Ep. 24: Four Ways a Coach Will Help You Make Your Pivot
There are a ton of good reasons to hire a coach when you want to make a big life change, or uplevel yourself in any area. But no matter what your pivot is - professional, personal, financial, health-related, relationship-related, or anything else, there are 4 key ways a coach will help you unearth your current blocks, address them, and overcome them. In this episode Coach Stephanie talks about the ways her own life coach has helped her in her own pivots this year, the results of that help, and what a coach will do to help you get to wherever it is you want to go.
Hey there, welcome to another episode of the I'm the Problem podcast. My name is Stephanie Finigan. I am your host and coach, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about four things a coach will do to help you make your big pivot.
I think that we're in the early stages right now of what will become the norm. It will be normal for people to have a life coach the way that it's normal for people to have a personal trainer, which isn't to say everyone will want a life coach. Not everyone wants a trainer at the gym, but for those people that want to go to the gym and see results, many times you will invest in a trainer. Even if somebody like is not a gym person, they know what you're talking about when you say, I have a trainer, that is a profession that people understand, and there's no real eye roll to it. It's just kind of understood if you're wanting to take your workout seriously, that we've normalized the idea of getting a trainer. I think that life coaching is going to be that in the future.
And I believe that because in some circles, certainly circles that I'm in, that's the case now. I have a coach on the regular. I have used a number of different coaches, but I always have somebody that I'm working with. Sometimes it's in a group capacity. Sometimes it's in a one-on-one capacity. But ever since I first learned of coaching and got involved with it, I've never not had a coach in some way or another.
But all to say, I wanted to really tie in together this conversation with this idea of making your big pivot, which of course is what I talk about and it's what I coach on, right? You want to make a life change. You're not really sure if you could do it or how to get started or how to get finished if you've been starting and you are kind of stuck or how to get the people that love you on board with it because it doesn't feel safe to them or it feels unrealistic or whatever the story is.
So this is what I coach on. And there are countless ways that I think a coach can help if you are somebody who wants to make a pivot. But I wanted to pull out sort of four key ways that I have found that coaching really helps for people that want to make any sort of big change. And again, when I talk about a pivot, it could be something like you want to leave your corporate job and go start a business. It also could be that you want to get a promotion at the job that you're at. You want to level up somewhere in your life. You want to go from running 10Ks to marathons. You want to go from having one kid to three. Like wanting to level up or go bigger or move in a different direction. Any one of those things in any area of your life, any one of those things can be considered a pivot.
So I'm going to talk today about four things that a coach can do if you are looking to make a pivot. And I'm going to start, as I usually do, using an example from my own life where I feel like my coach was super helpful for me and when I've been in the midst of making my own pivot.
Okay, so for myself, I've hired a life coach this year, this calendar year, 2024, to help me with my business specifically. And I've spent a lot of money on her. I emphasize that because she's not a business expert. She doesn't have an MBA. You know, if you follow her on social, like her content sometimes has typos. We joke all the time that she doesn't know the proper use of their, their, their, their. She doesn't know which spelling to use when in her writing. I mean, there's a lot of things about her that you would sort of say, whoa, she's not a business coach. What are you talking about? And she bills herself largely as a life coach. She definitely helps with business but her main focus is a life coach. And so why would I spend a lot of money on a life coach to help me with my business? That's a fair question.
The reason I did that is because she, no she's not a business coach, she's a mindset expert. As a life coach that's what she is. She's in the business of helping people understand, unpack and get unblocked within their mindset so that they can go be successful at whatever it is they wanna do. That's what you do as a coach. And I also knew if there's something specific I wanted to learn, if I wanted to learn how to run Instagram ads or something like that, something very tactical and specific, I could Google it. I could figure it out myself if I wanted to. Or I could go hire somebody else to help with that. But what I wanted to hire her for was the stuff that you really can't Google. And that's what a coach really does. It's the things that you really struggle to figure out on your own or the things where you're kind of banging your head against a wall and you just can't seem to make a breakthrough. That's what a coach will help you with.
I knew that hiring her as a coach, she would be able to help me figure out how I can build more belief in myself as a business owner. She'd be able to help me figure out how to get out of my own way so that I could have the business that I wanted to have and make the money that I wanted to make and have the impact that I hope to have. So she's helped me in a couple of very specific ways. She's helped me in countless ways. I'm going to give a couple of very specific examples just so you can understand what I'm talking about when I say that she's helped me with my mindset even though she's not a business expert and that that has translated into more success for me as a business owner.
So number one, she's helped me see the thoughts that I have that were totally in my way. And what's interesting is two things. One is they're not thoughts I realized I was thinking until I had a coach ask me questions that I didn't think to ask myself or ask me questions in a different way and kind of poke at answers that I gave her to really help me see, is this actually the thing that's bothering me or is there something beneath that? So understanding the thoughts that were totally blocking me from taking my business to the next level and what the actual thoughts were, that was really important.
