217. The Power of Coaching

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 217, The Power of Coaching.

This podcast is for people who know that living an extraordinary life is not easy or comfortable. It’s so much better than that. This is Better Than Happy, and I’m your host, Jody Moore.

Hey everyone, welcome to the podcast today. The episode that I’m going to share with you today is an episode that I recently recorded with one of my clients and friends, April Price.

She has a podcast called the 100% Awesome Podcast, which you can go check out if you want to after this. She talks about similar topics to what you’re hearing me teach here on Better Than Happy and I want to give you just a little bit of background about April.

April is in my coaching program Be Bold. We talk a little bit about this on our episode, on our discussion here. And she also went through my program Be Bold Masters, which is an advanced intensive program, five-day program that I offer to people who are in Be Bold who want to take things to the next level.

So I know April pretty well, I’ve worked with her pretty closely. I’ve been able to coach her a lot and, of course, I adore her. She has done such an amazing job of applying coaching to her life and sees the results of it. She’s actually just about to finish up her certification as a coach through The Life Coach School as well. She’s going to go on and do that on her own.

So, when she invited me on her podcast, immediately I said, “Yes, I can’t wait to come on your podcast, let’s do it.” And then, as we kind of proceeded with her discussion and she asked me all these questions, I was like, “These are some great questions and, April, you have some awesome things to add. I’d like to share this on my podcast, if you’re okay with it.”

So, thanks to April for her graciousness, letting me share it with you all. I think you’re going to find some interesting insight here as to what coaching is, why it’s so important, who it’s important for, how it can change your life. Please enjoy this discussion with April and myself. Here we go.

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April: So, I was talking to my husband the other day and I was talking about how, two years ago, my life was so different and that the one thing that kind of got the ball rolling and started a domino of change in my life was I hired a coach. And in this case, it was a nutrition coach. But it was just the fact – I think it was partly, like, investing in myself and trying to believe in myself and do something new. But that coaching led to other coaching, and I was telling him, I just can’t believe all the change that happened because I hired a coach.

Jody: It’s like a domino effect, yeah.

April: Yeah, and I think a lot of people think, like, they already know all the things. Like, I know how to eat, I know how to exercise, I have the gospel. I know I’m supposed to love I’m supposed to forgive. Like, I know all the things, why do I need a coach? But it made a huge difference for me and I just want your perspective on why you think coaching is valuable, why does everybody need a coach?

Jody: Yeah, well, it kind of goes back to the cliché, the idea of you can’t read the label from inside the bottle. So you may know – I think we do know – a lot of the things that we should be doing or that we want to be doing to achieve the goals that we want to or feel how we want to feel in our lives. But I don’t think it’s as simple to see where you’re getting in your own way. And I can only speak for the type of coaching that I do because there’s a lot of different kinds of coaches out there. And there are some coaches that are there to hold you accountable to your expectations, which is fine, but it’s not really the type of coaching I do though.

It is more that let’s take a look at where you’re getting in your own way. So, just by way of example, I used to have this coworker who would – he was just really fidgety. I don’t know if he had a little bit of ADHD or something probably. So I’d be sitting by him and I’d be like, “Stop shaking your foot,” you know, like in a meeting. And he’d look at me like, “What are you talking about?” I’m like, “You’re tapping your foot, can you stop because you’re rattling the table?”

He wasn’t even consciously aware that he was doing that. And that’s a tiny little example, but we all have ways that we show up or think or things that we’re doing that we’re not consciously paying attention to. We don’t need to be aware of the majority of them but I think a good coach can show you the ones that are simple enough to change but you just aren’t consciously aware that you’re even doing it. I don’t know, what do you think? Why do you think it’s so powerful?

April: Yeah, I think so. I liken it to, like, you can’t give yourself a haircut. I don’t know, I think you just get lost in the maze because you’re in there reading the story your brain is feeding you, so how can you think that there’s something else possible, right?

Jody: That’s right. I mean, the brain just wants to be right. I always say, we want to be right, more than we want to feel good, we want to be right more than we want to achieve our goals. So it is possible to take a look at your own thoughts and question them. And we encourage our clients to do a lot of that. But certainly, I feel like there’s that last little 2%, 3% that, without a coach’s support and knowledge, is pretty tough to catch.

April: Yeah, okay so how I found you is – once I found that I could change the way I thought about my food, I was like, well maybe I could change something else. Maybe it’s possible for me to change other things in my life. Anyway, through a series of events, I found The Life Coach School Podcast and I was like, what is this? What is this and where has it been all my life?

