Ep #128: Stop Pedestaling

You are listening to episode 128 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where you stop denying yourself by putting other people on pedestals. 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.

Oh, hello, my life coaches. How are you doing today? I am a little froggy in the voice, but feeling pretty fabulous. I have literally just returned from Austin, Texas for the first Life Coach School mastermind in three years. I hugged so many of you, I high fived so many of you. I gave like those eyes from across the room of acknowledgment that I see you to so many of you. And my voice is just, it’s a little, it’s a little much, guys. My voice is a little froggy.

And just how many of you so graciously approached me and loved on me, I really just want to start out today, particularly given the subject matter of how to stop pedestaling, of truly appreciating those of you who come in here, listen every single week, who spend time with me in your ear and stopped to say thank you. I didn’t know I was going to cry. It was fabulous.

You know, it’s been three years since the Life Coach School has had a mastermind. If you are not certified through the Life Coach School, first of all, you don’t have to be. You never have to get certified, there are plenty of other schools. It’s just where my certification came from. We host a mastermind every year, which really after this year’s I really think it’s not really the appropriate name of the event. It’s a once a year if you are certified you are automatically invited, and it is a learning and connecting opportunity.

In past masterminds we’ve definitely done more workshopping and more masterminding. And I definitely felt this year’s mastermind was more about inspiration and aspiration and connection than really like pen to paper, small group work like we’ve done in the years past. But it’s been three years because of COVID. And in the three years’ time, I have so many new clients, so many new listeners in you, so many more followers on Instagram or on my email list in those past years.

There are clients that I worked with two and a half years ago that I’ve never met in person until this past week. And so that right there, just the huge impact of being able to meet so many of you who I feel like I’ve known for almost three years, but this was the first time we actually got to be in the same space together.

And most people were so amazing, so awesome. And I have to say last week I gave a shout out to two coaches, Sean Murray and Leandra McCullen. Oh my goodness, I hope I’m saying her name right. I suddenly forgot her last name as it came out of my mouth. Now, Shawn is across the pond and I’m not even sure at the time of this recording whether or not she’s certified through the Life Coach School or not, but I did not see here, but I got to meet Leandra.

So Leandra, as I mentioned last week, is the first person inside Free To Paid Coach who used the process that I teach you to create a paid client. So yay, I got to hug her, high five her. If you follow my Instagram stories, you would have seen us. I posted some video that a friend of hers took as we were meeting and like that fills me up. And it was collaborative, and it was warm, and she owned her brilliance while we also got to meet.

And this is the kind of relationship that you want to have with your mentors and your coaches. Because then there are also the fans who pedestal. Now I’m going to get it right out of the gate, I am using a noun as a verb. I know a lot of people don’t like turning nouns into verbs. So if you don’t like that, I’m fine with it, I love you anyway, please keep listening.

So pedestal, I am obviously referring to when we put people on a pedestal. When we elevate them as if they are in the Olympics and they’re standing in the gold metal spot, right? And so when we pedestal people, we are putting them on a pedestal. And this podcast episode is all about how to stop that. Because so many of you are pedestaling your influencers, and your gurus, and your coaches.

Now here’s the funny thing, this is a part two to last week without me knowing that it was going to be a part two. Last week was all about how to own your expertise without arrogance. And I did talk a lot about putting people on a pedestal and I wasn’t necessarily thinking that I was going to talk about this again. So to be really clear, last week is a part one. If you haven’t listened to it, you don’t have to listen to it before this one, but definitely as this is over go back and listen to last week, too.

I didn’t necessarily think I was going to talk about this again until I went to mastermind because the pedestal thing was out of control, coaches. There were so many people pedestaling. So what do I mean by that? I’m talking about coaches breaking down crying meeting other coaches and gushing how their lives are forever changed, without that person even remotely acknowledging that they had any part in their own transformation. That is pedestaling.

When you see an influencer, or an expert, or your coach, even somebody you know intimately, and you see them as superior to you. Which is very different than appreciating what that influencer, or expert, or superior, I’m sorry, or coach, like talk about Freudian slip, or your coach acknowledging that their work was the catalyst that you needed to create transformation in your life. Do you see that difference?

When you pedestal people, you think the transformation is because of them. But when you respect and acknowledge people, you understand that their influence was merely the catalyst for you to create your own transformation. And it is super, super important that we understand the difference, that you understand the difference and you stop the pedestaling and do what we’re going to talk about in this podcast episode instead.

Okay, so last week was about not doing that to yourself and how to own your expertise and being the expert in the room without having to put yourself up on a pedestal or feeling like you are putting yourself up on a pedestal because that feels weird. You can feel the energy imbalance when you do that.

So this week is about owning your own brilliance as the client, as the learner, as the student and a follower of other people’s platforms, and you not putting them up on a pedestal so that you can own your own brilliance. Both episodes are about owning your own expertise and owning your own brilliance.

