Ep #36: Master Level Confidence

You are listening to episode 36 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where we break down the confidence of a master coach.

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.

Hello my confident coaches. How’s everybody doing out there? I hope that you are doing as fabulous as we are doing over here. The Lattas are having a good week. Things are just really wonderful.

We are getting lots of stuff done, we are knocking stuff out of the park, and I actually have a bit of news to share with you today. I have some really exciting news. Personal Amy Latta Coaching news. You might already have a hint of what it is but I’m going to make you wait just a few moments longer.

You definitely would already know what it was if you followed me on social media. So this is just a reminder to make sure, are you following me on Instagram already or not? Because you really should be. My Insta stories are loaded with background information, real life stuff, not only behind the scenes of Confident Coaches program.

So my Confident Coaches mastermind, I have two groups running right now. Just started the July group. If you didn’t get in with July, you can get into the next group that starts in September. So all kinds of behind the scenes of Confident Coaches going on in my Insta stories, snippets of my real life, my business life, my family life.

You’re going to see lots of Lou, the chubby chihuahua. If you follow me there, you already know lots of Lou the chubby chihuahua shows up. You also get a chance to connect with other brilliant life coaches that follow me on Instagram, and so you would also be able to connect with a lot of those other amazing life coaches.

Not to mention quotes to motivate and inspire and lots of book and media recommendations, particularly if you’ve been following along with the Black Lives Matter. I’ve been sharing a lot of what I’ve been learning and who I’ve been following there also, so follow me on Instagram. Amy Latta Coaching. My handle is @iamamylatta.

Let me connect with you. Let me get a chance to meet you too. It’s what I love about social media and I’m really loving Instagram with like, really being able to meet people as if they’re your besties and they’re just strangers on the internet. It’s so fun.

So like I said, if you already follow me on Instagram stories, you would know what the big news is already, but if you don’t already know, if you haven’t picked up the hints, I – look at the title. I have officially, after nine months of what is quite possibly the hardest work I have ever done, you are listening to Amy Latta, Certified Master Coach through The Life Coach School.

Seriously the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve been wanting this for five years. I haven’t been working on it for five years, but when I first came across The Life Coach School podcast and I realized that these were things I wanted to do, and first I set about getting regular certification.

Then it became all about the confidence that I needed to become a coach who made consistent income, and then it was six figures, and I’ve been working in these small steps to this ultimate place of I wanted to be a master coach. And I’m here now.

You’re looking, my friends. Lean in. This is five years of work in this one podcast episode. How exciting is that? And what I really want to share with you, I’m going to tie into this again towards the end of the podcast, but know that the five steps of creating self-confidence that I’ve created in The Confident Coaches Podcast, in my mastermind, in my member site, I have used these steps every step of the way.

And now when I’m looking here, here I am, I am master certified. I’m also going to be a guest instructor in the entree track, which is the business portion of my coaching school. I’m a guest instructor for my own coach, Stacey Boehman. I’m a guest instructor on her program, in both of her programs, and I’m in one of those programs.

And in the last 12 months, so from July 1st to June 30th, the past 12 months, Amy Latta Coaching has hit $350,000 in business revenue. Like, I could just hang here and it would be brilliant. I’m not going to. I can’t wait for you guys to see where we’re taking Amy Latta Coaching, but this is – I could totally hang here.

And the steps that I’ve created, the steps that I teach, we’re going to go a little bit more, I’m going to give you some good takeaways of what I’ve learned from this process in this episode that are outside of my five steps, but understand that those five steps that I teach, starting from episode one through six, everything that you’ve heard me repeat over and over again, I have used them every step of the way.

Learn them, master them, rinse and repeat. It’s all entirely possible for you. I know. So first of all, it’s really kind of crazy for me to think that just the master coach certification was nine months for me. That started before this podcast even launched. We’re on episode 36. More than that.

So more than 36 weeks of master coaching. It started out with three months of peer coaching and writing and studying. It was very much of a self-study. There wasn’t a lot of interaction with the school itself. There was some checking in once a month. There was a lot of writing and kind of groundwork.

It was a lot of preliminary groundwork for what was to come. It was more habit development probably at that time. Lots of journaling, lots of self-coaching, peer coaching, individuals and getting peer coached, and just kind of setting us up.