And on one of the episodes or something, you must have been interviewed or you must have done guest coaching or something and I was like, oh my gosh. So then I found you, I binged your podcast, I signed up for your coaching program. And for me, like, I had been listening to The Life Coach School and your podcast for about five months before I signed up for your coaching program. And I’m taking in all the concepts, I’m learning all the things.

I’m like, this is amazing. I’m learning it, I’m thinking it. And then coaching, for me, was like a completely different experience than just taking in the concepts. So I still remember, I signed up for your coaching program, I heard you coach somebody about not needing to make their kids happy. And I was like, what?

Jody: Don’t worry about them. It’s fine if they’re miserable.

April: It was like, wait a minute, right? Anyway, that very day, my daughter called me from school and she had just gotten into a car accident and I was like, okay, here we go. I’ve just been coached, I watched somebody else get coached, I applied it to myself, okay, here we go. I went over to the school. She’s, like, coming apart. And the biggest thing, the reason she’s coming apart is because she’s so humiliated. Everyone has seen this. It happened right outside of school, she’s freaking out, she cannot go back to school ever again.

And normally, I would have been like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to fix this,” all over her and wanting to change her. And I was just like, “Savannah, it’s going to be fine. We have insurance, it’s going to be fine.” She’s like, “It’s not going to be fine.” And I’m like, “Okay.” I just let it not be fine, and that moment changed everything for me and I was like, oh my gosh, this works. And I got on the computer, I wrote you a note, “I just want you to know this works,” as if you didn’t.

Jody: I love it though. Here’s what’s so powerful about that. In that moment, when your daughter is upset, she kind of wants to be upset. She doesn’t say that. She doesn’t understand that. But as soon as we try to talk them out of it, it’s like we start playing tug of war. We’re pulling on the rope which makes them pull back harder. And so to just let down the rope, which you did, then suddenly they’re like, okay, they don’t have to pull on their story so hard and they kind of can work through it. And it doesn’t mean we don’t help them later and help them process it, but it really is, like, wait, why didn’t somebody tell me this earlier? That’s how I felt at first when I learned all of this.

April: But the most amazing thing to me was, like, I had been learning this. I thought I knew it just from listening to your podcast. But then, coaching made it like, “Oh, this is how I apply it.”

Jody: That’s right.  So, I felt that same way. I’d been reading, not just from Brooke Castillo, but tons of self-help and personal development. But it’s the difference between reading a book about snowboarding and putting on a snowboard and getting on the mountain. It’s just entirely different.

And the great thing is, you don’t even have to get coached very often, but you do need to hear real life coaching, not just hear someone talk about concepts. It’s different.

April: That changed everything for me. I was like, I am so in, right. So I always remember that as my first coaching, even though it wasn’t directly to me, it was where I was finally able to apply it. and so I was curious about whether you remember any of those moments for you, a coaching experience where you were like, “Oh my gosh,” you know?

Jody: yes, mine was actually similar to yours where I remember being coached about my son, who was pretty young at the time. Let’s see, he would have been maybe six or seven at the time. And he’s just a nervous child. In my head, at that point, I viewed him as kind of negative.  I thought, he’s kind of grumpy, he’s not really happy very often, he sees the class half-empty kind of person.

Of course, I’ve shifted the way I view him now, but at that point, that’s how I viewed him. And I was getting coached on that, and sort of like you’re saying, this idea that I don’t need to make him happy. But what the coach said to me was – because I was like, “Sometimes I’ll take him to school and he’s scared. He’s scared I’m not going to pick him up or he’s scared he’s not going to be able to find me after school and I just don’t want him to be scared.”

And she said, “But he wants to be scared. Maybe he needs to be scared right now.” So it’s kind of similar to you, where I was like, “What? What are you saying? No one wants to be scared.” And so I had that exact experience like you. I don’t remember having one experience with my son, like you just said. I just remember, I kind of slowly worked on changing my thinking too.

He can feel however he wants to, and I don’t have to mirror him. I don’t have to be negative about his negativity. He can be unhappy. I don’t have to be unhappy that he’s unhappy. And so it was more, for me, like a slow constant retraining of my brain to I can stop judging him, thinking that he’s doing it wrong and feeling bad and doing the exact same thing I’m judging him for. I can just allow him to feel however he feels, including scared, and that really did change everything between my relationship with him and my experience with him.

