Happy November! This month on Inner Warmup, we’re talking about the mindset, skillset, and toolset of self-coaching. Taylor shares the definition of coaching used by ICF (The International Coaching Federation) and teaches how to cultivate a coaching mindset.
Tune in to also hear a helpful differentiation between a therapist, mentor, consultant and a coach.
Mentioned In The Episode
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Welcome back to Inner Warmup where your inner work begins. I'm Taylor Elyse Morrison, creator of Inner Workout and you as always are our expert guest. Thanks for being here. This month's episodes are brought to you by Inner Workout's, sister company Gateway Coaching. Gateway Coaching is coaching that works for your budget. You know how you can get a cheaper haircut by going to a cosmetology school? Gateway Coaching is essentially that, but for coaching, I didn't realize this until I went through coach training myself. But in order to get your coaching certification or credential, you need to have a certain amount of experience hours. And what a lot of coaches do right now, because it can be hard to find practice clients is they coach each other, they trade coaching sessions with each other, and that counts as experience hours. But what I know from talking to the Inner Workout community is that so many of you would love to work with a coach, just the typical price of 100 plus dollars per session feels a little bit out of reach for your budget. And that's why I made Gateway Coaching, to connect you with trained coaches who have amazing coaching skills. And they're just willing to discount their services for now, as they get their coaching experience hours. Everyone wins. So if you want to look at working with a coach on Gateway Coaching, you can head to the shownotes or just go in your browser to Gateway.coach. And that's actually a really nice segue into where we're headed in our conversation this month.
This month, we're talking about the mindset, the skillset and the tool set of self-coaching. I picked this topic for a couple of reasons. First, I believe that coaching as a term is being really misused in well being, in personal development spaces, and coaching as a tool itself is underutilized. Like so many terms and if you know me, if you've listened to this podcast, you know that sometimes I can be a stickler for definitions. Not that my definition is always right. But I realize sometimes we're talking about different things, because we're not clarifying terms. So right now, what's happening with coaching, is people use that term to mean whatever they want it to mean, which makes it harder for people to actually get the fullness and the goodness of coaching. The other reason I wanted to talk about self coaching is because it's a tool that we all have available to us, no matter what our budget is.
When I was launching the Begin Within coaching program, the feedback that I got from some people is that the pricing felt out of their reach. And I could do a whole other podcast series on accessibility, and also sustainability as a business owner and how those two things can feel like they're in conflict, but they actually can work really well together. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. The fact that some people felt like Begin Within wasn't a good fit for them financially, actually was part of the inspiration behind Gateway Coaching. We wanted to make coaching more financially accessible. And even then even reducing rates to as low as $50 a session that still might feel out of reach for some folks. And that's where self-coaching can be a really valuable tool. And I don't want it to sound like self coaching is a consolation prize. Because I work with a coach, I have a coach that I pay to work with. And I still self-coach on a regular basis as I'm trying to navigate, how to move through different situations. In work, in life, I'm self-coaching pretty regularly. And that's why we created this series of episodes.
I want you to think of November as your mini coaching school. And the first thing if you're going to be in coach school, we got to know what coaching means, right? So I mentioned the ICF, the International Coaching Federation earlier. I really liked their definition of coaching. So that's the one that I'm going to use to start with. And this comes from their website. They define coaching as "partnering with clients in a thought provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential." And then they say after that "the process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity, and leadership." So coaching is a partnership. Coaching isn't therapy. It isn't advice giving it isn't mentorship, it isn't consulting.
And that part, I think bears taking a pause to get into a little bit more. So let's talk about the differences between coaching and the things that sometimes get conflated or confused for coaching, by talking about a lemonade stand. So if you were working with a therapist, a therapist might help you unpack some childhood trauma, around the time that you tried to have a lemonade stand, and you invited a bunch of people to come, but no one actually showed up. A mentor might share the recipe for lemonade, and then tell you what they learned from building and growing their own lemonade stand. A consultant might go to the grocery store with you, look and see how you're doing your shopping for your lemonade stand. sift through your books to see what your profit margins are, and make recommendations on how best to run your lemonade stand. And a coach might work with you to get clear on what you want to get out of running a lemonade stand, and to hold you accountable as you work to make that dream of owning your own lemonade stand a reality. So there are some similarities in all of those things, working with another person, getting more insight into yourself as you make progress forward. But coaching is really about helping you do the work, rather than telling you exactly what to do. And in self coaching, you're wearing both the coach hat and the client hat, which can take a little practice. But you definitely can develop that ability. And the first thing that you need to do is to develop a coaching mindset.