And then the first week in January, which that seems like it was seven years ago but it was only six months ago. I left on January 4th and now here we are mid-July and we went to the Cayman Islands. We can’t even travel out of the United States at this point. This seems like a world away. It was only six months ago.

We had one week of in-person training where we went deeper than I had ever even imagined. If you guys know already in The Life Coach School, we learn how to use our coaching tool that we call the model. I have repeated it here multiple times on the podcast.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, results. And we learned how to use the model. We didn’t learn new stuff. We just learned to go deeper. I learned how to use the model in a way I’ve never considered before, learned how to break the rules with the model, come at it from different angles.

We created our own concepts, we taught our own concepts, we got tons of feedback on our coaching. Little bit more on that in just a bit from yours truly and me going into a fugue state. True story.

By the end of that week, we knew what our work was. So for those first three months, so after – including that one week for the next three months, that was project work. We always have a master coach project.

And my project ended up being The Confident Coaches program. The actual official program. Side note, if y’all aren’t hearing what I’m saying, I was certified in 2014 and I didn’t create an actual program until this spring. So those of you coaches out there, I literally did it for years. No one died. It’s totally fine.

So the actual Confidence Coaches program where I outlined those five steps. I created video modules, I created workbooks, I created new concepts to back up those five steps to help you work through those five steps. And along with all of the content that I created in the video and the full week of recording that I did where I wore the same outfit every day for seven straight days in a row, my family thought I was crazy, I also created a members only website that my designer – let’s be honest, she’s the one that built it.

My website designer, Jennie Lakenan, she developed that with the two of us working on that together. So that was the next three months. Now, this was my chance to show my mentors inside of master coach training what I knew, what I could create. This was like, the old Amy’s way to shine.

Those three months, I was able to shine by like, here’s what I know, here’s all that I can create, here’s my project. So therefore, my friends, that was not the bulk of my growth.

Because doing well and creating a project and executing it really well, hi, I was born for that. Hi, good little girl, straight A student, give me a project that I can knock out of the park every time, I got it. So it’s probably not a surprise that I aced my project.

I mean, I angsted over it, I procrastinated, I had to work through my I don’t have enough time to do all of this kind of stuff. But I totally knocked it out of the park. My real growth came from the last three months. The call evaluations where I was recording group and one-on-one calls and submitting them and getting feedback.

And oh my god, my friends, it was so painful. Painful because I couldn’t just show here’s what I know. In fact, I had to stop showing the way that you up-level your coaching in those call evaluations, the last thing you want to be doing is showing your client or the instructor how much you know. That’s not how master coaching works.

Totally out of my element, the exact opposite of what I’m really good at doing. I had to learn how to be more bold in my coaching and not let my clients off the hook. I had to learn how to do less offering of ideas, less suggesting what they should do. I had to learn how to ask more questions, like go five layers deeper, even once I think I knew where we were going, how can I continue to ask questions, go even deeper to see what else might come up.

Not assuming that I had any idea where my client was coming from or where their brain was going to go. Like having zero agenda for my coaching sessions. But at the same time, always making sure that we were solving the original problem that they came to me with.

That as I’m going five layers deeper, and maybe we discover something completely unrelated, I don’t go solve that problem because maybe it’s the deeper problem. That’s not the problem they pay me money for. They pay me for this problem over here.

So allowing their brain to go off on a tangent and maybe create diversions, but always bringing them back to center for what they came to me with. I went through rounds and rounds of these calls with lots of practice in between each round.

Being bold enough to risk the relationship with my clients, entire sessions of just asking questions, stop showing them what I know, and instead, only directing their mind to what they know. Not cheerleader coaching. Not tell them all the answers coaching. Not let’s just brainstorm coaching.

It challenged every people-pleasing, my value isn’t getting the A, good little girl, rule follower sell still left inside this body. I had to let it all go to reach master level. So side note, can I give a shout-out to my group clients and those last few one-on-one clients that I was submitting calls for their part in this growth because without them, I wouldn’t have had any work to submit.

So ultimately, here are the top four takeaways. So this is outside of the five steps to creating self-confidence. But I can see more modules being created just off of these four – consider these master level confidence takeaways right here.

