Lindsay Dotzlaf

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Mastering Coaching Skills with Lindsay Dotzlaf | How Coaching Made Me a Better Parent, Partner, and Business Owner

Ep #213: How Coaching Made Me a Better Parent, Partner, and Business Owner

How has coaching impacted your life? And how can coaching make a huge difference in the lives of your clients? As I reflect during this season of gratitude, I’m overwhelmed with appreciation for the countless gifts coaching has given me, both personally and professionally.

In this episode, I share my top 10 reasons I’m grateful for coaching. These range from major mindset shifts to specific examples of how coaching has transformed my parenting, relationships, and business. I hope this inspires you to reflect on your own coaching journey. 

Hearing how coaching has changed the lives of others is one of the greatest joys of this work. Tune in this week to discover 10 unexpected ways coaching transformed my life. From parenting and relationships to money and business, I’m sure you’ll find something you resonate with on today’s show.

What are your next steps in your coaching and your business? What support do you need? How do you get closer to your overall goal and what you want to create for yourself? To give yourself answers to these questions, mark your calendar for December 10th 2024 and join me for The Big Picture Workshop!

No coach can stand tall without a solid foundation. In The Coach Lab, you’ll learn the tools, skills, and techniques that will allow you to build that strong foundation so that your coaching can thrive… and your clients can, too. Click here to join!

Get the Coach Week 2024 replays right here!

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

  • How coaching empowers you to honor your deepest desires.
  • Why I parent my teenage daughters differently, thanks to coaching.
  • The ways coaching has strengthened my marriage and other key relationships.
  • How to pursue big goals and dreams without the pressure and anxiety.
  • The power of using coaching tools to reframe your past.
  • Why I feel immense gratitude that I had the courage to build a coaching business.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

  • For even more resources on making your work as a coach and success for your clients easier, I’ve created a freebie just for you. All you have to do to get it is sign up to my email list at the bottom of the home page!
  • Get the CEO Series for free! Five videos and live coaching to help you avoid common mistakes as you grow your coaching business. Click here to join!
  • Join me on December 10th, 2024, for The Big Picture Workshop! Let’s explore your next steps in coaching and business, identify the support you need, and get closer to your ultimate goals. Mark your calendar!
  • If you want to hone in on your personal coaching style and what makes you unique, The Coach Lab is for you! Come and join us!
  • Join me for Behind the Curtain, a video and audio series dedicated to all the mistakes I made that stopped me from hitting my goal over the past 12 months. Click here to check it out!
  • If you have a topic you want to hear on the podcast, DM me on Instagram!

Full Episode Transcript:

Hey, this is Lindsay Dotzlaf and you are listening to Mastering Coaching Skills episode 213.

To really compete in the coaching industry, you have to be great at coaching. That’s why every week, I will be answering your questions, sharing my stories, and offering tips and advice so you can be the best at what you do. Let’s get to work.

Hey coach, I am so happy you’re here today. Welcome to the podcast. First, let’s do a little housekeeping. So there are a couple things coming up that I just want you to know about so you can mark your calendars, you can be prepared and come join us because they’re going to be a lot of fun.

So first of all, if you aren’t following along, I am currently doing a series on my Instagram where I am giving it a lot more attention than usual, but just kind of giving some tips and tricks, some short coaching blurbs about tips that you can use in your coaching, reasons that I love coaching, the ways I think about coaching, just all kind of different things. Kind of just a two weeks of gratitude on Instagram for coaching in general, very broad. And we have some specials and some different things going on over there. So if you’re listening in real time, go check it out.

And the other thing that’s coming up is mark your calendars for December 10th. I’m doing a big picture planning workshop, which I did last year. I’m doing it again. And it is a workshop where we will look ahead, look at your whole next year in your coaching and your coaching practice and I will help you make some decisions and really get your year set up the way you want it to be. So that’s coming up. Mark your calendars again, December 10th at 1pm Eastern.

And after that, then we’re headed into, you know, the holidays, the end of the year. And one thing that we will be doing, I’m just going to let you know now so that if you have been thinking about this, you can kind of get your wheels turning and make a plan to join us if that’s what you want to do.

