Ep #137: Coaching Isn’t Enough

You are listening to episode 137 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where you realize coaching isn’t enough. Yeah, let’s go.

Welcome to The Confident Coaches Podcast, a place for creating the self-confidence you need to do your best work as a life coach. If you want to bring more boldness, more resilience, and more joy to your work, this is the place for you. I’m your host, Amy Latta. Let’s dive in.

Hey coaches, it’s another episode for you where I have yet another upper respiratory infection, you are welcome. I’m actually feeling fabulous but this is the voice you’re going to have in this episode.

And actually, here’s the super fun thing, today’s topic is actually going to bring up one of the reasons why I have been sick three times in the past six weeks. It’s got something to do with emotions maybe causing some physical stuff, and why coaching may not always be enough.

So this episode has it all. It’s got history, it’s got some body science, it has a deep vulnerability on my part. And it has some brand new information I’ve never shared before. So I’m super excited to tell you that thought work is not enough, coaching is not enough. Sometimes we need more, and why that’s the best news because there’s so much goodness out there in the world.

So I think it’s really important to understand, so I went to a coaching school that taught a very specific method. And many of my listeners come from many schools that teach a similar method. So if you’ve learned from Martha Beck, or Susan Hyatt, or Byron Katie, or my instructor Brooke Castillo from The Life Coach School, this is your thought work based coaching. What you think creates what you feel, how you act, what you create.

But there’s other coaching out there. It’s not all thoughts create feelings, drive actions, create results. There’s a lot of techniques out there. There’s a lot of modalities out there is a word you might hear. And here’s the thing, I love thought work. And that’s what, at least for my coaching school, we call that method. I love thought work.

Thought work has solved a gazillion problems in my life. Just knowing that what I think is different from the circumstance of my life has changed so much. My relationship with my husband is significantly better. How I show up in the world has completely changed because I am able to see that what I think is not necessarily everything else. And that when I think a certain way, I feel a certain way, I act a certain way. And then I create a certain thing.

For instance, creating a business that has generated almost $1.3 million. Hello, I did that with my brain. I did that with my thoughts. Also, I did that with some other shit that I haven’t been telling you guys about. And I’m telling you guys about it in this episode.

So I think first and foremost, no matter what school of thought you come to, I want this to be a place where we honor all of it. You’re going to hear me talk about the model, you’re going to hear me talk about thought work. But we’re also going to be talking about so many other things that can elevate thought work to a new level. Take it to a new place, get deeper results, faster results, more specific results than we’ve ever been able to get before.

Because that work is not the only gig out there and I think this is a wonderful thing, I think this is a perfect thing. And it’s really important because your head is only part of the work. I’ve told you a million times on this podcast, I’ve told my clients a million times that I love the feeling line. That that’s the body, right? What you think is coming from your brain, but what you feel, that’s when we’re dropping out of our head and into your body, where we feel it in your bones.

You guys have heard me use this language all of the time. And I love coming into a model on the feeling line. If you don’t know how to work out a model, I’ll go great, let’s start with what you’re feeling now. Or let’s go to where you want to feel. And it’s so important because our head can lie to us so many times, right?

This is your Helga brain, your cave woman brain, that primitive part of your brain versus your Gigi brain, your forward thinking brain, your prefrontal cortex. And sometimes even the most skilled practitioner of thought work can fall for the lies of the Helga part of our brain because the Helga part of our brain is trying to protect us. It’s coming from a place of love.

And so many times what I see coaches doing is like, here’s the model, great, here’s the thought. Okay, I’m going to feel motivated. Feel motivated and then try to go into action. And we’re just bypassing it a whole bunch of emotional work that could be going on there.

Or some of the thoughts that we have that our Helga part of our brain serve up trigger so much deep emotion that we don’t know how to handle the emotion that’s coming. We don’t know how to handle the sensations that are in our body. They’re too much. It’s like that meme of David from Schitt’s Creek, it’s too much. My sister and I share that meme all of the time when it comes to what’s going on in the world.