If you want to have master level confidence, here’s four more things that I want to put into your brain to consider and to work on. They’re not entirely unrelated to the original five steps, but they take a couple of concepts just a little bit deeper. And they’re also not really in any particular order. So let’s just dive in.

So the first one I realized, it’s what are you most afraid of? What are you most afraid of because that is your biggest growth. It’s okay if you don’t want to lean into it right now, but know this; it’s not going anywhere. That thing that you know.

I’ve talked about before what’s in the way is the way, that is another way to look at this. This is a different angle to look at that same topic. What’s in the way is the way, and it’s frequently what you’re most afraid of, right?

Know that it’s always going to be there. If you’re not ready to do the work right now, that’s okay, but at a master level, we’re going to dive into that work because that’s where your growth it and it’s going to be waiting for you when you’re ready.

Because realize right now that the universe is always conspiring in your favor, and it’s your favor to grow and to learn. I know. Did you realize that? That’s why even though I’ve reached this place where I realize today, before I was driving home from an appointment to come home and record this podcast, I was like, I could stay right here.

I make over $300,000 a year, I’m master coach certified, I’m representing my school, I’m representing my business, I could stay right here forever. But there’s more growing for me to do. The universe is always conspiring. It’s going to put a little noodle in my brain and we’re going to go to work because this is why we’re here.

We’re not here to get complacent. We’re here to grow. So what are you most afraid of because that’s where you have to grow. Mine was feeling vulnerable of what people will think if I don’t know the answer, of what clients would think when I did get bold and I didn’t let them off the hook and I really challenged them and I didn’t put up with their bullshit, when I called them out on their bullshit that they seem really married to, even though it sucks and they don’t want to be married to it, but they really are.

What if you were willing to lean into what you were most afraid of? Because the worst thing that could ever happen to you is a feeling. Whatever you’re most afraid of, whatever that is, it’s just a feeling. What if you weren’t afraid of leaning into it?

Because even those things that I thought would happen, like my master coach instructors would realize I didn’t know the answer, that my clients would get upset with me when I really pushed them on their bullshit, when I called them out on their bullshit, they would be mad at me, they’d be upset with me, they’d want to fire me, they wouldn’t want to work with me anymore, my master coach instructors would think she’s not as smart as we thought she was, she doesn’t deserve to be a master coach, et cetera, et cetera.

Really, that just meant I have to feel vulnerable because who knows what they’re going to actually think. That’s just what I thought they might think. Really, what I was going to have to experience is me thinking those things about me, which would create a feeling of vulnerability, which feels raw and open and exposed.

But if I can feel that, if I can learn how to feel that, which I do teach you in the Confident Coaches program, then I can have those things happen, all those things, which were honestly in my own brain, right? Because the worst thing that’s ever going to happen when you lean into what you’re most afraid of is a feeling that’s on the other side. If you can feel that feeling, then you can do that stuff.

So another takeaway from master level confidence was I realized we really need to dismantle the pedestals. So we put these people that we really admire, we have a tendency, those of us with confidence issues who aren’t sure about what we bring to the table, those of us who struggle with our own confidence tend to put other people on pedestals.

Like I can’t wait to be you, I can’t wait to be the Amy of confidence, I can’t wait to be the Oprah of coaches. I want to be the so-and-so of my special thing. But putting people on pedestals is a really dicey slope. So really think about people that you fangirl over.

Is it Oprah, Brené Brown? Maybe it is Brooke Castillo, my master coach instructor and the one who runs my school, maybe it’s me, maybe it’s another coach, maybe it’s an actor, maybe it’s a famous business person of some kind.

But putting people on these pedestals and we think that they have something, it just sets us up for so many really dicey situations. So really understand, first of all, putting people up on pedestals denies that they’re human. Really understand this that my mentors are no more messiah than they are devil.

Oprah, loved by many. She’s also hated by many. But she is not the savior and she is not the end of the world. She is just Oprah Winfrey, human being. Our mentors are the same way. Whoever you look up and you think, “I want to be just like them,” we put them up on this pedestal, they are human. They will mess up. They will have opinions of you if you know them that might be wrong.

