Many of us, at one point in our lives, feel like we have reached a roadblock and just don’t know how to proceed. Master coach and entrepreneur Keren Eldad joins us today to discuss her passion for helping people overcome periods of uncertainty in their lives and in their careers, which so many of us face. After discovering the value of coaching and finding benefit in it herself, Keren stresses the importance of asking for help and guides her clients to turn their perceptions inward, uncover mechanisms that may make them feel stuck, and help them pivot directions if needed. Tune in and get insight into how Keren discovered her passion and how she can help others find theirs.
Transcript:
Keren Eldad: [00:00:01] And when I think about that, I think no, it was that moment when four guys gathered under a street lamp in New Jersey and we found our sound and all there was was the music.
Sam Jayanti: [00:00:16] Welcome to Ideamix radio, I’m Sam Jayanti. And every week I chat with entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, career changers, experts and enthusiasts for insider tips that you can apply to turn your idea into a business. So sit back and enjoy today’s show.
Sam Jayanti: [00:00:39] Today, we’re delighted to welcome Keren Eldad, master coach to Ideamix radio. Keren, thank you so much for joining us today.
Keren Eldad: [00:00:47] Thank you, Sam, for having me. It’s a real pleasure.
Sam Jayanti: [00:00:50] So, Keren, we’ll take a look at this in a second, but one of the ways that you described yourselves and your turning to coaching and becoming a coach was to save yourself, to sort of reset your own life and as you, as you so well articulated it. Let’s take a quick look.
Keren Eldad: [00:01:18] What makes me passionate about what I do? I think the best way to answer that question is to talk about a scene that profoundly impacted me. I’m a big theater geek and particularly musical theater, whether you think that’s cheesy or not. And one scene that I think about it a lot is the final scene in Jersey Boys, where Frankie Valli looks directly at the audience and says: “People ask me what was the highlight? What was the high point? Was it when you were inducted into the Hall of Fame? Was it all those hits? Was it when Sherry blasted onto the radio? Was it the women?” And when I think about that, I think, no, it was that moment when four guys gathered under a street lamp in New Jersey and we found our sound and all there was was the music. That’s the exact same reason why I say passionate about coaching. Almost five years in, no day is quite like the last, but I have found my voice. And when you find someone else resonating with that, waking up to who they really are, realizing what you realized, having those deep, clear moments, there’s really nothing like it. All there is is the music. If you’re lucky enough to have a whiff of something like that awakening in your life, then I really hope you’ll chase it down the rabbit hole because there’s nothing quite measuring up anywhere near it in this lifetime. And that’s why I do what I do and what I hope to inspire in you. I wish you my kind of success.
Sam Jayanti: [00:03:04] The feelings of meaninglessness. Tell us a little more about that. What was your personal journey? Was there an event? Was there a catalyst? What caused you to both identify that as a problem and then really set about wanting to solve it?
Keren Eldad: [00:03:20] Well, what I love about this question is that you dive right in. There’s no Hey, who are you? Talk a little bit about this and how’s your day going? Let’s talk about the biggest crisis of your life.
Sam Jayanti: [00:03:32] Well, you dove right in in your video and I love that.
Keren Eldad: [00:03:36] I know I actually loved the opportunity to do it, too, because there are really only two scenarios in which people come to coaching–come to Jesus, as I like to say–the first is you’re really stuck, right? You’re, there’s almost a ceiling above you. I’m not going to use the term glass ceiling because I coach men, too. But there’s a ceiling above, the threshold has been stuck, and you can’t seem to get to the next level no matter what you do. So you understand that it requires a different level of thinking. Classic superstars come to coaching to really up-level their performance and blast through that ceiling. The second is trauma, and I don’t use that term lightly. Really, a very, very large event is happening to you, and even the sense of meaningless, which I felt, is trauma. It’s coming up against the biggest questions in life, and sometimes this is in fact catapulted by very, very large sequence of events. It’s not usually just one event. In my particular case, I like to say it was a midlife crisis at the age of thirty five. And technically 35 to 55 is generally the era of the middle age crisis. And in my case, I remember very, very clearly, like it was yesterday, because it was just a few years ago, waking up I’ve crossed all the t’s, I’ve dotted all the i’s, I live in the enormous house with the fabulous wood paneling, I live with a very tall man, which of course we all know is the holy grail of what you’re supposed to marry, and I had the C-suite job because I’d gone to the right schools and done everything right. And I was just miserable. I was truly, deeply unhappy. And it wasn’t regular numbness, which I see many of my clients experiencing. I was genuinely frustrated and unhappy and sad.