And sometimes, you know, like the word triggered has kind of become a joke in and of itself. But sometimes, yes, sometimes things can trigger us and trigger such a deep, vibrating emotion in our body that just dropping into our body in that moment, our brains are like, “No danger, danger, danger. Run, it’s too much.”

I also think it’s really important to know that when we just focus on thoughts and we just think of the feeling as a feeling line and yes, let’s drop into our body and feel it so that I can move on to the actions, we’re negating that we have other brains in our body. What? The first bombshell just came in at seven o’clock here into the episode. It just came in about five or so minutes in.

Yeah, we have other brain sources, other places of knowledge in our body. If your brain is a source of knowledge and inspiring function in your body, then we also have not just the head brain, but we have a heart brain. And most importantly we have a gut brain.

And we know this, we’ve used this language before, right? You got to listen to your gut. What does your gut tell you what to do? There’s a reason that phrasing exists. Listen, it’s super important to understand that like 75 to 80% of your knowledge comes from your gut. Yeah, 75 to 80% of what you know in this world does not come from the head brain, it comes from your gut brain. But we shut that down for the 25% of our knowledge that comes from our head.

That’s our acquired knowledge. We’re not knocking acquired knowledge, I love a lot of the acquired knowledge that I have. I love learning and I love learning new things and educating myself. I definitely view myself as and I value the education that I’ve had. But think about that. I just think this is fascinating. Think about that, think of everything you have learned. All of the book learning, what you’ve learned from people, what you’ve learned from observing in the world, all of your acquired knowledge.

I want you to stop for a moment, I want you really think about it. What if that’s just scraping the surface? What if that’s just 20 to 25% of your total knowledge that you have? You’ve only been accessing a little bit. You’ve heard that thing like we only use 8% of our brain or 5% of our brain, I don’t know what the statistic is off the top of my head. But we’ve heard that before and I’m like yeah, because we think it’s all in our head.

We’re only accessing a fraction of what we know in our day to day lives. That’s so fascinating to think of. And we defer to the acquired knowledge, the learned knowledge over our inherent knowledge, our gut knowledge, all of the time as if this is a good thing. Listen, it might have helped you pass chemistry when you were in high school, but it’s not helping you now.

If you really want to create, if you really want to go from free to paid coach, if you really want to create 100K in your coaching business, and those of you that have already created that but you’re still listening to me week in and week out, hello, I see you. Shout out to you guys already who just listen because you learn so much good stuff from this podcast.

If you really want to create newer and higher things, you want to bring all of that amazing knowledge to the surface. You don’t want to just rely on what you know in your head because really understand this, your inherent knowledge, that’s the star stuff, my friends. That’s the universe, that’s the cosmos embedded in you.

You, who in spirit form has all of the knowledge of all of time and space. And we’re like, yeah, but I read a book so you should do this. Yeah, but this book says, this teacher who doesn’t know me, doesn’t know who I am, doesn’t know about the star stuff that’s embedded in me is saying I should go do this. And even though it goes completely against my gut, I’m going to defer to them over what I know. I don’t think so. Not after working with me, you’re not.

And we’ve been talking a lot about the gut, let’s talk about the heart. You realize that the biggest electrical generator in the body is not the brain, it’s your heart. This is your literal like power source here. The electrical charge that keeps you up and running all the time, that comes from your heart. Why do we shut that down and go to our brain instead?

I really want you to think about this, if your gut is your curiosity center and the heart of all of your inherent knowledge, and your heart is your creative center and the electrical pulse that gets that knowledge out. And then yeah, there is your brain. And that is an important part because that’s the thoughts about what you are creating, and your knowledge on how to spell words or to operate a podcast.

Let’s even look at that. Let’s take one specific thing, let’s take creating a podcast. Understand that if we look at what it takes to create a podcast, almost everybody cuts the gut and the heart out and only goes for the head and tries to create a podcast from scratch and operate a podcast only from the head. And I’m telling you, you’re missing out on 80% of the magic right there.

