common advice might be to take certain actions like leave the room or take deep breaths.
With causal coaching, I show you the root cause of why you yell so you can stop. So in this example, it’s the thought driving, the feeling, driving the action. Maybe the thought is bedtime is so hard and they never listen to me. This thought creates the feeling of frustration from awareness of that thought. You can play around with it and loosen up the thought using curiosity and understanding that you can think anything you want in those moments and how you think creates how you feel and how you feel drives all of your actions. So then I help you come up with better feeling thoughts and teach you how to create thoughts. Intentionally intentional thought creation is one of the best tools that you can ever learn for yourself because your brain, not my brain, your brain is the most powerful brain for you, it’s the best brain for you. But you have to uplevel the software, you have to uplevel and give your brain updates just like we do on our phone and on our devices, we have to install that new software.
So coaching tools help you do that from awareness of what you’re thinking and how you’re feeling. You can learn how to process your feelings and think at a higher level in a more empowered way so that you empower yourself and are more in control of how you show up. I’m always saying in Grow You. I wish I could teach you how to control your kids or your spouse or your friends or whomever you want to control. I really do. I would love someone to teach me how to do it too. And of course we can’t and we’re not supposed to. And when we step away from the situation, we know that we know intellectually that other people are supposed to have agency and they’re supposed to be able to do what they wanna do. It doesn’t mean that we don’t set boundaries, it doesn’t mean we don’t decide what we wanna tolerate. It doesn’t mean that we don’t ask for what we want. We can do all of those things, but when we take responsibility for how we show up, how we think, and how we feel, we get all of our power back, we can completely change our lives. And that is such a gift to give yourself.
So as a mindset coach, I don’t tell you what to do and I don’t even tell you what to think. I show you how to think. I will certainly sprinkle in my own thoughts here and there, particularly if it’s helpful to get your brain going, but you have the most incredible brain for you. And coaching helps you take your brain to the next level. I like to think of it like I’m on a couch with you and we’re sitting side by side and there’s a projector in front of us and I’m showing you what’s going on inside your mind. This is what I have been trained to do. It’s how I continue to uplevel my own coaching through more trainings. It’s a way that I like to over-deliver to my clients is to kind of be on the cutting edge of of coaching so that you are getting the very best.
Because when you know what you’re thinking, you will think more deliberately. You will manage that primitive brain, you will use your prefrontal brain and you will change your life. Mindset really is everything. Most people don’t know this, nor do they know how to change their mindset coaching and specifically the coaching I do is the process of showing you how to change your mindset so you can change your life. It’s not that we just change our mindset and sit in a room all day and think happy thoughts. It’s so practical with the daily challenges that you are facing, whether it’s the nighttime routine, whether it’s the coaching that I did earlier, um, this week I’m thinking about my clients and navigating big challenges and small challenges. You have a brother-in-law who passes away and you’re navigating, um, how you want to show up for your spouse and your family, particularly when there are unexpected things that come up.
Um, you know, that can be a bigger thing that you’re working through with coaching. And it can also be the small things like feeling irritated that your husband keeps eating all of your snacks. I like to say there’s nothing too big nor too small because it’s all brain stuff. If there’s something you want, whether it’s internal, like to feel more connected in your marriage or it’s external, like to lose weight or to stop yelling, coaching can help when I coach you or when you listen to other people get coached, this is what we do inside Grow. You, you can either get coached or you can listen in to other people get coached. It’s so powerful. It is powerful because you see the tools actually applied in real life examples and also you get them applied to your life. Now, self-coaching is a term that I use sometimes from time to time. And again, someone asked me recently like, what does that really mean? Self-coaching? I like to think of as pretty broad and simply just the application of the tools to your life. It’s the process of coaching yourself.
Self-coaching is something that you can do daily or weekly or monthly. Again, using that analogy to working out, how often do you wanna exercise? It’s a personal question. You may want to do it daily. I kind of recommend daily self-coaching when you’re first getting going because you’ll have so much momentum for it and awareness. But there may be times after you’ve coached yourself daily that you get down to more of a weekly coaching and even less than that if, if that’s what you prefer. It’s definitely a personal choice. I tend to coach myself every couple of days and I use lots of different coaching tools and. Inside Grow You. I teach the thought model. That was the coaching model that I was trained in to help you identify your thoughts and I teach you a clean thinking process to separate out your thoughts from your feelings, from your actions, and that will help you see how you’re creating the experience for you.
And then from there you can decide if you want to keep that way of thinking or change it. I also have a tool that’s very popular inside Grow You called Mindful Journaling. This is a daily or weekly journaling practice that you can use to gain more awareness of where you’re at right now and where you want to go. So if you want to work on an identity shift, like going from someone who feels frustrated or apathetic to someone who feels a lot more joy and uh, contentment, mindful journaling is amazing because it offers you a specific formula to help you write into your future. Joe Dispenza calls that creating future memories. Well, I created a process for that. That’s a self-coaching tool. It’s not just listening to a book about creating future memories. Love Joe Dispenza’s books by the way. But it’s a process by which you can practice this in your life.