And then the other side of that is that she helped me see the thoughts that I was believing that I was sure were facts. And it's so crazy to me, because as a coach, this is what I do all the time. This is what I've been trained on. And this is what I do for other people is I help them understand, OK, you think that your husband is super annoying or your husband is yells at the kids too much or that you are just not good with numbers or you are not a good public speaker, like you think that all of those things are facts when the reality is all of those things are thoughts. And you've built up a whole story about why they're facts, but they're actually not. They're thoughts. And so if they're a thought, that's really useful to know because it means it's changeable, right? Facts we can't change, thoughts we absolutely can change. So those were two things that she really helped me with in terms of my own thoughts.
Another thing she helped me with was facing a lot of fears that I still had as a business owner that I thought I had cleaned up a long time ago, but were still kind of lurking. You know, like you clean out your closet and you like get rid of the old clothes and everything looks nicer, but there's still like dust bunnies in the corner in the back that you can't quite see, right? Like that's the, that's what these fears were. So I still was holding onto a lot of fears of what other people will think of me or like looking stupid in front of people who knew me in high school or college and would never have considered me somebody who would be a life coach or a business owner or looking stupid in front of people who think life coaching is stupid or feeling like none of this matters and like feeling kind of dumb that I think I can be successful at this, and all of these fears that I didn't realize were still there. I've been in business for a couple of years now and all of these fears were still lingering somehow and were definitely then as we played it out creating a situation where I had these thoughts, they created a feeling of fear and then from a feeling of fear I was not taking the kind of action that I want to actually be taking as a business owner. I was holding myself back. And so if I'm not taking the actions that I know I need to take to be a successful business owner, then the results aren't going to be there for me. That's just how it works. So understanding and facing and addressing a lot of the dust bunny fears that were still back there, that has been another really important thing my coach helped me do.
Another thing has been getting clear on not only who I want to help through my business and through the nonprofit arm of my business, which I'll talk more about in the coming weeks and months. But that has been a huge piece of the work I've done with her as well as breaking through some blocks I had there, getting clear on who I wanted to help and also why I wanted to help them genuinely from a place of like, this feels aligned for me. This feels good for me as opposed to, well, I want to help this group of people, or I want to do it for this reason because that's what I'm supposed to do because this is the niche everyone says you should go into because people say if you want to be successful as a life coach you need to help X type of people with Y type of problem and there's a lot of advice out there that will tell you that if you're a business owner of any kind and I have been coached by those people in the past and was following a formula that I didn't really believe in internally, but it's what the quote experts were telling me to do. And so I was just following it without actually checking in with myself and saying like, does this feel right? It didn't feel right. And I was just kind of dismissing that feeling and just assuming, well, I just don't know enough. I'm too new at this. I've only had a business for a couple of years, but it felt like I was squeezing a square peg into a round hole. It just, it didn't feel right for me. And now as I look at my business, it's starting to really feel exactly like I want it to. And that is because of my coach. So when I think about who I want to help and why I want to help them, all the reason and rationales is starting to feel so much more like me, as opposed to two, three years ago, where I was really trying to force a narrative and force a line of thinking that didn't make sense.
So all of these things that my coach has helped me with, and there's a ton more, but I just wanted to give you a couple of examples. All of these things have led to a couple of really amazing results in my business. One has been just simply more success without question. Like that's the obvious one. The other one has been, I actually have a business that I fucking like now. I get excited to get up and go to work on it. And not that I didn't love my business before, but it didn't feel like me, and my business is now really starting to feel like me. And when I think about what I want to post on social, or what I want to do a podcast about, or what I want to write about, or whatever it is, or talk to people about, or the way I want to coach, I feel more and more empowered just to do things the way I want to do versus how I'm supposed to do it.
So this is all to say, these are the specific ways my coach, who again is not a business expert, has helped me with my business. And regardless of what your pivot is, a coach will help you do the same.
So for me, the pivot I was trying to make was to up-level my business. I was trying to take it from where it was and where it has been to really making it not only feel better for me, but also be more financially successful, reach more people, formally add on the non-profit arm and all the things that I've wanted to do with the business and really just sort of take it to like a 2.0 version of my business. That was my pivot.
So I'm going to give you four things that I think a coach will be able to do for you regardless of what your pivot is. If it's in your business, if it's in your health and fitness, if it's in your relationships, your money, any other goals you have, anything you want to do. Again, whether the pivot is very dramatic and big or whether it's a smaller or more modest pivot or just an up level of where you're at or sort of an improvement upon where you're at. Whatever it is, these are four things that a coach will be able to help you with when it comes to that.