Your ideas and your inherent knowledge and the star stuff and all have universal time and space and knowledge invested in you personally, that’s coming from your gut. How you’re going to present them, the passion for them, there we go. The passion for that, the creativity, these ideas that you’re going to take that are inherent to you. And then the creative spin that you’re going to put on them with passion and love and fire, that’s coming from your heart.

And then what you want to think about yourself and the how-to of the tech to actually get the podcast out into the world, and the best way to organize that information in a way that makes sense in podcast form, yeah, that’s your head. So do you see how you haven’t even been scraping the surface when you ignore your gut and your heart?

So how can we help you get listening to your gut and your heart more? This is why coaching is not enough. This is why thought work is not enough, because it’s ignoring 80% of what’s there. We want to get these three pieces in alignment with one another.

And listen, there are so many different techniques, right? And thought work is important. And if you do thought work really well, you can get some of that alignment into work. We’ve talked a lot about feelings here on the podcast. We’ve done a lot of feelings work on the podcast. We’re just going to go deeper.

I’ve just learned new things, you might even say they were acquired knowledge. And I’m getting ready to share the story about that. But a lot of it was already in me and it was really, some of it is some technique stuff, some acquired knowledge. But all because in my gut I knew there was more that I needed to bring the table for you all.

This is where neurochemistry comes in the chemical changes that happen in our body when we get our head and our heart and our gut in alignment with each other. We’re very familiar with we need to change the neural pathways in our brain, that thinking creates neural pathways in our brain.

So when we’re changing our thoughts, we want to stop riding the one neural pathway over and over again, we want to ride the new neural pathway until it becomes embedded. Yeah, we’re doing the same thing between our brain and our heart and our gut.

We’re creating new neural chemical connections between those things, between the head brain, the heart brain, and the gut brain. Just like we’re creating new neural pathways inside the brain with our thoughts, we’re creating new neural chemical connections when we get the head and the heart and the gut in alignment with one another.

And here’s another big ass secret, I’m just going to keep dropping them over and over again throughout this podcast. I’ve been getting these things in alignment all along. I’ve been doing this work for five years. I kind of knew I was doing it and I’ve mentioned me doing it. But now I’m laying it all out on the table because I also just kind of realized that I’ve been doing it for five years.

It’s really funny, when I was at the mastermind a couple of weeks ago, and I think I’ve mentioned this on the podcast already, I was talking about oh, I wish there was a coach that did the really, really deep coaching, that did the patriarchy work, but also did this like deep connection stuff. And my friend on the other side of the table was looking at me going, “I’m waiting for you to figure out that that’s you.”

I have been doing the deep connection stuff on this side of the table for over five years. And honestly, if I’m really honest, this goes back to me being way a kid. This is stuff that was squashed down under, like this is where I learned from a little girl that acquired knowledge trumped inherent knowledge every day of the week. So I squashed that deep connection work that comes so easily to me that I can teach to others because it wasn’t what was going to get me an A on the paper.

You see what I’m saying? This is where my good friend Dr. Wendy comes in. Now I’ve mentioned Dr. Wendy on the podcast before, I’ve worked with Dr. Wendy for over five years. She’s technically a doctor of chiropractic, but oh, she is so much more. I’ve called her my energy worker, my body worker, my empath.

Now, when I started seeing her over five years ago I was having a lot of physical pain. A lot of pain in my hips and back and I had to see a chiropractor all of the time. I have fabulous insurance for chiropractic, not for Dr. Wendy, she’s all out of pocket. But I get 26 chiropractic sessions a year covered by insurance and I would max out most years.

And that’s how a lot of patients get referred to Dr. Wendy, when chiropractors are seeing patients and they’ve done all of the physical work and yet pain still lingers and it really shouldn’t, they send their patients to Dr. Wendy. Because your physical pain almost always has an emotional source. So once you’ve handled the physical ailment, if pain still persists that means there’s an emotional disconnect.