Gosh, I have so many other tools, hundreds of them I teach processing feelings, curiosity, asking better questions. These are just some of my favorite. The key and the reason kind of why I’m mentioning them here is so that you understand what self-coaching is. It’s sort of this umbrella and underneath are these tools. I like to think of a tool belt and I have self-coaching tools in them, and depending on what I’m going through, I’m gonna pull out whatever tool I wanna use. Just like if you were building a house, are you gonna pull out the hammer or the screwdriver, whatever. It’s, I was listening to Brene Brown recently and she was talking about pulling out one of her tools and starting to apply them to her life. And I thought, this is self coaching. So it’s the application piece. Consuming is really helpful. I think particularly if you decide that you want to grow, certainly listening to personal development or any kind of other books and education tools that you can consume, they can really, really help you in just getting your mind in that space.
Um, it’s gonna be much better than just listening to music or watching TV or something that’s totally unrelated to how you want to change and grow, but it is just the first step. So I remember when my first son RJ was born and I had read books and they were really helpful and I follow accounts that are educational and I’m kind of always on the, the cutting edge of reading and learning about child development. And when I was reading about sleep training and, and baby sleep and all of these things, I remember needing more help. And so that’s when I took a sleep training course and got coaching on it. And that is when it changed when I had a specific formula that I could apply to make a difference with how we were navigating sleep. So the consumption was helpful in so far as it helped me become aware of baby sleep and kind of what to look out for, but it, it wasn’t taking it to the next level.
It wasn’t kind of changing the outcomes. And so I’m all for curating your feed to be, um, the types of accounts that you want to consume. And that doesn’t mean it has to all be educational, not by any means include the entertainment that you want to consume, but do so intentionally. That’s what this is about. It’s not about right or wrong or or good or bad. It’s about intentionality and living your life more purposefully. So for me, I want to consume on purpose. Am I perfect at this? Absolutely not. Not even close, but I make little efforts and changes as I go along. And I think that consuming educational content is a great introduction to coaching. And coaching is really the next step that actually changes your life because you truly take the work from the podcast or from the book or from whatever kind of passive learning and then you apply it to your specific circumstances.
I was thinking about how I’ve used coaching in my life recently and I wanted to just share with you, um, because I think it’ll provide a kind of wider range of, of examples that are really specific. So you know this already. I talked about it on the podcast. Someone stole a check from me during my move for thousands of dollars and deposited it. I definitely would have navigated that in a worse way without coaching tools. My primitive brain would’ve gone to fear and overwhelm and anxiety and it would have been so much more stressful than it was now. Was that fun? Was I happy? No, but I used the tools that I have from coaching to help me feel so much more empowered. Another example from my life recently is that someone I love in my extended family was diagnosed with breast cancer, completely unexpected and hard to navigate.
And coaching tools really helped me. They allowed me to, um, feel my feelings and focus on asking useful questions and avoid those questions that are stuck. Questions like, why is this happening? You know, how could this be? Or any, any sort of like disempowered question like that that our brain on default wants to go to instead focusing on the more useful questions like who do I want to be in this and how can I support this person? Another area of my life that I have used coaching tools on recently, my husband wanted to move back to Chicago after we had already put down a very big non-refundable, um, deposit of earnest money with a builder in Charleston. And navigating that with such peace and clarity is 100% only because of coaching. Without that, I would have looked to kind of the past and the future and worried and kind of had a lot more mindset drama about it, particularly around the money aspect of it.
But I have such clean thoughts about money and trust me, that doesn’t mean that I enjoyed just saying bye to that money, yet I was clear about my priorities. So I was able to make really good decisions for me and not have any regrets. I had another situation where someone who I love lied to me. Again, unexpected. Do we ever expect lies? I don’t know. But in this case it was unexpected. And knowing what I know about lying, particularly with the studying that I’ve done around kids and just child development, um, it was so helpful. This person happens to be an adult, but I applied this same kind of coaching tools and I was able to navigate that with love for myself and for the other person in a way that I never would have otherwise. And then there are all of the kind of challenges that have come with motherhood, one of my coaches and mentors who’s asking me, you know, kind of how was that transition?
And I’ve talked about it here a little bit before that it was not bad. My transition to motherhood, um, was was not bad at all. And in fact, I think it was amazing. And that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard. It doesn’t mean there weren’t sleepless nights and I certainly don’t want you to use that against yourself. Um, but I say that because I had grown so much before becoming a mom that it was sort of like, all right, let’s get the tool belt out,. This is what we do when we’re tired. Instead of thinking I’m tired and this is a huge problem, I’m never gonna sleep again. I’m gonna be mad. So now I’m not only tired, but I’m mad. I pulled out that tool of reframing the tired, I’m tired and that’s okay. I’m tired and I will sleep again. This little way of shifting the way that I think was life-changing, it was so helpful for me to navigate those, um, early transitions and even some of the, the ones now with the tantrums and the biting and the problem behaviors and second guessing parenting and the comparison trap and all of that.