Sam Jayanti: [00:05:24] What allowed you to identify that you were so unhappy because it’d probably be in some time and building, right? It didn’t just happen in the moment.
Keren Eldad: [00:05:33] No, but here’s what it’s like: it’s like sleeping in the library instead of sleeping in your own room. It feels like sobbing in the shower, and it feels like going to work with no sense of eagerness. You’re achieving stuff, you’re doing well, it’s fine. The job was fine. But I knew that I could do a lot more than this. The job was I was the head of marketing at a large watch company called IWC. They own Cartier and Van Cleef, and IWC is their third largest brand. And I was 31 years old when I got that job, so it was a pretty big feat for me and everything seemed from the outside, especially on Instagram, to be going very well. That ex-husband on Instagram not only looks tall, but usually dressed to match my outfits, you know, so we really looked like Barbie and Ken.
Sam Jayanti: [00:06:25] You had him very well trained, Keren.
Keren Eldad: [00:06:27] And I remember–please, he did this himself thank you very much. And a lot of people around me kept saying, “You’re so lucky, you’re so lucky, you’re so lucky.” And it really reminds me of the Britney Spears song She’s so lucky. She’s a star. It was terrible. I was in an abusive marriage. He was miserable to me, and I was so driven for status that I couldn’t break free of it until one day I decided, what the heck? I can’t live like this anymore. And I shattered everything. I broke up the marriage, I left, I had to leave the job because I was living in Switzerland, which, p.s., is he worst thing ever. And then moved back to New York City, where I belong, and started to really struggle, started to really go through a period of, essentially, disintegration. I couldn’t find a job for a very long time. My things that I got to keep in the divorce burned in a fire. My cats died in the same month. I mean, it was a huge series of events, but the best thing that ever happened to me. Because, the thing is, when you lose everything, you don’t have anywhere else to go but up. And I started to finally realize that even for an Ivy League graduate, it’s not shameful to say I need some help. And that was when I turned to the self-help and to the coaching, and everything changed. And in fact, it changed so fast I think some of my friends still had whiplash. But when I discovered it, I also discovered that I have a deep passion for this and that that’s what I want to do if I can help just one person go through what I went through. It’s already a privilege.
Sam Jayanti: [00:08:06] That’s an incredible story, Keren, I’m sorry you had to go through it. But something you said really resonates, which is when you’ve hit rock bottom and there’s nothing left to lose, the only room is for improvement. And so no matter what you do, it’s going to be better.
Keren Eldad: [00:08:24] That’s true.
Sam Jayanti: [00:08:25] And, you, how did you know at that point to turn to self-help, to turn to coaching? And I ask this because so many people, even at that moment when they realize they’re stuck in a really bad place–there’s trauma, there’s a series of bad decisions, whatever has happened to them–they still feel a sense of helplessness and lack of control or loss of control and they don’t know how to regain it and they don’t know who to turn to.
Keren Eldad: [00:08:56] Well, two things happened. First, I don’t know why, but by some miracle I had in my library a book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which I’d read college. Nobody should read this in college, you’re not going to get it. Even if you absorb it intellectually, you’re not going to get it.
Sam Jayanti: [00:09:12] I’m glad you say that because I believe with lots of those books that you don’t start to absorb the lesson until you in your adult life.