But in the summer I created a new offer. It was called the Summer Project. It was amazing. I’m going to have some people talking about projects on the podcast coming up, so you’ll get to hear some of the things that people worked on, but it was so fun.

It is a short three-month offer, a group offer, where you bring any project that you’re working on in your coaching practice, and we get you through it. We make a plan. We coach through all the obstacles. We figure it all out. It is so much fun. So I’m doing it again. It won’t be called the Summer Project. We haven’t – By the time this is out, we’ll probably have landed on a name. It might just be the coach project, but it will be a very similar setup, three months, but this time with an option to work more closely with me.

So there will be the regular three months and then an upgrade that it’s more of a mentor through your project for three months. Some of that came up last time where a couple of people had projects that it was more time-consuming, more involved than they expected it to be, or maybe they even knew that it was going to be a bigger project, and they just wanted some more of my time or more of my eyes on their things, maybe going through things with them or whatever.

So that will be coming up. That will be starting at the beginning, in the new year, towards the beginning. I’d have to check the calendar, I think it’s the first week of February, but we will be selling that in December. So if that’s something you are considering, or even if you did it last time and you want to do it again, it was so much fun. I loved it. Clients loved it. Again, I’m going to have some of them on talking about their projects.

But let’s dig into what I want to talk about today. So if you’re listening to this in real time, this week in the United States is Thanksgiving week. And however you celebrate that or don’t celebrate that or whatever, I know it can have quite a shifty past, Thanksgiving, but I think over the years for a lot of families in the US, it has really just evolved to be, at least this is how we think about it in our house, it’s really just a day to spend with our family, eating great food, cooking all day. Let’s be honest, mostly my husband cooking all day, me watching him or helping, assisting, whatever, pouring the wine.

We play a lot of games and then we eat. And one thing we do before we eat is my kids usually lead this, but they pass a, you know, like a basket around and they give everyone something to write on. And everybody writes down something that they’re thankful for. Some of them are really simple, some are longer. And then we go around and we read them. You pull them out of the basket and you read, and then you have to guess whose it is.

Now, mostly my family loves to joke around and they love to be silly. So we get a lot of funny things, especially because my grandpa a few years ago, we call him Poppy, he’s no longer with us, but the thing he wrote that he was thankful for as he was sitting at a table with some of his kids and then a lot of his grandkids and his great grandkids, because my kids were little at the time he wrote, he was thankful for Poppy’s good looks. Again, he was Poppy. We called him Poppy.

So that became kind of a joke that comes up pretty much every year. At least a few people write that, but, you know, then someone had to go around, pull his thing and read it and then guess who wrote it. Now he was quite the jokester, so that was not out of character for him. It was not hard to guess who did it, but that’s always kind of how it’s gone.

But because of that, as I was thinking about the podcast, it’s going to come out this week, one thing that came to my mind that I’ve never really talked about, but that has been on my mind a lot is to consider all of the reasons that I am so grateful for coaching. Not all, the top 10. I’m going to give you the top 10 reasons that I’m grateful for coaching and that coaching has changed my life. And I am doing this from the perspective, you’ll see this as I’m going through, I’m doing this from the perspective of mostly in my life. So you all know me because of mostly my business and hear me talk a lot about my business and coaching practice. And what you’re going to hear from me today is some more personal things, but here’s why this is useful for you.

First, I think this is such a powerful exercise. The one reason I have been doing this for myself and kind of keeping a list, I wasn’t necessarily planning on recording content with it or recording a podcast, but it has really helped me connect with just coaching in general. The power of it, how amazing it is, how powerful it is, why it’s important, why it’s so important that you all get your work into the world, and that I do too, right?

It’s a great reminder for me, but also a great reminder for you. So if you have never done this, you should definitely take a pause. And I mean, not now, listen to the episode, but then afterwards maybe carve out some time to do this for yourself because it has been really, really powerful for me. And some of these things, again, will be quite personal, but there’s going to be some learning in it for you as well. Partially just sharing. You’re going to learn some things about me that you didn’t know. And then also just some learning and some considering maybe where do these things show up? Where have they shown up in your life?

And again, these are from the perspective of me just hiring a coach. So before I was even a coach, you know, when I just hired a life coach and learned about coaching and had a coach for the first time, all the way through now. So also being a coach, starting my business, all of that.