Last week’s episode was more about you owning your expertise and brilliance as the coach and as the influencer. And this week’s episode is about owning your own expertise and your brilliance as the student, as the influenced. The influencer and the influenced, right?

And let me be really, really clear, there are mentors, and influencers, and coaches in my life that I love. Like truly love. I adore them. Their work was what I needed in order to transform my life. Without listening to them, reading them, paying them to coach with me, I cannot say if I would have seen these changes in my life and be where I am.

Maybe I would have, but I don’t know. And so I’m so glad that I have them in my life so that I could create that transformation. And I honor their work and their influence in my life. But I created my transformation. None of those people came to my house and moved my arms and legs to do the work for me.

Any change that I see in my life was my own doing, not theirs. So when you are pedestaling you are putting someone else and their knowledge and their expertise above your own, always. Like they always trump you and you are thus downplaying your own role in your transformation and your own expertise.

So that is what pedestaling is, putting somebody else and their knowledge and expertise above your knowledge and expertise, and crediting them for your transformation as opposed to crediting yourself for your transformation. And here’s why you got to stop it. Here’s why pedestaling kills your confidence and impacts your ability to become a confident paid coach. And it will absolutely influence your future earnings potential and influence the number of clients you are able to serve.

Because number one, there is no ownership of your transformation. You ever feel like you’ve created results and immediately thought that it was just dumb luck or maybe it was a fluke, right? Or you’re giving all of your credit to the coach that you were working with at the time. There’s no ownership of your results when you pedestal other coaches. You don’t see how you created your own result.

Like in your model what thought did you have? What feeling did you have? What actions did you take that created your results? When you pedestal people, you’re like, “It was them and I just did what they told me.” No, there’s a thought and a feeling between what they told you and the actions you took and the results that you got. And when you pedestal people, you aren’t owning that thought and that feeling, and a lot of times you aren’t even owning the actions too.

That’s where sometimes you own the actions, but you still credit them. Sometimes you don’t even own your actions, you’re like, “I don’t know, I literally am just like a robot doing whatever my coach tells me, it’s totally them.” And the biggest problem with this is you can’t replicate, because you don’t know where it came from. You can’t replicate your thoughts, and your feelings, and your actions. Well, you might be able to replicate the actions, but again not the thought and the feeling if you don’t think it came from you in the first place.

This is a main process point of the new Path to 100K Mastermind. I haven’t talked a ton about that. I have mentioned it before, the Confident Coaches Mastermind really is no longer. Now that I’ve introduced Free To Paid Coach, it just makes sense that the mastermind is Path to 100K. Like Free To Paid Coach is going to get you confidently paid as a coach into a minimum of $5,000 in six months. And then Path to 100K is going to teach you how to take that and create a $100,000 business.

And the main process point is how to replicate what’s working in your business. And then I’m going to teach you how to stop doing what’s not working in your business. All because you’re going to create the brain of a 100K earner so that you know the difference.

And if you think other people create your results, you have no idea how to replicate them. You’re like, “I just keep doing whatever they say.” And there’s zero ownership of the thoughts and the feelings, and the deep thought work and emotional work that you are doing to create those results.

I didn’t even think about this, this isn’t even in my notes but this is a really good point. When you’re doing that, this tells me that you don’t believe that the model works too. You really don’t understand that your results come from thoughts and feelings. So that’s kind of like a deeper acknowledgment of you don’t know how to replicate and you don’t own your transformation, is that you also don’t think your results come from what you think. 

Thoughts become things. What you think is the result that you’re going to get. And when you’re pedestaling people, you are completely denying that that model is at play. You don’t understand that your thoughts become things. you think my coach’s thoughts become my things. My coach’s directives become my things. but not my thoughts become my things.

Now, I do want to acknowledge that you will hear people say I just do what my coach says, and these are massively successful people. My coach is one of these people, she will tell you, she’s like, “I just do what my coach says.” But be really clear, her coach is not giving her, and she is not giving me, do this not that.

What my coach does is she gives me the room and she holds the space for me to do the deep emotional work so I can figure out what I’m thinking that is denying me the results I want to create and what I need to believe instead. She’s giving me the space to find my own answers. And only on occasion, will your coach say, “Okay, this thing right here, you just need to stop this.” Or, you know, “This thing right here, you just need to go do this.”

But a good coach will only do that after you’ve created like 99% of your own transformation. And honestly, that’s what my coach did for me last year and 2021. I have mentioned this before, I have an entire podcast episode sometime in January where I mentioned that I didn’t hit one of my goals last year, right? This is what Stacey, my coach, did for me last year.