And they will have opinions of you and then you still get to decide what you want to make that mean about you, right? The more I work with these women that I used to have on pedestals, the more I realized I don’t have to be anything other than me with them. When I put them up on pedestals, I wanted to please them, I wanted to make them like me.

Because if Oprah loves me, then I must be golden, right? Which really gets us into this – here’s that dicey slope. It gets us into this manipulative energy because we’ve put them higher than us to somehow have them make us like us, and that feels terrible. You don’t show up as who you really are.

You aren’t able to show them what you’re really capable of because you’re too busy in this, “Are they going to like this? Does this sound okay? Do they agree? Is this too out there? Is this not enough out there? Are they picking up what I’m throwing down?” I mean really, it’s so exhausting even thinking that way.

And pedestals also discount what brilliance you have. If all of your energy is going to try to make them see you in a certain light, all of those questions I just threw out there, you’re denying what you bring to the table. You can’t possibly bring your brilliance to the table because you’re too busy trying to make sure that you’re meeting what you think their expectations are of you.

You are putting what you think they want over what makes you brilliant. This is why I love my formula for creating future you. In the Confident Coaches program, I have my people create future you. This is not a new concept, but the way I teach the concept is very new.

It’s a simple mathematical equation that the energy of future you, the confidence of future you is what you admire most in the people that you currently admire, like the top three people you admire most plus what is your superpower. You can’t leave out your superpower because future you is not what you see in others.

It’s a little bit of what you see in others because that’s a reflection of you, and it’s a whole lot a bit of the magic that only you have. No one has anything that you don’t have. And pedestals make it very hard to see what we bring to the table because we’re spending all of our time looking up to them and not right at us.

Plus, when we put people on pedestals and they do show up as human, have you ever witnesses someone you adore fall? It feels terrible because we can’t imagine that they could ever mess us. And then when we do, we are just in this jumbled mess. Are we confused? Are we trying to justify what they did? Are we trying to defend them? Are we mad at them? Do we love them more?

We just get in this weird place because we’re trying to reconcile somebody that we’ve put so high up on a pedestal doing something that we’re like, I don’t think that I would have done that, I don’t think I would have said that. So now what? Talk about a jumble of emotions.

But when we allow our mentors to be what and who they are, brilliant humans, just like you and me, we don’t spend all that mental energy trying to please them, to be okay with them, to get their approval, you can disagree with them without it being an identity shatterer. So really pay attention. Who are you putting up on pedestals? And really question why.

And that leads me to taking what serves you. So now, our mentors are here to teach us though, right? Here I am, I’ve just had you knock all your pedestals down, and now we still need to learn from these people. So how do we reconcile that?

My master coach certification did actually require me to meet certain standards as set by my mentors, and if I didn’t meet them, then I didn’t certify. Here’s what I want to offer you. The world will always offer you thoughts and opinions, but they are their thoughts and opinions, and you have the choice whether you want to put their thoughts and opinions into your thought bubble.

You don’t have to. You always have the choice. In that in-person week, I would say we learned by midweek of our in-person training that there were some contradictions amongst the instructors. What this master coach instructor told us was different than this one.

And eventually, we realized that they all had differing opinions. Some were similar, some were very diverse. Who was right? Who was wrong? What if you get to decide? I liken being in master coach training with being in a graduate philosophy class, except we never were really clear on what the syllabus was.

Eventually we started to see the structure, but it was very much a guessing game at first. And ultimately, our final was there are some basic points that the professor wants to make sure that I have an understanding of, but these points may differ between students and ultimately, no one’s final paper looked anything remotely similar to anyone else.

So they were giving me their thoughts and opinions on what I had to work on, but ultimately, me certified as a master coach was much less about meeting those thoughts and opinions and then choosing instead, what am I going to work on and what am I going to put in that final that takes into what they have to say, but is wholly reflective of me.

It’s kind of like they lay it out on the table. They lay it all out on the table and you get to decide what you pick up and what you run with, except that there is no table. Everything’s still in those people’s minds. We get to decide what to make of other people’s opinions and evaluations of us.

We always have the power to make our own opinion and our own evaluations, the most important one. And the more we do that, the better able we are to take their opinions and evaluations of us and to decide if adopting any of them serves us or if it shuts us down.