All right, so let’s just dive in, shall we? And I would love for you to share too. So if you want to come tell me on Instagram in my DMs or wherever it is that you contact me, or if you’re in The Coach Lab, post it in the group as you’re listening. I would really, really love to hear what some of your answers would be and why.

And you’ll see as I go through these, some of them are more broad, just something that feels just so powerful that has really changed my life in lots of ways. And then a couple are very specific. So you’ll see that as I’m going through. So let’s just dig in.

So number one, and these aren’t necessarily in the order of importance, definitely. But number one is very broad, but probably one of the most powerful takeaways for me from coaching before I was even a coach was to just really learn to ask myself and check in with myself around what do I want? When I very first hired a coach, I was definitely living a life that was very centered around taking care of other people, asking what other people wanted. And while I was still doing my own thing, so I was running another business, I was doing all those things, but I was so afraid to let anyone down that I was still doing all of the other things, right?

Being the perfect mom, I’m going to say in air quotes, because that is not necessarily what was happening. It’s just the way I was thinking about it at the time. And being the perfect wife and the perfect, just the perfect everything, right?

And really what I mean by that is just not wanting to let anyone down ever, period, right? Just like really showing up in ways that didn’t always honor what I wanted out of certain situations, but really was like, what do people expect from me and how can I be the best at that?

So that’s something that obviously still comes up consistently. And I’m just always so grateful that I have the awareness now to stop and take a breath and say, wait, what’s my decision here? It doesn’t mean I’m never doing things for other people. I still love to do that sometimes. Sometimes I even do that when I don’t want to, right? Because ultimately I do want to for whatever reason, because I love the person or whatever it is.

But just learning to make decisions from a place of honoring truly my deepest desires first, or at least equal with what I think other people want from me, what I think my, you know, what people would agree I’m supposed to be, doing all of those types of things.

So for example, starting my coaching business was one of those things, definitely. Nobody really wanted me to do that. Not that they weren’t supportive, but they were just like, why? You already have this business. It’s going great, which because that’s what they saw on the outside because that’s what I was showing everyone, right?

Because I was not being honest with myself or with anyone else. I was just kind of painting this pretty picture of everything’s great. Everything is fine. They still know, my husband definitely knows if I’m like, yeah, I’m fine. He’s always like, uh-oh, that’s just always a sign to stop and check in.

So that’s probably the first one. And that’s just really broad and has affected probably all the areas of my life. And it really is just something that has put me in control, or at least shown me where I have control, where I don’t have control. And it always just gives me this check-in to remind myself, like if things aren’t going the way that I want them to go, or if I’m not fully in love with something about my life, there’s always the opportunity to change things or to create something different.

The next one, and this one makes me kind of emotional. Like this is the one that brings up a lot of gratitude for me. And when I say emotional, I mean, like in a good way, it just brings up so much gratitude, is parenting. So as I’m recording this, I have a 12 and almost 15 year old, and they are amazing. The loves of my life.

And they are becoming the ages where they are making a lot of their own choices. And my older daughter is in high school and she’s navigating all the things that come with that and playing sports and just doing the things that she wants to do. But I cannot tell you how different I parent them versus what I probably would have parented them if I didn’t have coaching at all.

And maybe not, who knows, we can’t know for sure. But what I do know is that in the past I think I would have really cared a lot about what other people think and what other people think of their decisions. And maybe even down to small things, what they wear, what they do with their hair, all of that, I would have been a lot more, had a lot more maybe opinion about it.

And I just love so much that I can show up, especially for bigger things, like when my older daughter is talking about things like, what classes should she take? And when she comes home from school and she’s like, so-and-so said I really need to start thinking about this because of college. And instead of me just diving right in and saying like, oh, you’re right and you should take these hard classes. And yes, you have to get all A’s. And yeah, we should definitely be thinking about college and making all these plans.

That’s just not what I do. I have much more of a kind of like, well, let’s check in with what you want, right? What do you think will be best? What do you think you want to be thinking about right now? Are you thinking about college? If you are, I’m happy, more than happy to talk about it and to help get any resources, whatever. This doesn’t mean that I’m checked out. I am actually probably more checked in with them on an individual level around what do they want? Why do they want it? Like what are their dreams?