Keren Eldad: [00:09:19] Until your later in life and you’re really asking, not from a place that wants to conquer, but from a place that wants to surrender –completely different stance with the with this universe. And so that first book really resonated with me and had me start going down a rabbit hole of looking for. And I ended up at a talk that was given by Jen Sincero, who wrote You Are a Bad Ass, which is hilarious self-help book. And I don’t know why but I guess I was just ready to listen. I was buying everything she was saying. And that was when I really started to say not only is there no problem here in saying I need some help, but I think this person can help me. That’s how you find coaching. You really end up, you have to be wise enough to understand that you’re hearing the voice when it crosses your path and when you’re ready, the teacher will appear. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. You’ll notice that they were all around you all this time.
Sam Jayanti: [00:10:17] All this time. Yeah. You said recognizing that you need some help, and so many people struggle with being able to ask for help, why do you think that is? You worked with a lot of different types of people in your coaching business. Why do they struggle with asking for help even when they know they need it?
Keren Eldad: [00:10:39] Well, I work with different types of people but I work with a general genre of society. I work with overachievers, people who have achieved success above and beyond in many dimensions of their life. And for us, it’s the hardest thing is to admit that things are actually not OK. Here’s how first sessions and coaching go. Listen, my life is actually really fantastic. Everything is really, really good and I’m very, very positive. I’m a really positive person. But if you just asked, I mean, there are a couple of areas that I’m not satisfied with, but here’s why they’re actually satisfying. It’s so hard for us to detach our identity from “everything is OK and I’ve got this” because our identity was formed around “everything is OK and I’ve got this”. Well, this is what Brené Brown calls, in her infinite wisdom, an invulnerable stance. And this is what I call, in my infinite wisdom, know-it-all-syndrome: believing that you have to know it all and have to be the person who has got this in order to save face in your society. But here’s the problem with it: if you want to commit to that stance, you get to stay where you are. You get to stay frustrated. You get to stay on the hamster wheel. You get to stay unhappy. You get to stay dissatisfied with the results of your life. If you’re willing to just have the humility to say maybe there’s something I can still learn here. I’m not even asking people to say I need help. Maybe there’s something I can still learn here. You’re going to crack open the door and that’s going to let all the light in.
Sam Jayanti: [00:12:13] I love what you said because I’m a huge believer in the learning mindset, and as I get older, I increasingly am convinced that there are really two types of people in the world. There are people who have a learning mindset and are always looking to learn new things, whether about themselves or the external world. And then there are people who sort of close themselves off and who need almost to be, you know, to kind of see through some sort of vehicle that that’s not the right way to approach the world and themselves and to sort of adopt this mindset. One of the things you talked about, in terms of what makes you passionate about your work, was the deep, clear moments and the awakening that comes from that clarity. How do you enable that for your clients when you work with them?
Keren Eldad: [00:13:08] And they feel that by being a very good teacher. As a matter of fact, I don’t see two kinds of people. I think that both of those the fixed mindset and the growth mindset exists in all of us, and that’s because we are always bowing to emotional needs. And what I love about this work is when you start to really really profoundly understand it, not just the theory, but in practice. I’ve done this with more than five hundred and fifty people in lots of executive settings but also in personal settings. You can answer the question, “why do we do what we do?” Just this morning in the New York Times, David Brooks, who wrote a really wonderful book called Second Mountain–everything else was terrible, but that book was very good–wrote an op ed, saying, “why we don’t know why we do what we do” and he spoke to several psychotherapists and none of them gave him a satisfying answer and I thought well, it’s because you’re not talking to a coach. Most of us do understand fundamentally why we do what we do. It’s very, very basic. It’s a very basic understanding, and that is that there are only two worldviews lack or scarcity and love. Scarcity mindset was first explored in the seven habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey. He was the one who coined the term. And essentially, it is you either see the world as a place with finite resources that we’re all competing for, which means your mindset is naturally going to be “I must secure my ground. I must be safety oriented.” Fixed mindset. Or, the world is abundant. Miracles happen every day. No one’s tracking resources from other planets. And yet I have internet in my lifetime, which is amazing because I didn’t see the internet until I was 15 years old. And everything is possible. And from there, you make vastly different decisions. Your mindset can’t be fixed anymore because it’s not looking at a small, small sliver of reality. And the wisdom that is imparted in coaching is the ability to identify within ourselves, always where we’re operating from, and bring you back to the relaxed abundance stance, which always produces better results.