Speaking of being shut down, the last point here is about being the student. So right on the first day, first hour, my coach Brooke asked for a volunteer and I raised my hand straight up. She offered a challenge and I did not automatically know the answer and I shut down.

For like, two and a half days, I wandered around the Cayman Islands in like, a fugue state. My closest friends were, “Amy, are you okay? You don’t really seem yourself.” And here’s why. Because I’ve always gotten my value from knowing the right answers, or more importantly, showing others that I know the right answers.

So the rest of the week, even after I came out of my fugue state, I still hesitated to volunteer because I wasn’t willing to be the student. I wasn’t willing to not have all the right answers upfront. Don’t assume you know the answers. Decide you don’t even want to know all the answers because there’s no growth in knowing all of the answers.

Be open to learning what you don’t yet know. What would shift if you stopped assuming that you know what the person is thinking? How much freer would you feel if you didn’t assume that you knew what people were thinking all of the time?

How different would your coaching be if you dropped that agenda? If you didn’t assume that you knew where their thinking was coming from, where the conversation was going would truly open you up, right? And what would shift if you stopped assuming that you knew the answers to anything?

Being in a group program, coaching with a coach. When you’re working with your coach, are you assuming that you already know what she’s going to teach you? Are you truly open to whatever is there for you to learn?

This goes hand in hand to taking what serves you because you need to be open enough to be the student and be willing to be wrong and be willing to allow people to have all the thoughts and opinions on you, and then take what’s going to serve you so that you grow, which is different than taking on thoughts and opinions and punching yourself in the face with them.

This challenged my very worth system. My worth has always been based on making sure that others knew that I knew. But only because I wanted to make sure they liked me. All that dismantling the pedestals. What if I’ve dismantled the pedestal, I’m not as worried about making sure that they like me.

I can just allow them to have thoughts and feeling about me, give feedback that would help me grow, and not use that feedback to punch myself in the face and make it mean that I’m not good enough. If I could just surmise what I said right there has basically been my last nine months.

But if you weren’t trying to already know the answer, you might learn something new. You might get a new result. What new ideas may you stumble upon? What might you find that challenges old beliefs and therefore offers you an area of growth you had no idea was waiting for you?

Plus, I want to offer this. Being a student in life is so much easier. It’s so much easier to coach my clients now because I don’t have to work so damn hard proving to people. I don’t have to prove to anyone that I already know the answers. I just have to keep my mind open for what’s possible.

There’s so much less energy and so much less angst. Okay my friends? So lean into what scares you the most. You can put it off, but the universe is going to keep offering up to you on a platter. Dismantle any pedestals. It is people pleasing and it is diminishing your power and that diminishes your confidence.

Take what serves you from others but don’t have to beat yourself up with it, and be a student in your life. If anything, it’s a hell of a lot angsty than having to prove you already know everything. There’s nothing I won’t ask of you or my Confident Coaches clients to do that I am not willing to do myself and this entire master coach journey has been a master class in that.

Set a big hairy audacious goal. Believe in my bones I can do what I’ve never done before, bring on all the feels and don’t let them stop me. Be the queen bee of my business and my life. Not a worker bee. Stop trash talking myself, stop quitting on myself, no matter what.

Because these steps work and on the other side, audacious confidence. On the other side, audacious and huge celebrations. This is what we do. Coaches feeling more confident, signing more clients, becoming coaches who make 8K a month as just a matter of habit.

What will you create, my friends? Who will you step into? Because we are confident coaches and we are doing this. Alright my friends, until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.

Friends, I am so excited to offer you a podcast-only treat. I am sharing with you the five-day Unblock Your Confidence mini course. It is only available to The Confident Coaches Podcast listeners and the only way to get your hands on it is right here. Why do you need this course?

Well, in this five-day mini course, you will learn why it seems like you struggle with confidence when others don’t, how to build trust in yourself, how to get over your fear of failure, how to stop caring so damn much what other people think, and the best thing you can do to unblock your confidence today.

All of that in just five days. This is some of my best work waiting for you. Visit www.amylatta.com/unblockconfidence to get yours. Again, that’s www.amylatta.com/unblockconfidence. Go now and get started today.  

Thanks so much for listening to The Confident Coaches Podcast. I invite you to learn more. Come visit me at www.amylatta.com and until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.