Welcome, everyone. I'm Kim Christiansen and this is the Peaceful Productivity Podcast, where I share strategies to help you get the most out of your time and feel better in the process.
Hi everyone, welcome to this episode of the Peaceful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host Kim Christiansen and I want to thank you for joining me today. Today's topic idea comes from my amazing daughter. When I asked her for suggestions, she said, why don't you just tell people why you love coaching so much?
And I'm laughing because part of me wonders if it's because she's tired of hearing about it herself. But I think she really does think that it might be helpful to hear more about me and my perspective and why I love coaching. So thank you to my amazing daughter for the suggestion. So when I think about my journey with coaching, I go back to 2017. I remember the exact day that I hit a metaphorical wall of burnout. I was working in corporate, we were still in the office back then. I arrived at my desk, opened my computer to a very full inbox.
I bet you there was probably 100 unread emails in that inbox that had just arrived over the weekend. And I felt like the air had been knocked out of me. I just felt defeated. I almost physically slumped over. I was just so tired. And it was Monday morning and the weekend even begun yet. I got up from my desk with the idea that maybe I would refill my coffee cup, even though that was probably like my third or fourth cup of the day. And I wandered over and I made eye contact with my mentor at the time. She could tell I was in a low place.
And she indicated that we should have a private conversation. And so we did. And it was through that conversation that I realized that not only was I feeling burned out that day, but I had been feeling burned out for quite some time. Upon reflection, I realized that for months I had been on the edge of tears, short tempered, impatient, anxious, just really, really tired, coping with food, wine, overworking, TV, whatever I could do just to sort of power through it. And I kept telling myself, Oh, once I get to this next milestone, it'll get better.
Once I get through year end, once I get through month end, once I get through whatever, and it just never got any better. So on that particular day, I decided to take a leave from work, which helped in some regards. But the moment I walked back into work, all of the same familiar feelings came flooding back. So I knew that it wasn't work that was making me feel this way. It was in fact, something internally going on with me the way I was thinking about my work, the way I was scheduling, something I was doing was not enabling me to be successful.
It was not enabling me to feel productive and accomplished. So over the upcoming year, I explored a lot of different healing modalities, meditation, a lot of different courses and some therapy, which helped a lot. And it wasn't until 2018 that I came across a life coaching podcast. That podcast instantly resonated with me. And I think the reason why is because even though I was at a place where I was functioning, I was surviving. I wasn't thriving. I wasn't flourishing. I was pretty much meh at the time. And so the idea of a mechanism, a modality.
It allowed me to set goals and feel like I was making progress towards those goals, that would somehow replace this feeling of being powerless in terms of my goals, and feeling powerful and effective and productive and accomplished. The idea that there was something out there that could help me with that really, really appealed to me. So I quickly signed up for a coach. And the experience was so transformational to me, that I very quickly thereafter, signed up to become a coach. Through coaching, I have lost weight.
I have stopped over drinking, I've stopped overworking. I started a business. I went full time into that business. And I saw improvements in almost all of my relationships right across the board. I learned how to take responsibility for my own emotional experience. And that enabled me to not just manage my emotions, but create and use emotions to fuel me towards my goals. I came to realize that if coaching could be that helpful for me, it would be something that I would very much enjoy helping other people with as well.
Especially as I looked around and saw that we, many of us in my work environment loved our jobs, but we were just feeling really burned out and tired. And this was back in 2018. So fast forward a couple years later, I had my coaching certification. I was working in my coaching business part time. And also working full time. And I had never felt more energized. The ironic thing is that I was working more intensely, not more hours, but more intensely, in the sense that I was working on work that I was very much passionate about.
The time just seemed to fly by and I was very much enjoying what I was doing. So much so that I no longer felt burned out. In fact, I woke up each morning feeling energized and looking forward to my day. Then in 2021, after some family members had gone through quite a few different medical types of issues, I recognized that it was time for me to go full time into my coaching business. And I think at that time, I just was struck by the idea that life is short. I could no longer use the fear of the unknown as an excuse to delay my dreams any longer.
And all the while this entire journey, I continued to get coached. I think that's something that I failed to realize in the beginning is that I thought coaching was like therapy in the sense that it would help me to fix something that had been broken. But now what I realized is that coaching isn't meant to fix anything. It's meant to reveal obstacles to yourself so that you can design and implement ways around those obstacles. Those obstacles being the way that we're looking at a situation, our perspective.
That's what I love about coaching most of all, is that coaching recognizes that the solution to your issues, your problems, is really an internally derived solution. It's based entirely on your own inner wisdom. And the reason why we don't necessarily see that wisdom or have access to it is because we might have been so accustomed to listening to our logic, our rational brain, our analytical selves for so long, that we have forgotten to tap into those inner desires, motivations, and solutions that come from our intuition.
So for me coaching is an exercise that reveals myself to myself. And that's why I say that I can coach anybody on anything. Because coaching isn't mentoring. Coaching doesn't require a knowledge base. It simply requires the ability to be curious, compassionate and ask powerful questions. These skills are not something that come to us naturally, at least not in my experience. They are things that are learned skills. The ability to hold space for somebody, to listen objectively, to neutralize what the client has emotionally charged for themselves.
The ability to offer different perspectives and ask powerful questions to help prompt that inner reflection and awareness. That's a learned skill that doesn't naturally occur, especially in those relationships where we're so emotionally invested in helping others feel better. Coaching isn't designed to make anyone feel better. In fact, what we learn through coaching is that that's impossible. We only have complete control over our own thoughts, feelings and actions.
This deep understanding of our own thoughts, feelings and actions allows us to have empathy, to have compassion, to be curious, and to hold space for other people, even when they are feeling hooked in by their own emotional experience. I almost think of coaching as having a drone that is able to fly above the forest when I'm only seeing the trees that are right in front of me and I'm moving so quickly that I can't even tell which direction I'm going.
The coach with the perspective of the entire forest can tell me and guide me in terms of what will work best for me. So coaching is a skill, it's a talent, it's an art form, but it's so valuable. Now I have so much confidence that I can set any goal for myself and with the support of my own self-coaching or an external coach, I can accomplish any goal. Maybe even more importantly than that is the knowledge, the experience that not only can I accomplish the goal, but I can enjoy the process of doing it. I no longer feel pushed to accomplish goals.
I no longer feel compelled to accomplish a goal in order to validate or prove myself worthy of anything. Now I simply set goals because I enjoy the process. The ability to enjoy the pursuit of goals translates into an overall enjoyment of my life. And that's what I wish for everyone is not just the ability to be successful and accomplish your goals, but to actually get enjoyment out of the process. If you are a woman in the beginning stages of your business, it would be my honor to be your coach.
For more information, please see my website, FinancialWellnessCoach.ca. Take care everyone. Are you looking for a coach who will help you increase your business profit while protecting your time and your wellbeing? If so, I'll invite you to check out my website, FinancialWellnessCoach.ca.