We meet quarterly, I’m in a program called $2 million group with my coach Stacey. We meet quarterly, we have a Facebook group, and for nine months all we did was coach on the bullshit in my brain. The stuff that my coach was telling me to do was to get over my inadequacy, was to stop telling the tale that people get upset with me and that this is a problem. To stop talking about the clients who would leave CCM and say this was not worth my time and money and me making that mean that I was a bad coach and that I didn’t know what I was doing.

Because I wasn’t acknowledging the people who were killing it. The people who did think that CCM was brilliant, and all of the clients that have now gone on to become six figure coaches because of that program, right? And it was denying my ability to speak up and to say the things that would make people uncomfortable.

We did that for nine months, and it was horribly uncomfortable. But I kept coming back and doing the work and she kept holding the space for me until the dam finally broke. She wasn’t in the dam with me. I had to be in it, she simply held the space for me as I did it. And then when we came back together this past January, then and only then did we completely outline the difference between Free To Paid Coach and Path To 100K and it became a, alright, let’s do this and not that. Let’s drop this and let’s drop that.

But I had to do 99% of the transformation on my own first. She could not do that for me. I’m going to get emotional again. Oh my gosh, I’m crying again, I didn’t even know. She could not do that work for me, I had to. I had to do that work and it was the most important work, the actual steps to take are so secondary to you being willing to understand where your doubt is, where it’s coming from, to hold space for yourself, to love yourself so unconditionally that you fully trust for yourself with so much love, so much self-safety, so much compassion.

Stacey could see it for me, but she could do it for me. I created that, not her. And I love her so much for loving me, but her love for me could never trump a lack of love for myself. It was only after I did that work that we were able to come together in January and it was a pure do this don’t do that conversation. And it was beautiful and it was magical. And there’s no way I’m giving her credit.

She’s the one that named Free To Paid Coach, I’m telling everybody right now, Stacey Boehman named Free To Paid Coach. I didn’t come up with that brilliant concept. But I already had the pieces, I already had the tools, right. I had already done all of the work, I already had all the pieces together, she just kind of put it together in the pretty picture.

So I will give her credit for the naming of the program and I will absolutely give her credit for holding that space for me and my mastermind sisters so that I could show up as the million dollar brained coach. I now have that brain of a multi-million dollar coach that was able to show up and do the work and share with my coach here’s what I know. Here’s what I know my clients need. Like she just helped me put the puzzle together. I’m the one that provided the pieces, right?

This is just step number one. This is just point number one of four. Okay, come back. What are we even talking about? Where am I? Oh, why pedestaling is killing your confidence. Number one, there is no ownership of your transformation. Okay, let’s get back on track here. Number two, oh, and I thought my voice was shot before, now it’s really gone.

Okay, number two is you always need someone else, right? You struggle to make your own decisions, you claim to not know what to do next. You know, I had a previous client years ago who worked with me for a year and so many of our calls ended up from her going and that’s why I hired you, so that I can be confident.

And at the time, I could hear it. I wasn’t quite skilled enough as a coach yet to coach her out of it. And probably, because this was a few years ago, probably because at the time I was still doing the same thing to my coaches and mentors, right? I couldn’t identify the pedestaling because I was still pedestal at the time.

So I could see it as a problem, wait a minute, she’s giving me all of her, like she thinks she needs me. She’s giving me, not only all of the credit, but she thinks she needs me to make all of her own decisions since she doesn’t feel comfortable doing that. She just keeps telling me that’s why I’m waiting for you to deliver me the confidence, Amy, right? But I was still kind of doing it myself with my own coaches and mentors. So I did struggle to coach her out of it because I was still a little bit in that pool, right?

And when you downplay your own expertise in favor of others, you’ll have an idea of what you like to do, but you always feel the need to check in with them to make sure it’s okay. You’re always saying things like, so what should I do? Or you’ll know this is what I want to do, but you’re like raising their hand. Listen, other coaches are not your mother, you do not need their permission.

Now that I no longer at all pedestal any of my mentors, and especially Stacey, I can take her coaching and I can leave what I don’t want to do on the table. I don’t agree with everything that she tells me, I don’t have every single one of her thoughts and beliefs because I fully own my own. I absolutely value everything that she has to say, this is not a you’re wrong, I’m right situation at all. I just don’t take everything that she gives me. She’s not my mom.

Now, if I was still wavering, there was that point where she looked me in the eye and she’s like, “I’m not coaching you on this again.” But we were talking about my mental shit, not like the task I’m doing, right? Other coaches are not your mother, you don’t need to ask them for permission.

All right, so the third thing is there’s no trust in yourself, right? So when you don’t take ownership of your own transformation and you think you always need somebody else to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do, you’re not building trust in you. And let’s be honest, that just feels terrible because trust is, it’s love, and it’s grace, and it’s compassion.