April: Awesome. And that’s why I think a coach can be so helpful because you never would have thought about it on your own, just one little question or the way we see it. Yeah, because we’re so tied to that story.

Jody: That’s right.

April: Okay, so the next thing I wanted to talk to you about was this last weekend, I took my daughter up to the school and I was driving home – my mom needed a ride home from Utah and I was driving her home. And we were talking about coaching and she’s like, “You still have a coach?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I have like four coaches.” And she’s like, “Well don’t you think you know as much as they do?” And I’m like, “I never think that. I never think that.”

So I was curious for you, I know you’ve been a life coach certified at The Life Coach School for five or six years, and then you were a corporate coach before that, and probably you know everything there is to know about coaching…

Jody: I’m glad you think that. Let’s just go with that.

April: That’s the end of the question… So my question was like, why is coaching still valuable to you?

Jody: Well because – so two things. First of all, just as you were telling that story about your interaction with your mother – I never watched Downton Abbey when it was on TV. And now there’s a movie coming out and everybody kept telling me how good it was. And I told my husband, “I think I just need to commit and watch Downton Abbey before the movie comes out.” Which is not very far away and there’s like six seasons or something.

I’ve been staying up really late watching Downton Abbey right now because I have this goal. And so just when you were talking about your mother, it’s reminding me of, like, it’s so fascinating to watch this period piece where we’ve come so far since that time. And for example, when they first introduced the telephone and everyone’s been getting all these letters, that’s how they communicate with one another, through letters.

So they first get a telephone and some of the people are like, “Why do we need that? What’s the point of that?” And that’s how I think about coaching. With people who haven’t experienced it and who are just used to that that doesn’t exist, they don’t realize what a luxury it is and how much better your life is with a coach, then they view it as something like, why would we need a telephone? We have letters. We can write letters, right?

Anyway, the reasoning why, in answer to your question, it kind of goes back to what we said in the beginning, that a good coach – in fact I’m actually getting ready to teach a group of coaches at The Life Coach School in a few weeks. One of the things I hope to convey to them is that the amount of things that you know, the amount of wisdom and knowledge you’ve accumulated is great for you, but it actually kind of can get in your way as a coach.

You don’t need to know a lot as a coach. In fact, you have to be able to set aside that sometimes. What you need to be able to do is to help your client access their own wisdom and get themselves out of their own way and you’re just showing them their brain. And sometimes, the amount of knowledge we have gets in the way of that because we start making assumptions.

Like, when my coaching is at its worst, if I’m overly tired or I’m just having an off day, I do too much teaching and I start sharing my wisdom. And my clients like that. It’s kind of fun to learn. But it’s much more impactful for me to just ask questions and kind of mine the knowledge from out of their heads. Because they know what’s best for them in their situation way better than I do or some book I read or some class I took.

April: That’s so awesome.

Jody: So coaching is not just telling people what to do, at all. Again, at least the type of coaching I do is not that at all.

April: That’s awesome. Okay, so when I first signed up for coaching, I remember being so scared about it; scared to just take a chance on myself or scared to think, like, to believe something could work and then be disappointed again. And I think people are nervous about it or scared about it for different reasons. But I guess I would just ask you, what would you say to someone who’s unsure about trying coaching or if they’re unsure about the benefits of coaching. Do you have any advice?

Jody: Can I ask you real quickly, how long have you been in my coaching program now?

April: 15 months.

Jody: 15 months, okay, a little over a year. And you’ve been through my advanced Be Bold Masters class too, so you have quite a bit of experience there. So I would be interested in hearing your answer to this after I answer it. But I think it’s natural and pretty human of us to fear things that we don’t understand. It’s just the brain’s way of trying to protect us.

So I think there’s a certain element of that – typically, if I have a client that’s nervous, I say, “It’s totally fine, you can be nervous, it’s not a problem, I’ve got you.” There really is nothing to be nervous about. It’s the same thing I say to my children now that I know this, you can totally be scared, it’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with being scared. At the same time, I’ve got you, I’m going to take care of you. This is not dangerous. There is nothing to fear. But it’s okay to bring some of that fear with you.

Now, I love what you bring up, April, about disappointment. So if we think about, well I’ve tried other things that didn’t work, whether it be that they’re trying to improve their marriage or lose weight or whatever it is, improve their mental and emotional health in some way, we avoid disappointment and what I like to teach people is two things. First of all, the disappointment is an emotion, which means it’s only created by your thoughts.