I am not a parenting expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I am an expert at coaching at mindset. And when you take care of the mindset part, when you clean up kind of what’s going on for you as mom, the parenting gets a lot easier. It, it sort of like takes care of itself. Now are there gonna be hard times? Of course, but so much of the work is the work that we do on ourselves. And again, it’s like working out your body. It’s getting your mental and emotional wellness in the best state. I’ve used coaching for some other areas of my life as well that I do want to mention here. I used coaching to help me lose 25 pounds the first time and then I had my first baby and I used coaching and the tools that I teach and the change your eating habits forever course inside grow you to lose 40 pounds after having my first baby.
And I will do the same thing again after the second baby. I’ve used coaching to go from kind of being more rigid and inflexible and really type A to being more easygoing and laid back. I’ve used coaching to stop yelling and this is a big one because I grew up in a house where yelling was the norm. And I often hear that as a reason why people think they can’t stop yelling. I promise you my friends, you can 100% change. I used coaching to meet my husband. Steve was so amazing and I remember my coach at the time just saying, if it’s not me, you know as the coach, if it’s not me who you’re working with to find your husband and and get married, it’ll be the next coach. And it was so freeing to hear that because I’d sort of gotten to a point where I thought like, it’s now or never And that’s, um, it was just so interesting looking back because of course you never have to give up on any of your dreams. And so she really helped me reframe how I thought about dating in a way that served me so well. And to kind of finish up that story, I did meet Steve, my now husband when I was working with this coach.
Coaching has helped me work through marriage challenges so that I have a more empowered mindset to be the wife I wanna be and to let go of that in control enthusiast. That is sort of my default. Like I want Steve to do things the way I want him to do things. Didn’t he get the manual on that? Of course, we all have something like that for our friends, for our family, for our spouses, for our kids. And when we use coaching, we can become more aware of that so we can step into our own empowerment instead of trying to control others. And it creates a much more loving, connected, peaceful marriage. I used coaching to pay off my law school debt, $206,000. That was huge. I used coaching to switch careers, going from a lawyer to A C F P to then a business owner.
It sounds like maybe using that example, you would think that I am more, um, risk averse, but I am not. I am a little scaredy cat and so I feel a lot of anxiety and I have a lot of nerves about big decisions and yet I don’t let that part of my primitive brain take control because I know I have the awareness that it’s my primitive brain. So instead what I do is I make decisions from my prefrontal cortex and it is the only way that I would have been able to ever change careers because I just distinctly remember quitting being a lawyer and a C F P and how horrible it felt in the moment to do those things, to make those transitions. And yet I did them because I made the decision ahead of time from my prefrontal cortex s brain. And so I didn’t have the second guessing.
I just had the part where I felt totally nervous about what was to come, but I knew that it was my brain. I knew that it was my default brain, my primitive brain just trying to protect me. Your primitive brain always wants you to do what you’ve always done. And so you have to train it to understand that so that you are the boss and that the primitive brain is in the backseat. Otherwise you’ll continue to live the same life you’ve always lived. Always that primitive brain is so strong and so you have to learn how to manage it.
I’ve also used coaching for smaller things. You know, most recently I’ve stopped watching tv. I’ve used it to increase my confidence and on and on. It’s really my best kind of tool and way of approaching my life that helps me endlessly. So how can coaching help you? What is heavy on your heart? Are you feeling unhappy? Are you feeling overwhelmed? Are you navigating a difficult challenge with your in-laws or in your marriage or your parenting? Is it something else? Maybe your physical health, maybe you received a diagnosis. I anything that is present or future focus that you want to change the way that you think about so that you can feel more empowered in your life.
That is where coaching can help. You can learn how to manage your brain so that you are the leader of your life. You can’t control kind of the hand that you’re dealt in coaching. Can’t make that any more likely either, but it can help you navigate the challenges. So when you are dealt that hand, you’ve trained for it, you are prepared, you know that you have this tool belt that you can reach into to help you. One kind of word of caution, just like shopping for a new car or a therapist, I think it’s really important to test drive. Not all cars are the same. You know this, not all therapists are the same. You may or not may or may not know this. The same is true for coaching. So look for coaches who you feel safe with, who are effective at helping you even when it’s uncomfortable. So you want a coach who’s gonna push you. If you think of like a basketball coach, you don’t want a basketball coach who’s saying, yeah, take it easy. Don’t worry about it. Shoot however you want. You want a basketball coach who’s gonna teach you good form, even if it’s uncomfortable, even if it makes you sweat, even if the next day you’re a little bit sore.
You want a coach who takes their work seriously and who continues to invest in themselves to over-deliver to you. That is my hope and intention always. I am not perfect at it by any means, but I am always 100% committed to helping my clients navigate their challenges and live their best lives. I know that I am not the coach for everyone, but if you like this podcast, I am likely an excellent fit as your coach. So I would love for you to join me. You can learn more about my coaching program, Grow You over at momonpurpose.com/coaching. You can also try out coaching and kind of ask me some questions and, and learn some tools to see what coaching is really like on a group coaching call at. Ask Natalie Anything
[email protected]/asknatalie, find a coach my friend. Stick with that coach and continue to grow your life will never be the same. I promise you that. Take care.If you loved this podcast, I invite you to check out Grow You my mindfulness community for moms where we do the inner work together. Head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more.
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