For instance, Dr. Wendy was the one who described emotional pain as being like imagine a filing cabinet in your basement. Like imagine that you have a basement room in your body. But visualize a basement room with a filing cabinet. And every emotional incident and of your life, a new file gets stored in there.

So over time that filing cabinet starts to overflow. It falls out of the filing cabinet and then the room fills up, and then the basement fills up. And eventually it comes up to the surface and it comes out as physical pain.

That’s you. Your basement is deep in your core and when your emotional pain manifests as physical pain, it’s telling you something. This is why we do this in coaching all the time. What do you think your anxiety is trying to tell you? What do you think your fear is trying to teach you? It’s a similar thing here, when you’re having physical pain what do you think that’s trying to tell you?

And I’ve talked a lot about her before, I’ve wished that I could refer her. But there’s really kind of no one else like Dr. Wendy and I’ve been unsure how to share her work because she just has this ability to just read my body. I can walk into her office and she’s like, “Oh, what’s going on with this over here?” I don’t have to tell her what I need and she doesn’t necessarily say, she’s just I’m placing this stone here to release this. And I’m pressing here to process that.

She uses acupuncture, acupressure, a variety of minerals, stones, crystals. Sometimes she brings in essential oils if she needs to, apply kinesiology, clinical kinesiology with an emphasis on emotions, biometric integration, which releases emotional pain. She uses all of these techniques to help release your emotional pain, to help work through whatever that block is that’s going on in your body.

And inevitably, I would leave her, I see here every six to eight weeks for the past five years, and invariably I go and I’d be able to create so much more after seeing her. And I’ve begged her to be able to have a network of people that she could refer. And I have people who travel out of town to see her. So if you ever come to town, if you ever want to get her information, you want to travel to St. Louis, by all means come see me.

So I had been canoodling. I had been canoodling, boy, wouldn’t that be cool if I could bring her into my clients in some way? But it all came together this spring, this is where we’re coming in for the third big thing. This spring has been really difficult. I’ve had a lot of circumstances where it has brought my people pleasing and my desire to make sure that nobody’s ever mad at me to the surface.

There’s been a lot of changes in my life, personally and in my business. I’ve been setting boundaries, holding people to those boundaries, saying no when I’ve always said yes before, speaking up when normally I would just keep my head down and stay quiet. And these situations have not always been met by the other people the way that I would hope. Like, oh, if I stop people pleasing, then somebody’s going to have something to say about it. And some people have had something to say about it.

And this is my work, right? Allowing people to not be okay with me. Learning that I can be safe while I feel unsafe because not people pleasing feels really unsafe to me. And if you think I was able to set those boundaries and just process a few thoughts, no, no, no because coaching isn’t always enough. No, no, no.

So funny thing, I started putting the, a lot of this stuff was ruminating in my head for a month or two because of some coaching work that I’ve been doing. I’ve been doing some reinvention work, I’ve been doing advanced certification in feminist coaching. And then I had an appointment with Dr. Wendy and then it was going to be another eight weeks. And then after that appointment I started putting actions to the mental work that I was doing.

I started making those changes. I started doing those things that I’ve mentioned. But I didn’t have another appointment with Dr. Wendy for another eight weeks and I had called her office and said if you can get me in earlier. But she books out, and so her office was trying to call me when an appointment would come up. And invariably, I wouldn’t be able to go in when they had a cancellation.

So in the meantime I’m coaching, I’m self-coaching, I’m doing a lot of walking, I’m meditating. I did everything that was available to me and it was not enough. And it’s been a catharsis, the work that I’ve been doing. The couple of months of learning new acquired knowledge, like I’m wrapping up four months of work in the feminist coaching course.

So all of this started over four months ago, but those first two months was just me kind of like soaking everything in and making a lot of changes in my brain. And in the past two months it’s about actually applying that.

And this catharsis that I’ve been going through, the implementation of all of this change and everything that I’ve mentioned, it would but up against every fear, and anxiety and worry that I had. And it was bringing up, so many of those files were coming up from the basement, my friends. All of the files were coming up from the basement, it felt like.