Sam Jayanti: [00:15:14] I like that. I like that analogy a lot. Focusing on the abundance mindset is just a more positive driver for everything we do in our lives. One of the ways that you have positioned your company, yourself, and the brand you’ve built around your company, With Enthusiasm Coaching, is that you built it to serve your ideal client, which is you in a sense, right, taking into account the needs that you had when you went through this incredibly difficult time in your life. Tell us about how, you almost sort of see a mirror of your experience, it sounds like, in the clients that you work with and it makes you effective at helping them navigate these moments of their own. Tell us a little about that.
Keren Eldad: [00:16:09] Well, the sexiest term of the last year and a half has been my classic experience of coaching and that is the pivot. Since COVID started, so many people started reevaluating their lives, and so many people started to consider a pivot, either because they had to, because apparently raising children at home is not as easy as it looks, and because they really really wanted to. They’ve been wanting to for a very long time and suddenly they realized there’s nothing to lose and time actually does march on. The pivot is the best time in life for coaching because you’re open. Your mindset is flexible, and when your mindset is flexible, you’re ready to go. That’s the essence of what I’m looking for in clients, because when I talk about my former experience, I’m not particularly looking for people who were burned out and just overwhelmed beyond recognition. Generally speaking, there will be a period of grief before you actually go into coaching, if that’s your status. But the openness and readiness to understand that what I have done up until now is not working and will not serve me further, it will only really retain a status quo that I am not interested in anymore. That’s the period. That’s the magic time.
Sam Jayanti: [00:17:28] OK. I like that description. So Keren, let’s pretend for a second I’m a client of yours and I’ve just come in. I’m facing a difficult moment in my life and I’m looking for some help. How would you start with me?
Keren Eldad: [00:17:44] Great. What’s going on?
Sam Jayanti: [00:17:49] I feel totally overwhelmed by family, work, my husband, all the various needs that are imposed on me at any given time.
Keren Eldad: [00:18:01] Overwhelm is the scourge of our times, isn’t it? It’s so easy to start feeling like there’s so little time, so much to do, and you’re being torn in different directions. How long have you been feeling this way?
Sam Jayanti: [00:18:15] About the last year.
Keren Eldad: [00:18:16] Yeah. You talked to other people about this?
Sam Jayanti: [00:18:23] Not really. And you know, they’re, it’s interesting because I, you know, there have been feelings of being overwhelmed at various times, right, as a woman, as you go through you’re both building your career, but also the transitions of getting married, having a family, raising children, et cetera. And I got used to the feeling of, you know, sort of feeling short on one or another of those areas, but sort of looking at it in its entirety and saying look, as long as I’ve spent the time and engaged with the things that I want to engage over a longer period of time, that’s OK. And I learned to cope with that. But, you know, today again, as an entrepreneur, as mother, there is this feeling of just being overwhelmed. Of course.
Keren Eldad: [00:19:16] Well, it’s very understandable. There’s a lot on your plate, and you’re right to liken this to the greater society even though we do respect, we’re not talking about them right now. We’re only talking about Sam. What else do you think is going on?
Sam Jayanti: [00:19:32] Maybe taking on too many things.
Keren Eldad: [00:19:34] Maybe. What else? Why would you take on so many things? You know you could put them all down, right?
Sam Jayanti: [00:19:46] True. I think I feel a sense of responsibility, you know, and a sense of needing to fulfill my potential and education and all the privilege I’ve had…
Keren Eldad: [00:20:00] There you go. There it is. So if I can give you a magic wand, a really cool one from like the 80s classical Disney movie. And bipity bopity boop in six months you can have anything you want. What would you ask for? Anything, go bananas.
Sam Jayanti: [00:20:21] It really would be success and stability.
Keren Eldad: [00:20:26] But you’re asking for success and stability. And if your root premise is that success must come from great responsibility to be successful, stability is kind of a pipe dream. What have you done to address this so far? Have you worked with an awesome coach?