So it is optional. But, worst case scenario, you’re going to feel disappointed, which is just an emotion, which we will teach you how to deal with. So, the alternative is that we stay in kind of – I think of it as staying in the cave. Let’s not go outside the cave because it’s scary out there. It’s dangerous out there. We don’t know what it’s going to be like. It might not work out like we wanted, so we’ll just stay in the cave.

Now, if we never leave the cave, we don’t go explore the rest of the world. We don’t create advances in society. We don’t make our lives better. It’s the discomfort that gets us to a better life and a better situation. So, I mean, depending on my client, they’re not always ready to understand that, which is why I just say, it’s totally fine, you can be scared, just come with me, I got you. I don’t know, what are your thoughts about it? Do you think it’s scary getting coached?

April: Oh my gosh, no. I mean, I love to get coached.

Jody: People do tell me, when they come on the coaching call they say, “I’m really nervous right now.” So there’s a little bit of nerves there sometimes. But what does it feel like to you to get coached?

April: Oh, to be coached, it feels like kind of an awakening, like a slow awareness, like question by question, you kind of like step outside of your own head enough to see it. It’s kind of like – not like the light just booms on usually for me, but like the sun coming up. Like, it’s just a slow gradual awareness. And then after I get coached, I’m still pondering and mulling and thinking about the things that I’ve been coached about and it just seems to get brighter and brighter and brighter, you know what I mean? So for me, I tell my husband all the time, I’m like, I feel like I’m waking up, you know. So that’s what it’s like.

Jody: I’ve had coaching experiences where I felt so much love from my coach. And oddly enough, she wasn’t saying all the things we say to our friends and sisters. She wasn’t validating me. She wasn’t agreeing with my sad story. It was sort of the opposite of that. But I could feel the love around it. It felt like the truth. It felt like, can we be real and honest for a moment, from a loving place. And I think it’s the most amazing feeling. I love getting coached. Anytime there’s an opportunity, I’m the first one to raise my hand, please coach me.

April: Exactly, and so I was – as you were saying that, it reminded me of my experience at Be Bold Masters and just, like, I felt so in love with myself, with my life. I just felt in love at the end of that experience because of all the coaching we did. And I remember Dina Rudder, seeing her, and she’s like, “You are a different person.”

Jody: That’s what we do at Be Bold Masters.

April: She’s like, “Love is just pouring off of you.” And so you saying that brings that back for me. I remember that totally.

Jody: So good.

April: Yeah, okay, so, to kind of finish up I wanted – well, I guess I have two questions. One, I think it’s really interesting, as I’ve started coaching, that your relationship with your client is kind of different than any other relationship. It’s not like a friend. It’s not like a sister. It’s not like a mother. And it’s really unique and it’s kind of sacred in a way. So I’m wondering what you see as your role as a coach. What do you feel is, like, your responsibility or your role in what you provide for your client?

Jody: It’s a really good question. I just feel, honestly, so honored that my client is trusting me because when I’m coaching someone, they’re really opening up. Even if it’s just a little thing, it doesn’t always have to be heavy things we’re coaching on. But it’s still them being vulnerable is what it is. I’m exploring some things in their head. We’re exploring truth. And so I really hold that sort of sacred, that they have put their trust in me.

And one of the things that I will say I’ve gotten really good at after lots of years of practice is what, in coaching, we call holding space, which means I have zero judgments. I really don’t. So people ask me all the time, how do you keep your opinions out of it? Don’t you sometimes want to roll your eyes or don’t you get annoyed or impatient, you know, with people? And I really honestly don’t because I’m sort of able to put this coaching hat on when I go into coaching where I’m not thinking or listening to my client in the same way I do in the rest of my life. My opinions are irrelevant. My judgment is irrelevant.

The only thing I bring to that coaching is love and openness. So I love my client, but here’s the key, I equally love everyone in their story. So like with my friends and family, when I say I keep judgment out of it, if my sister comes to me and she’s telling me about somebody that was rude to her – I love my sister more than that person she’s talking about. I bring my opinion in, which is you’re amazing he sounds like a jerk and I’m sorry that happened and here’s what you should do about it.

When I’m a coach, I’m loving my client and I’m loving that guy that she’s telling me about that was rude. So everybody’s equally lovable and we’re just taking a look at truth, and that’s a pretty powerful experience. I dare say it’s almost spiritual. That’s how God sees us. He loves everyone in this story. And I don’t mean to compare myself with God, I just mean I’m helping us access what’s available to us, which is unconditional love.