Number one, a coach will help you be able to accept reality. So what I mean by that is separate your circumstances from your thoughts. So again, as I just talked about, so helping you see where you're really married to a story, whatever the thoughts are that you have that you feel very firm in and you really believe a coach is going to help you see what's actually a fact in that situation and what's just a thought. The reason this is so important is because whatever the facts are, a coach is then going to help you see it can't be changed. And you fighting with reality is not going to help because you argue with reality. You're going to lose a hundred percent of the time. You just need to start to accept your circumstances and then notice the thoughts that you have about them. That's the first thing a coach will help you do when it comes to your pivot. Is it really not possible for you? Is that just a thought? What are the facts? Is it a fact that I can't run a six minute mile or is that just a thought that I have? And what if I decided to not believe that thought? Then what comes up? Whatever your pivot is, those are the types of questions that a coach will start asking you.
Second, a coach will help you get clear on what the actual problem is. So identifying and questioning the thoughts that you have that are keeping you from getting you where you want to be. Again, it's usually not what you think. It's never about what it's about, I like to say. So I talked in the beginning about how I was having all of these thoughts about my business that I was really sure were valid and true. And my coach really poked holes at some of them when it came to, like, my own skills around marketing and when it came to the types of people that I wanted to support and that, you know, I don't think I can make money doing that. And all these thoughts that I had, those weren't the problem. All of those thoughts I had were really just excuses. The problem was something very different. The problem really tapped into sort of my own fears and beliefs and things that, as I said, the emotional dust bunnies that were there and sort of the things I was still holding on to that I didn't even know about. So a coach will help you get clear on the actual problem because it's really hard for us to see. The example that one of my other coaches used to use is like, it's hard to read the label from inside the bottle, right? It's just hard to know really what's happening in our own mind sometimes, which is why it's really useful to have a coach.
So the third thing a coach is going to do is help you identify and overcome your objections. And again, a lot of the objections that you have about why you can't make your pivot happen, right? I don't have the time, I don't have the skills, I don't have the money, my partner isn't supportive, I don't have enough of a network, I don't know what I'm doing, I have too many other obligations, it's not realistic. All of those objections that seem really, really true to you are just thoughts. A coach is gonna help you first understand what those objections are, because you might not even realize what some of them are in your head, and then break them down so that you can then address them one by one and overcome them. A good coach will not accept the answer, “I don't know,” from you. When you say “I don't know,” you're shutting down your brain's opportunity to problem solve, and that's what your brain is designed to do. Your brain is designed to solve problems. That's why when we don't have a problem to solve, our brain likes to go to work kind of finding one. Have you ever noticed that? And so that's what our brains are wired to do. They want to solve problems. So give it a good problem to solve. Look at the objection, I don't have enough time to do my pivot. I don't have enough time to make this change happen. I don't have enough money. Like, look at those objections, and then just question it. What if that wasn't true? Then what would happen? And start to just ask those questions. That's what a skilled coach will do. And when you hit a wall and you say, I don't know, a coach will not let you off the hook with that. They will find a way to help you break down that mental barrier and help you figure out how you could know how you do know What are other options and that's actually really fun when that happens because then suddenly you're thinking thoughts that you never would have thought before you have ideas that you never had before and they start to feel very normal, it starts to be like, “Oh, yeah, I can solve this. Oh, I can do that, oh, this isn't that bad,” and then you look back and you're like, “Why did I think that was a problem in the first place?”And it's kind of amazing to watch yourself evolve like that.
Okay, and then the fourth thing a coach will help you do to make your big pivot is a coach will show you how to build beliefs. A coach will really be essential for you if you don't believe that your pivot is something that's actually possible for you. Because what a coach is gonna do that Google can't and AI can't, sorry, is a coach is gonna believe in you even when you can't so that you eventually can, right? So one of my coaches used to say to me if you don't believe that you can do this, borrow my belief in you. I know that you can. And just kind of knowing that there's somebody out there who genuinely believes that you can accomplish what you wanna accomplish, because I promise you a good coach is gonna look at you and be like, yeah, it's no big deal what you want to do. I've heard it before. Right? I've heard crazier things before and people have accomplished that. So knowing that your coach doesn't think your idea is crazy or irresponsible or reckless or unrealistic, knowing that they have your back and they do believe it's possible for you, that in and of itself can be huge because even if you don't believe it, you can borrow their belief in you until you do. And a coach will help you build that belief in yourself, and ultimately, that's what you need in order to make any pivot happen. You need to believe it's possible.
So those are four of the things that a coach will help you do to make your big pivot. There are many, many more, but I wanted to throw those out because I just found those very universal, and also, those are things coaches have helped me with and they were extremely helpful in getting not only my business to a level that I'm really psyched about and growing still, but also just generally speaking helps me with a number of things in my own life. So I hope these were helpful nuggets for you.
You can find all the information about how to get connected to me either through free email coaching, the newsletter, one-on-one coaching over at makeyourpivot.co. So spend some time over there. I would love to connect with you guys further on your own pivots and help you however I can, because I know whatever you want to do is entirely possible, even if you don't know that yet. All right, have a good week, you guys. I will talk to you next time.
I will talk to you next time.