And really allowing for all their big feelings, which is sometimes hard with teenagers because they can be quite big sometimes. And I’m certainly not perfect, but just holding space for hearing them and hearing why they’re upset and really giving them some tools and helping them a different perspective on how to think about things instead of just getting in the pool with them and just being there to support them with any emotions they’re having, but also giving them tools if they want them, right?

Like being fully accepting of everything that they’re going through and not getting in the pool and just being always just upset with them or, you know, whatever. I just have so many tools to be able to show them and give them the option of like, is this how you want to handle this situation? Number three, which kind of is going to build on number two. And of course, a lot of these will probably be related, but number three is relationships in general, but specifically with my husband. His name is Nate and I love him so much.

And one thing that I notice, and it’s still there, right? I’m still human. I still have human thoughts, but one thing I know for sure is that, one, I’m much more open and honest with him just as far as what, again, coming back to like what I want, what would feel great to me and asking for that and asking for things, telling him how he can even support me or what my view of certain situations are.

But also allowing him to do that too, right? Allowing him to make his own decisions, which seems so silly to say, but it really is like letting him just be who he is. Now, you’re all coaches who are listening, or I assume most of you are. So you’re going to know what

I’m talking about. If you aren’t, you might be like, well, of course he gets to be who he wants to be. But in relationships there are times that we are like, don’t act like that, I don’t like it. Or we can be nitpicky, especially when you’ve been in a relationship with someone for a long time. We will have been married for 20 years in June, which is so fun. And I really have learned to allow him to be who he is and also find things that I really love about that, even when I think in the past I would have thought like, oh, I want that to change or I don’t want him to do that, all while still honoring what I want, right?

That always gets to be a part of it too, is asking for what I want and telling him, you know, just being open and honest and truthful in all the things that I envision for myself and for us and for our family and really like letting him be in on it. That’s probably the biggest thing, letting him be in on it instead of me just keeping these kind of like secret dreams and wishes and thoughts in the back of my mind.

Okay, the next one is also quite broad, but a huge shift for me is learning how to create the results that I want to create or reach for huge goals without pressure. Not that there is never pressure. Not that it’s like, oh, I never feel pressure to do big things or to hit big goals. But I really think that prior to coaching, that was probably the number one way that I would accomplish things in my life. I would put them off to the last minute, so then there was a lot of pressure to just get it done.

And I still do that sometimes, but now I recognize it. I’m not doing it for the pressure. Sometimes it’s just because that’s how I operate. And that’s also fine. But just noticing, gosh, thinking back it’s almost like it seems like alternate reality. Like I can hardly even remember who that person was. It’s also probably why I was having panic attacks quite often, which I’ve been pretty vocal about here on the podcast.

But before coaching, even with a bunch of therapy, which really helped me manage the panic and the anxiety. And it really helped me, you know, it gave me tools to calm down in the moment and all of those things. But coaching really shifted something much bigger, and this is one of the things, not having to add so much pressure in order to get things done.

Being able to ask for help, that is not something I ever used to do. Now I’m excellent at it. Sometimes maybe even too good, just in my life, right? I am really great at saying things like, hey, I need help with this thing, or I just have too much on my plate, can anyone help me? Or maybe we push some things back, we take some things off the plate.

None of those, none of those, none, would have been options before coaching. It would have been, we are just finishing the thing no matter what, and we’re going to be the best at it. And we’re going to blow the goal out of the water and whatever. Just even saying that now it’s like, again, it feels like alternate reality.

Okay, number five, which is very specific. This is something that took me by surprise when I realized it. And really I was quite emotional in the moment, I even had a moment in the car just like crying and all the things. My 12-year-old loves to ride horses. And when I say she loves to ride horses, I mean, when she was little, first, she loves every animal that has ever existed. And when she was little, she started saying she wanted to ride horses.

Now she had no context for this. Like we did not know anyone who rides horses at the time, she had not been around them, whatever. Then as she got a little bit older, one of my actually best friends from college, she lives south of us on a farm and they do have a few horses. And so then she kind of got introduced to them, but it was like, you know, once a year she would see these horses. And as she got older, she would get to ride a little bit and my friend would whatever.