There came a point where I could not process the fear, and the doubt, and the grief fast enough. And it just felt like, it felt like it just kept compiling and compiling to the point where I was starting to feel depression. There were days where I struggled to get out of bed. And I’m a life coach and I know how to coach people, and I know how to coach myself. I know what to do, I know how to process pain.

So when we get those moments where what we know to do isn’t working, that then became a shame blanket on top. You know what to do, why isn’t it working? And here’s the thing, so many of you will experience moments like this in your coaching business.

Where in Free To Paid Coach, where in Path to 100K Mastermind you’re going to start doing things. We’re going to really challenge all those patriarchal rules. We’re going to be like, “Heck yeah,” and it feels great inside of a coaching call. But then you’re going to actually have to go do it out in the real world and really tell people who you are and really stand up for what you believe in and really show yourself to the world.

And some of y’all are going to skate right by. Some of y’all’s nervous systems do not get triggered by this stuff, and that’s totally fine. But if yours does, this is the episode where I want to assure you everything’s going to be okay. And it’s with these tools that I’ve learned from Dr. Wendy and what we created together.

Because what happened was all of this felt like a mountain of overwhelm to me. It was this grief, anger, overwhelm cycle and I could not coach my way out of it as much as I tried. I had my regularly scheduled appointment after eight weeks of that and she got me on that table and she went to work. She’s tapping around my body, she’s getting what she needs to help, you know, she’s getting her tools of the trade, right?

We as coaches have our tools of the trade, well she’s got her tools of the trade. She pulled out all the stops. Stones placed here, cold laser there, she stepped out of that room and Mama. Sister, wow. Listen, I was experiencing such deep sadness because it is sad to let go of who you used to be, even if who you used to be needs to be let go.

Embracing future you is fucking amazing and you do have to become that person who has what you want in order to create what you want. But that means shedding who you are now. And that is grief. That is sadness. It’s like breaking up with somebody you really love, but you know isn’t coming with you.

So when she stepped out of that room, the floodgates opened. It all came out. Have you ever bawled with your full body? That deep pain, grief that you only see in the movies? That was me. Listen, I don’t think I’ve, I’ve only cried a handful of times like that. Maybe a couple of times when my heart was broken as a young woman. But in my adult life I can only remember crying that hard when my dad died and then other times when I’ve been on her table.

And then I just kept crying from a deeper place. My arms actually fell off the side of the table. So imagine me on a massage table with my arms out to the side, like in the shape of a tea. And just when I thought I couldn’t possibly cry any harder, I cried even harder. All of it, four months and then eight intense weeks of deep pain, and grief, and anger, and frustration, all of it.

By the end of the appointment we hugged like we always do. She had to go on to her next patient. I got a couple of appointments set up six weeks apart so I didn’t have to wait quite so long. And then I asked for something that I’ve never done before. And I asked, can I set another meeting with Dr. Wendy sometime? Sometime soon. No body work and I want her to help me figure out how I’m going to bring this work to my clients.

Now, in Free To Paid Coach I’ve already included some creating self-safety, how to help your nervous system process emotional pain, and it’s a great place to start. But in the mastermind we are going even deeper, further and faster. You’re going to show up in a way that’s going to confront everything that has told you you can’t do this before, even when you believe, all of that is going to be brought up to that surface.

And in order to really step into that 100K you, to really embrace all of the internal inherent knowledge that you have and bring that 80% that you’ve been told to keep quiet and bring it up to the surface. We do so much of that in Path To 200K that I created specific techniques with her that Path To 100K masterminders are only going to be able to learn at the live event and inside the mastermind.

Together we developed basically what I’m calling at home techniques to turn your intuition on for a deeper connection. How to actually turn inadequacy off. Not just recognize it in the model and see what it’s creating for you, but actually turn inadequacy off, hello. How to stop over thinking. How to release overwhelm.

How to unclog, oh this one right here is so good. How to unclog energy and flow. You know like when your brain feels really foggy and cloudy and you just kind of like feel like emotionally constipated and you can’t think clearly? Yeah, I actually have some physical things you can do with your body to loosen that up. To put brain fog to bed, let go of your brain fog.