Sam Jayanti: [00:20:45] Not yet, not yet.
Keren Eldad: [00:20:46] You want to consider that. You want to consider that. What we’re doing here, just so you know, is a discovery. And a discovery is really the beginning of the wiser questioning model, which is the questioning model that’s employed, particularly by the International Coaching Federation. It’s predicated on an anti didactic or non teaching coaching methodology that only asks open ended questions. We’re really inviting you to free flow. We’re inviting you to ask more questions and inviting you to ask questions in a way that is conducive to you getting a little bit to the heart of your emotion. Now, I don’t know if this has resonated with you, I can see in your face that maybe it has, but that moment or responsibility, that’s got to feel like a possum on your chest. When you say that–and not fulfilling my potential and not honoring my privilege–I mean, you’re feeling ungrateful if you don’t do everything perfectly. And honey, that is awful. That is an awful feeling. What if, instead, you could dedicate yourself a little bit to the exploration of where that self-worth nonsense has trickled in and by the way, anybody here listening, anyone listening relates to this because the bottom line belief for most of us is “I have to work really really hard to be worthy, I gotta dance for myself.” And you have children?
Sam Jayanti: [00:22:12] Yes.
Keren Eldad: [00:22:13] Do they have to do anything to earn your love? Anything? Zero! I have a cat named Waffles. She’s a terrible, terrible cat. She’s the Naomi Campbell of cats, and that cat can do no wrong in my eyes. She can do no wrong. She opens her eyes she is God in my life. And that is how you want to start feeling about yourself. That’s how you want to start feeling about yourself. So for that dream to come true six months from now? First, I want you eliminated success because you haven’t defined it properly yet. You know what success is? Success is a deeply satisfied state. I am satisfied with what is, not “I have accomplished x y z” I am satisfied with what is. I am eager about life–satisfied. It’s like the feeling you have after eating a really good meal. Just just happy and I know I’ll eat again. And when you start to really explore the way to that, I would begin first, I would definitely look into coaching. Coaching saved my life. There is nothing that magically reveals your own blind spots to you, which is why we need coaches. But the best place to start is Brené Brown’s work because that’s the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is I’m trying to play for my supper. And in that case, I would actually look at Dare to Lead with, just, I think, her magnum opus. And it’s a book that’s designed for corporate teams, but it certainly explores vulnerability and empathy or self-empathy to the deepest extent. And the second one I would read is The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav. This is a woo-woo spiritual book, but of infinite use to those of us who are just ready to come face to face with what we really are.
Sam Jayanti: [00:24:02] Great recommendations, I will definitely read those and I thank you for your insight and advice on me and my situation.
Keren Eldad: [00:24:14] You know, Sam, I really think that overwhelm is the biggest, I say the scourge of our times because everybody’s feeling–there are very few people who are not living in overwhelm. Because to get out of overwhelm, you really have to challenge every premise that we’ve built modern society and that’s the hustle culture. But if you think about the word hustle, it’s kind of swindling. Entertaining this ruse and keeping this mask on of “I’ve got this” and “I’m doing everything” and “I can do it,” and if you’ve got a problem, Sam is going to solve it. It’s costing you. So just put it down, begin there.
Sam Jayanti: [00:24:55] Yeah, that’s really good advice. Thank you. I appreciate it.
Keren Eldad: [00:25:00] Any time, any time.
Sam Jayanti: [00:25:02] Keren wonderful, it was so great to get to know you, your business, how you became a coach, what led you on your own personal journey to do this, and, and of course, thank you for coaching me, as well, in this session, but we’re delighted to have you on the show and thank you very much.
Keren Eldad: [00:25:24] Any time, a real pleasure. You got this.
Sam Jayanti: [00:25:28] Thank you.
Sam Jayanti: [00:25:31] Thanks for listening today. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And while you’re there, please do review the show. We love hearing from you, so email us at info@theideamix.com or Instagram DM us. Our episode this week was produced by the incomparable Martin Malesky, with music by the awesome Nashville based, singer-songwriter Doug Allen. You can learn more about Doug at DougAllenMusic.com.