And it just never went away. And in the house that we used to live in, there weren’t really horses around us. So it wasn’t something we would see often, but she was still consistently talking about it. She was always asking if she could take lessons. It just was always constantly on her mind and she can be quite intense. And when she decides she wants something, she’s going to figure out how to do it.

And then we moved to a town over, kind of a little further into the country. And now we are surrounded by horses. And when we moved, she just saw them, right? It was like she would see them everywhere. And she just knew like, now’s the time, you have no excuse, right? Because I used to say things like, well, I don’t know where we would go and whatever.

So now fast forward, she is incredible. I love watching her ride. It is amazing. But what’s interesting about this is I used to be so terrified of horses. I had kind of a bad experience on a horse one time where I just got off of the horse on a mountain and I was like, I’m not riding this horse back. I was in, I think, high school. And my family was like, let’s do this horse riding thing. It was a terrible, horrible experience. And the horses were all fighting for the lead.

And now I know so much about horses that I know what was happening, but I didn’t then. Not to mention my consistent anxiety was out of control because I was terrified and the horse could feel that and just wanted me off. So it was like brushing up against trees. Like honestly, it was just trying to get me off of its back.

And looking back now, I feel terrible for the horse. But at the time I was terrified and said I will never ride another horse ever, period, like the end. Now, I don’t ride with my daughter, although she has been asking me to recently. So maybe I’ve actually been open to it, but just the fact that I let her ride, I fully support it.

She’s fallen off a couple of times, and this is the thing that had me in my car crying. She was in a show. She’s never been so happy. She was doing a jump. The horse got spooked at the last second, she wasn’t in total control and so the horse went one way, she went the other way and fell off. She was totally fine. She got right back on. I went, uh, of course, it scared me. And I was actually filming, so we even have the clip, you can hear me. But I was so calm. I just watched her get back on, I felt so proud of her.

Yes, I know that there are risks, right? Like it was definitely not the safest sport around, but watching her every time she’s at the barn, the relationship she has with the horses, the way that it is literally all she wants to do and she’s great at it.

And it gives her, I see a lot of myself in her and the pressure I was talking about and all those things. I see that this gives her an outlet for that, for that intensity that she has, that she can put – Because when she’s riding, she is totally focused and nothing can distract her. And so watching her have that, I had a moment after the show where she fell and I had a moment in the car and I wasn’t crying because I was scared because she fell. I was crying because I can’t believe I’m letting her do this and how amazing.

So I’ll report back. Who knows? Maybe at some point I may even ride. But I’m there at the barn, I’m around the horses all the time. I really love them. I actually love their energy. Now that I’m a much calmer person, I think they are much calmer around me. And just overall, that’s a very specific example, but has a way bigger kind of crossover to all the things that I love about coaching.

Next one, number six, it has really helped me first expand my worldview, for sure, and I’ll come back to that in a minute, but also just really understand other people. And by that, I mean, maybe not understand, but be more accepting. And I really have this belief after years and years and years of coaching so many clients of, and this is more from the coaching side, but just being the coach that gets let in on clients’ secrets and fears and dreams and all of the things.

I just think humans are so amazing. And one thought that really helps me in so many situations is we are so much more alike than we know. Because after coaching, even before I do what I do now, which is now I help coaches in their coaching. But when I was just a one-on-one coach, people would just open up all of these things to me. And I just remember thinking at one point, maybe a few years in, it was like, whoa, so many of these are so similar. And everyone thinks that their thoughts are so unique and so weird and different and scary and all of these things, but really they’re not.

And of course we have our differences and those are amazing too. And that comes back to expanding my worldview and really understanding differences and biases and all of the things, which I have a lot of background in from school, but just hearing it in real life, people just saying all the things.

And then now running a program where I have clients in, I don’t know, I should have checked how many, but almost from every continent. In my last live event in Miami, we had people there from five continents, five. That’s so crazy to me. I will never forget the very first time I had an international client, just the first one, and it blew my mind. And now I have so many of them.

And it’s one of my favorite things to just really see how kind of universal some things are and how just hearing a different perspective from someone who has a totally different life experience than someone else can really open up people’s minds to considering other things. I could go on and on and on about that. It’s probably one of my favorite things. One of the things I get the most kind of excited about is all of that.