And like what she was doing for me, process deep pain and grief on that neurochemical level in a safe environment, small doses at a time. And I can actually show you how to release small amounts of deep pain and grief when it is blocking your ability to talk to the people that you really want to talk to and to create in this world what you really want to create.

Now she’s been doing these things for me, and a lot of them I didn’t even know she was doing. Some of them were things that she’s told me about long ago that she said, hey, when you go home, I want you to do this here and I want you to do this here. And I just kind of forgot about it. Some of it was brand new stuff. Some of it she’s never mentioned and she’s never had me do on that table before. That’s the stuff I was really, really excited about.

So when we get to the live event at the Path To 100K mastermind I’m actually carving out some of our three days to work through some of these techniques so that you can see, since we can’t have a Dr. Wendy walking next to us all of the time and reading our body. I wish that we could.

We’re going to combine that master level coaching to kind of figure out what’s got you stuck. But you’re also going to have some actual physical techniques you can use on your body to take the coaching work, the thought work, and actually process through it and integrate it. Get that head, heart, and gut in alignment so much faster.

So you will be able to to learn what you need to use when you need to use it. Like oh, I’m overthinking, let me rub that spot on my arm like Amy showed me. Oh, I’m feeling really blocked and I can’t access my Gigi thinking, I ain’t got no intuition today. Great, I’m going to place my knuckles at a V off my belly button, find my adrenals and give those a massage, give those a rub to kind of clear that clutter off of my gut.

Do you see how this just takes what we’ve learned to a new level, to a different plane? And I want to bring more of these ideas here. I want to keep having these conversations. To me nothing is off the table. I want this to be an encouragement to you to use whatever modalities speak to you. You don’t have to use what I teach, I’m not certifying you as a coach. I want you to bring in everything that has worked for you.

Like even this neurochemistry work that I’m talking about is not the end all be all. In fact, I want you to even notice I’ve done this entire podcast and you can tell my voice, not the best because I’ve been sick three times in six weeks. Are we surprised? This right here could be an entire podcast episode, the physical ramifications of emotional work.

These are the physical side effects of so much emotional work. I’ve been spending at least four months really integrating new information, and two months acting on that new information. And it has required me to stand up to people, to stand my ground, to set boundaries, to not hang my head, to not go hide in the shadows, to say what I really mean. To say no, I’m not doing that, even when I would normally have said yes. To take my people pleasing and say we are not doing that anymore. No wonder I’ve been sick.

My body has been trying to purge and process all this emotional stuff and it’s a lot. Now, and Dr. Wendy reminded me of this, this is stuff that I knew but it wasn’t at the forefront. Now I’m actually going to have it in my program so I’m going to know.

When you get physically sick, like even me just knowing how to move the lymph in my body, doing dry brushing, lymph massage, moving my body very gently, a lot of hydration, a lot of vitamin and mineral support to support your body as it’s processing the physical ramifications of your emotional work. It’s all connected, my friends. It’s all important. It’s all integrated.

You are not all of these separate pieces. You are an integrated body and we need to support all of it. And we are going to welcome all of it here in this space. And we’re doing this in deep levels in the Path To 100K Mastermind.

We are also doing some of these things in Free To Paid Coach also, but the real deep integrative work is going to happen more often in the mastermind level. I’m bringing all of the modalities into both programs, but how you see it show up may be different just because of where people are in their businesses.

All right, my friends, so this is why coaching is not always enough. And this is the best news because there’s so much goodness out there. I’m always going to lead with the coaching, deep master level, deep dive under the surface coaching. But now we have even more tools in our toolbox to help you process through that so that you can go create what you’ve always wanted to create. You’ve got this.

I sure hope you’re going to meet us that first week of August in the Path To 100K Mastermind, the three day live event that first week. I sure hope you’re going to be there. Did you get signed up? I hope you didn’t miss the window. All right, coach, until next week. Let’s go get paid, coach.

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