So there's a lot that we could talk about, like if this were a real coach school training, there's so much that we could get into on the coaching mindset. But there are two things that I really want you to hone in on. So the first is something that I believe is most associated with the coactive coach training model. And it's this belief that the client is creative, resourceful, and whole. And so for you as a self-coach, that means that you have to believe that you are creative, resourceful, and whole. And if you haven't listened to the previous episode on self expertise, that might be something for you to go back to. Self-expertise, this belief that you are creative, resourceful and whole is really foundational to the way that we talk about self care and personal development at Inner Workout. And it has to be foundational to what you believe about yourself if you are going to self coach. You have to trust that the answers are within you or if you don't have the answer, because there are some things genuinely that we just don't know, there are things that I don't know, if someone asked me to do some like fancy physics calculation, I don't know how to do it. But what I do know is where to go to find the answer. I could think of someone in my life who could maybe do that calculation, or I could navigate to a YouTube video, or ask someone to make an introduction to me. That's what we mean by being creative, resourceful and whole, that you have access to the answers whether they are within you, or you have to kind of follow the breadcrumb trail to get to those answers.
And if that just feels so out of reach or outside of the way that you are relating to yourself right now, developing the self trust might actually be the first thing that you tackle in self coaching, is coming back to this idea and coaching yourself around the fact that you are creative, that you are resourceful and that you are whole. And the last thing that I'll add on that wholeness piece, I could do a whole other thing on coaching versus therapy. There'll probably be a blog post that I write at some point of it. But one of my coach teachers, Rene Siebert, I think it was Renee, I believe it was her. But she talked about this idea of and she was a former therapist, and she talked about how therapy is often raising your floor. So it's working through trauma. And if you have a diagnosis or something, it's raising that baseline for you so that you understand yourself and you're starting from a more solid foundation. And coaching is raising your ceiling. So it's raising the possibilities that are available to you. The other metaphor that got used a lot in my coach training is that coaching is to therapy as a personal trainer is to a doctor. So a lot of times when we're doing coaching for ourselves, and when I as a coach am working with other people, we're working from a place where there is relative health and where we want to build strength, I'm not working with people on the things that they experienced in their childhood that I have no licensure to explore. And that might be worth keeping in mind for you, too. There are some places that can feel too sensitive and too heavy to go into on your own. And that's when it can be really useful to have that external support, in this case of a therapist, and depending on the topic of a coach. So that's one piece of the coaching mindset is being knowing that the client is creative, resourceful, and whole, and that your job is to keep leading them back to themselves. In this case, your job is to keep leading you back to you.
The second coaching mindset piece that I want you to develop is this belief that there's no agenda. And I don't mean that there is no agenda in the sense that there isn't a plan or a flow for how you would work with yourself. In a coaching session, there's always a flow, there's a particular way that sessions tend to go and it doesn't mean we're following like ABC, like we're robots or something. But we know that there's a general structure. So that's not what I mean by there's no agenda. What I'm saying is that you as the coach, and any coach, is releasing any preconceived ideas of what the client should, that word should always red flag, or what approach they should take. So what the client should do, or what approach a client should take, that is not any of my business as a coach. And that is not any of your business as a self coach. That can be hard, that can be particularly hard to do when you're self coaching, to get yourself outside of the shoulds. The outside neutral perspective, honestly, that is part of the value of working with a coach or working with someone else like working with a friend to ask you some coaching questions. But again, it's not impossible. What I do sometimes when I'm working with myself, is I might also list out the constraints that I'm seeing myself playing in or the boundaries that I for whatever reason feel constrained by. So sometimes the best way to get outside of the agenda and to let go of it, is to actually write it out and say, Oh, I'm assuming that there are only two answers here. I'm assuming that this has to happen this month, I'm assuming that I have to do this by myself. You could keep going. But stating those assumptions can then allow you to release them, but you have to know that they're there before you release them. So I want you to play with this with this coaching mindset. The next time that you go into a journaling session, or especially for self coaching, an audio journaling session might be good. Try writing or saying to yourself, I am creative, I am resourceful. I am whole. And I come to this with no agenda.
Doing that for yourself can help you enter in to your coaching session, your self coaching session, your time of reflection with some clear expectations. Now I'll hand it over to you for a moment of reflection. When you think of the idea that you as the client, are creative, resourceful and whole, and that you as the self coach are coming to a session with no agenda. What do those two mindset shifts make possible for you and how you relate to yourself? What do those two mindset shifts make possible for you? Take a moment to reflect and then come back at the end so we can close it out together.
Next week we're going to look at the self coaching skill set. So spend this week honing your self coaching mindset and I'll connect with you again next week. And again if you are looking for the support of a coach at a more affordable price, check out Gateway Coaching at Gateway.coach. Thanks so much for your time and thanks as always for your expertise. Take care