And the other thing I’ll just give as an analogy is, you know, I tell people, when they’re new to working with me as a coach, and especially when I used to do one on one coaching, I used to set this up for everyone. I’d say, “Listen, my job is to tell you the truth and show you the truth.” And so I want you to imagine, like, if you hire an interior designer, you don’t want her to come in your house and go, “Everything looks good, I love what you’ve picked out. You’ve done a great job.”

You want her to say, “Well this part’s working well, but this part, I think, could be better, and this part, I think, is totally dysfunctional. We should totally change that,” because that’s what you hired her for. And so, as a coach, I’m not there to be your sister or your friend. Hopefully you have one of those in your life. I’m there to show you the truth, which you’re going to thank me for later when we get the house cleaned up.

April: Yeah, it kind of reminds me of something Kris Plachy was saying the other day. She’s like, “I love my client, and so I’m not going to let them keep punching themselves in the face. I’m going to show them the truth. Their thought is hurting them, and because I love them, I’m willing to show them the truth.”

Jody: That’s right. It’s totally out of love. It’s like, hey you’ve got some lettuce in your teeth. And not everyone will tell you, but I will because I love you.

April: Exactly, that’s awesome, I love it. Okay, I wanted to end just because – this is just for personal fun, because I’m curious and I just love you and – so I don’t know if you remember, at Be Bold Masters when you told me, did you know you can believe whatever you want? And I was like – I had heard you say that 100 million times, but in that moment, when you were coaching me and you said that, it was like all the walls in my brain just went down.

Jody: I remember that.

April: Right, and I just went around for two days going, “Did you know…”

Jody: It really is true. I don’t know why you have to hear it 100 million and one times. I’m the same way though where I’m like, all of a sudden, I just get it. and I do remember you having that experience because you were like, “Wait a second, I think you’re saying you can just believe whatever you want.” Yes, I am saying that. But that’s what’s so fun about this work is that even though on the surface it’s not complicated to understand, but the real understanding, the deep application of it is so many layers deep that I love the idea that there’s still so much more available to me to understand. I think I’m just barely getting started. I hope so.

April: So that thought, for me, is one of my favorite thoughts and I use it all the time. So I wondered if you have a favorite thought that you use a lot.

Jody: Oh my gosh, I have so many.

April: I know, but I just thought, if something comes to mind.

Jody: I think it depends. So when I’m going through something challenging in my life, I love the idea that everything is rigged in my favor. That’s a really comforting thought to me, because I can look back on anything that felt like a tragedy and how it, in some way, led me to where I am now. And I’m like, that was totally rigged in my favor.

So I’d just like to believe this is all rigged in my favor. That’s one of my favorite thoughts. Another one of my favorite thoughts, as you know, is this is going to be fun.  Because as I pursue goals or even as we do have challenges come up in life, I love the idea that nothing has to be heavy, nothing has to be overly serious. We can just have fun with all of it, and I find that to be really powerful for me as I’m pursuing goals and things.

April: That’s awesome. Well, thanks for changing my life.

Jody: Oh my gosh, thank you for having me on. It’s so much fun. I love hearing it and I love seeing what you’ve done with it. I don’t know how I got to be so lucky to do what I’m doing and working with people like you. It’s fantastic.

April: Oh, well it’s because you’re brave. I was talking to a coach – because I’m going through The Life Coach School – and she had me make a list of the three people that I really admire, you were top on the list. I won’t put this in the podcast, but I just want you to know. And she was like, “Tell me why?” And I was like, “Because she was brave and changed my life.” And I think being brave is, like, that’s what I have to tell myself every day, your being brave completely changed my life. And so I’m so thankful that you’re brave and I’m trying to be brave too.

Jody: You can do it. I’ve got you, I’ll help you through it. Oh my gosh, you are so beautiful, thanks, April. I love you, girl, take care.

April: I love you. Bye.

Jody: Bye.

If you have a question about something you’ve heard me talk about on this podcast or anything else going on in your life, I want to invite you to a free public call, Ask Jody Anything. I will teach you the main coaching tool I use with all of my clients and the way to solve any problem in your life, and we will plug in real life examples.

Come to the call and ask me a question anonymously or just listen in. Go to jodymoore.com/askjody and register before you miss it. I’ll see you there.