And it can take time to build in you. I’m not talking about like going from a place who never trusts themselves at all to like, I fully trust myself. You can create a lot of amazing result without full trust in yourself. This is a lot like belief and doubt, right? You can create a lot of amazing results when you still have a lot of doubt. But the tools I teach in Free To Paid Coach, which is for those coaches who want to become paid. They’ve never been paid or they’ve only sporadically been paid.

And my Path to 100K Mastermind, which is where we actually get you to 100K coach, the tools I teach in those two programs will absolutely teach you to build trust in you. Because no trust in yourself feels like building this business on quicksand. It feels unstable, it feels untenable. And there is no amount of money in the world, there are million dollar coaches that I saw accepting awards on that stage that are standing on quicksand.

They need the money to feel confident. They need the applause and the adoration to feel confident. They need to feel like they are on a pedestal and that people believe in them and worship them in order to feel secure. But that is not security. That’s not trust. And I teach you that in Free To Paid Coach and we build on that in Path To 100K Mastermind.

All right, so what do you want to do instead? If we stop pedestaling would we just be like, “Hey, hi, how are you? You’ve had no impact on my life at all.” No, as usual, there’s a whole range of things between denying other people and adulating other people. Is that even a word? Am I saying that right? Adulating? Let’s just replace it with pedestaling people, right? There’s a huge swath, there’s so much in between.

Like how do you follow others and acknowledge their role without pedestaling them? This is where you get to say thank you for your guidance. Thank you for your mentorship. Thank you for holding space for me as I navigate through this. Thank you for showing me what I could not see on my own. Thank you for not giving up on me. Thank you for teaching me things I did not previously know. I appreciate what you have taught me.

This is respectful. It’s not just respectful to them, but it’s respectful to you. And honestly, this is most of what I saw last week. There was a lot of pedestaling. It’s kind of like pedestaling is kind of like the screaming toddler, it seems to make a bigger splash but honestly on a one to one interaction type of thing, this is happening much more.

There is a lot of respect in the coaching community. And I just want you to pay attention to where do you see yourself still pedestaling? And then be willing to ask yourself why. Why am I afraid to own this in my life? What makes me uncomfortable to say I’ve created this and no one else? This is the coaching work that you have to do and this is the coaching work that we do in Free To Paid Coach.

You don’t have to struggle with this anymore because it doesn’t feel good, right? Like even when you pedestal and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, you’re so amazing.” Underneath that there’s a hollow feeling, like you walk away and it’s like a shot of, you know, endorphins. It’s like a shot of heroin where you like momentarily feel fabulous but then that connection goes away, they go home, you go home and you’re left with a hollow feeling, right?

So if this is a struggle that you have, you won’t have it anymore after joining Free To Paid Coach. But of course you have to do the work. The mere enrollment in the program, like Shawn has found out just putting herself on the wait list, she went and created a client. Only her second one, and her first one in a year, right? I told that story on the podcast last week.

You still have to do the work and it is possible that you could go and create a paid client just by signing up. But it’s not because you signed up for Free To Paid Coach. It’s because you made a decision in your mind that there was no other option. Free To Paid Coach is fucking brilliant. Every single coach listening to this needs to get their butt in there. It’s simple, it’s easy, it’ll be the best decision that you ever make. But I’m not going to be the one that delivers the result to you. You will, and that’s the best possible news ever.

You’re going to come through it feeling like a bad ass. You’re going to come through it feeling like you aren’t on quicksand, but on a stable, solid, confident ground. I merely provide the tools and coach the hell out of your brain so that you can get there until it clicks and you finally get there.

All right, my friends. So if you’re listening to this podcast and it’s dropping I want you to go to Instagram, or if you prefer Facebook, absolutely look for Amy Latta business page. Not my personal page, but my business page, Amy Latta. And look for this podcast, this is episode number 128, Stop Pedestaling. And I want you to drop into the comments and just I am done with pedestaling or no pedestaling for me. Whichever one rings better. And drop that in the comments. Let me know that you heard this, let me know that this message is connecting.

And you can enroll right now. Free To Paid Coach is open all of the time. I’ve gotten a lot of people who are so confused by Free To Paid Coach because they don’t believe me that it is as fabulous as I keep telling you. We’re open all of the time. It never closes. It is not a short time period. It’s $1,000. It is a steal. It is a no brainer. Personally, I think it’s $100,000 worth of value but, you know, that’s kind of like I believe my own baby is the most beautiful baby.

$1,000 and you can be coached by me this afternoon. We coach every Thursday afternoon. It’s $1,000, every coach should be in here. It’s open all of the time and it never ends. I mean, until the program itself comes to an end because I’m no longer, like I’ve retired and I’ve not passed it on. It’s open, we’re waiting for you.

Stop pedestaling right now. Let’s get this work done. You can enroll right now at amylatta.com/FTPC. We’re waiting for you inside. This is the place in the program that you have been waiting for. And until next week, let’s get paid, coach.

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