Coach Marie is a certified holistic life coach who helps clients grow into the best versions of themselves and achieve their personal goals in life and at work. She combines her knowledge of hypnotherapy and spiritual and healing modalities to pinpoint problem areas in their lives and how they can change their mindset to help them through these problems. Coach Marie understands the importance of mental health, how it can affect other aspects of life, and how we can work through it to create a life we love. Listen now to learn how you can rewire your beliefs and goals to grow more confident in who you are and what you are capable of achieving!
Narrator [00:00:00] Successful individuals use coaching and mentorship to help them unlock their potential. Not all coaches are created equal and that’s why we work with the top 5% of coaches at ideamix. Welcome to Coaches You Need brought to you by ideamix.
Jamie [00:00:15] Welcome to Coaches to Know: a podcast short by ideamix radio. This brief podcast is designed to demystify coaching and help you, our audience, understand what coaching is and how it can help you. I’m your host, Jamie. And today I have the pleasure of being here with Coach Marie, who is going to help us understand what is life coaching and specifically what is holistic life coaching. And very briefly, I’m going to introduce Coach Marie. She has been working as a certified life coach for 15 years, but she actually got her start supporting her friends and her family to achieve their own personal goals. In addition to being a certified life coach, she’s also trained in hypnotherapy, neuro-linguistic programming, meditation, and other spiritual and healing modalities such as Reiki. And if that weren’t enough, she’s currently working towards her Ph.D. in a philosophy known as Metaphysics. She is originally from Ireland but has been a U.S. citizen for 24 years. Coach Marie’s clients are those who are seeking to personally grow into the best versions of themselves. But oftentimes they come to her with a very vague notion of what that is, and she helps them define it and then work towards it. So thank you, Coach Marie, for being here with us today and speaking with us about life coaching. This is the first time that we’ve ever actually spoken about life coaching on the Coaches to Know podcast, so I’m very excited to define that with you and help our audience understand what is life coaching and specifically what is holistic life coaching. So why don’t we start with that question of what is life coaching and how do we differentiate it from executive coaching, for example?
Coach Marie [00:02:02] Yes. Thank you. Great to be here. Well, you encapsulated it well and in your introduction, it really is more about personal growth, life coaching. So every aspect of a person’s life as opposed to just career, although I can cover that with people also and people do not come with a specific crystalized goal, they come with an intention, a wish, or an area of their life that’s not working and they don’t know why and they don’t know whether they need therapy or if coaching will help them. So they find out in a free consult if it’s the right fit for them. And usually, they’re pretty excited thinking they can change an area of their life that they’ve been trying to change for a long time.
Jamie [00:02:52] So that’s very interesting. So basically, life coaching will focus on other areas rather than just your career. And talk a little bit about what does that intercession look like for people and maybe give us an example of, you know, for example, an area of life that’s not working for one of your clients and what does that look like?
Coach Marie [00:03:22] Yeah, well, to start with, it could be in the relationship sphere finances when they’re able to disclose that to me, which they all have, emotional mental health, physical health, their environment, their beliefs, their mindset. It goes all across the scope. And it actually evolved me into holistic because I really do use that when they come to me with, like I said, a vague notion, although a specific idea that I cover every one of those areas. I question every one of those areas because holistic means all parts of us are interconnected and can be absolutely clarified only by the reference to the whole person. So when I start there, I often find areas of their life that really are connected to what they’re talking about. And usually, by the end of their summation, they will have either crystallized the goal or completely changed what they came to me for help for because they realize that every area is connected to what they’re talking about. So it’s very interesting what they realize and understand understanding arises and they really start to see that they’re not–I’ll give you an example. One woman came to me thinking that she needed to really work on her time management, and it was about her career and she knew I was a life coach, but she thought it was a personal problem. So I gave her my holistic questioning and by the end of that, she realized or I helped her realize that it wasn’t about time management. Her career was affecting every area of her life, her marriage, the way she felt about herself…and it turned out she was in a partnership and an agency that was really making her unhappy. And it was taking up so much of her time correcting and spending over time at work. And I introduced the idea to her of starting her own agency, and she got very excited and also very scared. And we worked through that and she started her own ad agency. That really was the issue. It wasn’t that she was unhappy in her field. She was unhappy with the relationship she was having with a partner and didn’t really believe that she could do it by herself. So it was about her mindset.
Jamie [00:06:15] And it sounds like the relationship that she had with this partner, which maybe could be defined it as maybe being a little toxic for her then filtered into other areas and gave her the perception that she had problems that she actually didn’t have. Exactly. And then once you start, you do this holistic assessment and diagnosing and really figuring out what the heart of the problem is and you see how all this stuff is connected. I just imagine your clients having like a light bulb moment.
Coach Marie [00:06:43] Exactly. The aha moments come a lot. Yeah.
Jamie [00:06:47] That’s amazing. That really is. I’m curious if we could drill down on what is your reference to holistic questioning and what does that look like? What is that? Can we define that a little more?
Coach Marie [00:07:00] Well, it’s just going into every aspect, every category. Okay. So I go down the list. Well, what’s happening in your relationships? And I just ask very general questions: Are things working well? What’s not working? And literally just go down that list and it’s not long. It used to be long in the beginning when I started it, but I really honed it down and I just ask a few general questions What’s working, what isn’t working? And people start to disclose and start to have their own ideas so it’s really interesting, me watching it work as much as it is for them to realize what’s really going on and what they really need to change or pay attention to or what needs to change in their thinking beliefs and actions towards what they really want to manifest in their lives.