And that I just feel so grateful to my clients, even now who show up so brave and vulnerable and tell me things that maybe they wouldn’t usually say outside of our coaching situations. And sometimes they do it in front of a whole call full of people, right? On the weekly Coach Lab calls where there are a bunch of people on, I’m always so impressed when the coaches are so brave and show up and maybe say something or share something that feels quite uncomfortable to them.

That will never get old for me, or it will never, I will never take that lightly because I know what it feels like to be on the other side of that. And it really takes a lot of vulnerability and bravery to show up and say, I think I could be better at this thing, can you help me? Or this situation happened and I don’t know what to do about it. Or I’m having a hard time here or, you know, whatever, here are thoughts I’m having about my clients. Like any of those things, it’s just so brave and that will never be lost on me.

The next one, and this is something, if you’ve never considered this, this is something that just came. I knew it was happening, but it really, I’ve been thinking a lot about it recently. So another reason I’m grateful for coaching, it has helped me reframe parts of my past. Parts of relationships that I’ve had with people, thoughts that I’ve had about myself just over time, some experiences I’ve had.

But it helps me, like now in the moment when I get coached and I see that I can have so much compassion for myself. And when I’m coaching my clients, kind of going back to what I was saying a minute ago, I can have so much compassion for them. And I can really have this thought that like people really are, I believe, good and doing the best that they can do in a lot of ways and we have so much in common.

It really helps me look back at past relationships and relationships with people in my life who I should have been quite close to that I wasn’t, that really kind of helps me reframe and even forgive a lot of things that happened and kind of recreate a past relationship with them in my mind. So I’ll just tell you specifically because this is all about sharing.

You may have heard me talk about this before, but my dad, my parents were divorced and I was really young. My dad actually passed away a couple of years ago in 2020, but our relationship was always not great. He had some issues with addiction most of his life, or most of my life I should say. And it would come and go, right? And I always had so many thoughts about that.

And so I’d make it mean things about myself and of course make it mean stuff about him. And I did so much work on that through therapy and just all of the things. And one thing that was really useful in therapy, when I was in college I think is when I really started to go to therapy for this because I realized it was taking up just too much of my brain space, is my therapist said you are the one who gets to decide if you have a relationship with him.

And she kind of gave me permission to decide what that would look like, if anything. And maybe people had done that before, right? I don’t know. Hey mom, if you’re listening, I’m sure you probably told me stuff like that. But in that moment, right, when I was really working through some of that stuff, it just allowed me to say like, actually for my mental health, I think it’s best that I just don’t really have a relationship with him.

So that happened. But then on and off as he would be sober and then not sober and then whatever, he would kind of come and go. And then I had kids and then I kind of developed this, like, how dare you? Like, how could you do that? Like now that I have kids and I see what that relationship is like, how could we not be close?

But now, years later, after all the coaching and all the things I have completely rebuilt, like not made up things, right? But I am able to have so much more compassion for him and for his situation. And not that it’s like everything is off the hook, and maybe him not being here anymore is one thing that has allowed me to do that.

But it’s really powerful to realize, to like use the tools that you’re using now and then look back and be able to apply some of those tools to some beliefs or thoughts that you created as maybe a kid or a teenager or whatever age, as a younger version of yourself. It has been really, really very powerful for me.

Number eight, I have learned that honesty is such a value for me. That I love to be honest, that I feel so much more open and free and connected to people when I can be honest. Honest to myself, first of all, honest to them, right? So sometimes, like right now you might be thinking, well, yeah, like what’s the opposite of that? Like lying is not what I mean.

What I mean by that is just being open and honest and kind of vulnerable, right, in a way that I didn’t used to be at all. I used to hold a lot in and just not be really honest about what I wanted or what I was feeling or the experience I was having, or like being able to say no in the most loving way. Like being able to do that is something I can do now that I never used to be able to do before. And that is so huge for me.

Number nine, you might think this is funny. Those of you that know me who only know me since I’ve been a coach are probably going to think like, wait, what? But so I think number nine I’ve written, because I wrote out the list. I wrote just feeling my feelings, but that’s actually not what I mean because I used to feel lots of big, big feelings all the time. Specifically just like allowing myself to cry. That’s so specific.