Jamie [00:07:51] But it sounds like there’s always some sort of trigger or starting point. That’s maybe the cause, but then it has ripple effects throughout all these other areas of their lives. Is it? Yeah. Is there a specific you know, just in your experience working with clients, is there sort of a specific area that you find that people tend to have more disruption from? Like is it relationships, finances, social, emotional health, especially now? You know, I’m just thinking in the wake of COVID, there’s a lot of talk around mental health. Yeah. You know, and I guess that’s what the following question would be, you know, is there a specific area historically that you have seen where people tend to have problems that ripple into the rest of their lives? And has it changed, maybe even since COVID?
Coach Marie [00:08:42] That’s a great question. Yeah, relationships are a big one. People come all the time with “Should I stay in this relationship? What do I need to change in me?” And I’ve helped people break up and I’ve helped people stay within relationships. But definitely mental and emotional issues. That’s the biggie. And people are questioning themselves. They don’t know where there might be a fault or what they’re doing to either contribute to or contaminate anything in their lives. So I work with them to help clarify everything that needs to be changed within them or where they have false beliefs about who they actually are. And in COVID, that’s been actually still the same but magnified mental and emotional. So sometimes I do have to refer people to therapy. If it’s a deeper dive they need. Like I can really diagnose clinical depression as opposed to a situational sadness that can be changed just by changing whatever they’re doing or thinking or believing, thereby changing their actions. And because we don’t get–we really don’t manifest what we want. We manifest what we believe. So all of these realizations start coming when we start honing down and going into it. And definitely COVID has, like I said, completely exploded that area. People questioning.
Jamie [00:10:22] I really like what you said, that we don’t manifest what we want. We manifest what we believe. And so it sort of gets back to when you said basically, I think once you then identify a problem, then you try to get underneath the problem to understand what these people believe about the problem, what they believe about the problem, plus all these other areas in their life.
Coach Marie [00:10:50] Absolutely.
Jamie [00:10:51] What is that? What does the process look like? Is that sort of like the diagnosis? And then finding out sort of the next layer is really uncovering what the belief is about these different areas.
Coach Marie [00:11:09] Yeah. Again, it’s really questioning when I recognize it in someone, I just ask them very directly, “What do you believe about that? What is your thinking about that? What is it that you believe about yourself? What’s the story you tell yourself about yourself, which is carried into every area of your life, whether you can or cannot do something or accomplish something?” And it sets up patterns in people. Sometimes they don’t realize it’s a pattern. But as I question them and recognize the patterns, which are things that are set in motion in very early development: Repetitive ideas about who you think you are and who you believe you are and what you can and can’t do. And they start to see, Oh, my gosh, I’ve been this way all my life. So this is something that needs to change. This is more in the area of quantum physics, but it really is something that people see. Once I ask them specifically what they believe, what they think, which is what a lot of life coaches do. But as I go through all the areas, I asked them specifically what they believe.
Jamie [00:12:18] So once you diagnose that somebody has this false belief about themselves, what is the process for breaking that pattern?
Coach Marie [00:12:26] Well, that’s something that’s an ongoing thing in coaching, which is when people either sign up for larger packages because I can help them through that process. And it really is about the same way that we come to believe anything about ourselves or about anything in the world. It was installed through repetition–whether it was directly stated or whether it was subliminally suggested, You’re stupid, you’re not good enough, you can’t handle it. It’s the same thing. I give them things and homework that they can do on a regular basis to start to break those patterns because the neuroplasticity of the brain causes people to often think that these things are hardwired. But we’ve proven through science now that these things can be changed dramatically through the same repetition of the opposite belief, not just affirmation. It has to be affirmation coupled with new action and behaviors. [00:13:32]So many people will learn how to do behaviors that they still don’t believe they can do, but they learn to do it, and it starts to literally change the neural pathways and the synapses and creates a whole new belief system and a way of thinking and believing about yourself. It’s very interesting, but it takes time.
Jamie [00:13:51] How long, for example, would something like that–I mean, I imagine that’s very individual, right?–you can sort of customize. How long do you typically work with your clients to change?
Coach Marie [00:14:06] It really depends. Some people, when they understand what they need to change and they understand what they have to do to change it and if they can’t continue with the actual coaching, I’ll recommend books to them or programs that they can take to actually start that process. Or some people I’ve had come back to me year after year to go a little deeper or to reinstall in another area of their lives. So, it really depends on people’s finances. Once they know what has to change, most of them are pretty willing. I wish they would stay longer because they really need that coaching, you know, to keep reminding them and keep them on track. But it depends.
Jamie [00:14:59] Wonderful. Thank you so much, Coach Marie, for your time today. I feel like I’ve been blown away. I’m ready to sign up with Coach Maria to change my life. To our audience, if you would like to work with Coach Marie or any of our other coaches at ideamix, please visit us at theideamix.com. Thank you for listening today.
Narrator [00:15:23] Thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave us a review. Find your ideal coach at www.theideamix.com. Special thanks to our producer, Martin Milewski and singer-songwriter Doug Allen.