But when I say cry, I mean cry in every single situation. Like when I’m happy or when there’s something about incredible talent that really gets me. So sometimes my kids laugh at me because we might watch something, we like to watch shows like America’s Got Talent or things like that, where people are just doing things that are so incredible and so moving that sometimes I’ll cry and they’re like, oh my gosh, are you crying again?

But what’s funny about this is that even though I can do it so freely now and it feels so good, right? It feels so good to just allow the tears, even when they’re attached to more negative emotion also. There’s just a freedom in just allowing yourself to have those moments. The amazing thing about this is when I first started dating my now husband, so I’m going to say this would have been, I don’t know, I would have been 21 or something, 22, something like that when this happened.

I remember telling him with so much pride, I probably haven’t cried in at least a year. And he said, which, because he’s such an amazing guy, he was like, hmm, that’s weird. Why? I don’t think that’s good. He immediately, like I was just so proud of it. And I said it like he was going to give me an award. And he was like, yeah, I think you’re supposed to like, feel your feelings.

I’ll never forget that conversation. I even remember like we were sitting in his car having this conversation. And I don’t even remember what we were talking about or why it came up, I just remember saying that. And then I remember going inside and thinking like, he’s wrong. He does not know, this is such a good thing. I didn’t mention at the time also that I was just having constant anxiety and bottling all the things up because I don’t think I really knew that myself or was being honest with myself.

But thinking about that now, again, like I said earlier, it feels like an alternate reality, that is what that feels like to me. I cannot even imagine being that person now, because now I cry all the time in the best way.

The last thing, okay, the last one, it might be what you thought I was going to say, or what most of these were going to be about. I noticed after I made this list that most of these are, like some of them have to do with my business or they’re experiences that I get to have because of my business, like coaching all the people and being exposed to so many different thoughts and views and all the things.

But the last one that I couldn’t be more grateful for that has really changed so many things about my life is just having the courage to have a coaching business in general. And really, I could do just a second episode about like all the sub points under this, but just all the things that are just hard about having a business, I am just so grateful for coaching literally every day.

When I don’t feel like doing things but I show up anyway, not for my clients. I pretty much always love showing up for my clients, but more like writing emails or doing things that aren’t my favorite tasks. Or letting people be wrong about me, right? Like people that haven’t worked with me before, or that have opinions about me who might be sharing them out in the world and just allowing that and being okay, knowing that I’m going to make it through.

Or the courage to set huge goals and go after them. The courage also to not hit those goals or to blow them out of the water, or to turn up the heat and really move fast and make quick decisions. And equally on the other side of that, to kind of slow down and change some things, which always feels quite scary.

And just really the courage to run the business. The audacity to believe that I am a person who can do that, which some of you might think, you know, if you only know me from here and you’ve only known me as a coach, you might think it sounds silly. But for me, I mean this is not something I would have ever thought I was going to do, right?

And I will be forever grateful for coaching and for finding coaching and for knowing pretty quickly, like, oh, this is my thing. This is why, like this when I was in school and working for the psychology department, like doing all the things, immersing myself in all things psychology and social science, I know that this is where I was supposed to land, at least for now. Not that I have plans to go anywhere, but you never know. But I just couldn’t be more grateful for that.

So that is all. Also, I guess that’s not all, one more thing. It also allows me to do this, right? Which is a podcast to share all these things with you, to teach you things, to help you, to support you, to support my clients and have all of those connections and continue to help all of them in whatever ways that they need help.

So that’s all, if you’re listening, you got all the way to the end. I’m also super grateful for you. I’m so glad you listen. Those of you that leave reviews, you have no idea how much I love them and they really warm my heart for sure. And yeah, come find me, share with me. What are you grateful for? Why do you love coaching? What is it about, like what is something that coaching has really, really changed for you? Tell me. I can’t wait to hear. All right, have an amazing week and I will see you back here next week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Mastering Coaching Skills. If you want to learn more about my work, come visit me at lindsaydotzlafcoaching.com. That’s Lindsay with an A, D-O-T-Z-L-A-F.com. See you next week.

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Hi I’m Lindsay!

I am a master certified coach, with certifications through the Institute for Equity-Centered Coaching and The Life Coach School.

I turn your good coaching into a confidently great coaching experience and let your brilliance shine.

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