135 - Design, Live, Thrive: Living Your Best Life Starts with YOU

A coach holds up a mirror in front of someone and helps them see things they couldn't see before. Sometimes it's just small changes and shifts that can make a big difference in someone's life.

In today’s episode of the Life Coach Business Building Podcast, I will be joined by 5 amazing coaches who will be speaking at the Design Live Thrive Summit about themes surrounding women. Each of these coaches has a variety of credentials and coaching backgrounds, and their presentations are based on their unique personal experiences. 

Along with receiving detailed guidance (inside of the Business Building Boutique) on writing their signature talks, they also talk about how working with other coaches has broadened their perspectives and made the summit preparations a memorable and beneficial experience.

So if you want to have a glimpse of the topics and ideas that will be covered in the summit on January 13 & 14, 2023, as well as the kind of support that these coaches received as they crafted their talks,(and what they will do with this signature talk after the Summit) then make sure to tune in and join us in this conversation!

Save your seat for the Design, Live, & Thrive Summit on January 2023 here: www.designlivethrive.com
Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/IVI6-NKiDQ8

Transcript

Aida: Sometimes we're always looking for happiness in our lives, but that can backfire. but choosing a purpose rarely fails. So it means figuring out your purpose in life, given your unique set of talents and capacity. So, very similar to what Tina, Laura, and Stacy said.

And, to go back to what Stacy mentioned about, your thinking and your thoughts, like what do you wanna keep? What's serving you? What's not serving you anymore? . And one of the analogies that I came across that I really liked is it's like cleaning your house. so you go through each room in your house and you look at what thoughts are there and decide, is this serving me? And you can move forward from there.

Debbie: Hello, I'm Debbie Shadid, the host of the Life Coach Business Building podcast. If you are ready to have more clients in your life coach business, then you're in the right spot. Each week I'm gonna teach you super simple strategies to grow your business without feeling overwhelmed and without spending money on paid ads. If that sounds interesting. Stick around and let's get started.

Debbie: Welcome to today's podcast. I am very, very excited to introduce you to some speakers from my upcoming summit. You guys have heard me talk about this, the Design Live Thrive Summit on January 13th and 14th.

So today I'm gonna be talking to five of the speakers. If you guys haven't signed up, you need to get over there and sign up DesignLiveThrive.com and save your spot. So let's go around today and I wanna introduce you to each one of the speakers. I also want to have them share a little bit about their coaching business, what brought 'em to coaching, and then you guys we're gonna talk a little bit more about what they're going to be teaching you at the summit.

So if you're attending, you're gonna get to hear a taste of what's gonna happen on our summit. 

All right, Thais, we'll start with. Yes. And introduce yourself. Tell us who you coach and a little bit about your business.

Thais: Well, thank you so much for having us here today, Debbie. I coach women with the picture perfect life.

Everything is in place, but they feel stuck and they just want to enjoy the lives that they have here right now. And that is what I'm talking on the summit. And I'm so excited about this topic, especially during this time of the year when you're just planning about our future and we just want to see what we're gonna do.

And then you guys are stuck on the what do I want? Right? You just don't know what you want and then you just get stuck with these little goals that you are now really excited about anyways. It's like losing weight or running or, but it's just like goals that you know you're not passionate about. But I am so excited to teach you how to actually figure out and discover what you truly want for 2023, just to make it different than 2022 was.

Debbie: Yeah, I think we're all guilty of just picking goals and resolutions that are kind of like rinse and repeat and we never actually accomplish 'em. Right? So, yeah, that's gonna be your approach to help people really figure out, and I think all of our really, everybody's looking to inspire women to do bigger and better things in their life in 2023.

So thank you for that. Tina, introduce yourself. Tell us who you coach, what you do, and a little bit about your business.

Tina: Yeah, I'm excited to be here today, Debbie. Thank you. You're welcome. I'm Tina Andrews and I work primarily with women in the midlife that are going through transitions where they're looking for renewed purpose and joy in life.

And a lot of that comes just from personal experience. I've been coaching for 10 plus years, but I'm just in the process of rebranding and shifting things a little bit and working. As women, we go through this ReLife awakening, midlife reawakening I call it. And so during the summit, I'm excited to talk about some tools that I use during my process, as tools or exercises to help us find out what we really need to feel fully alive.

I mean, we all have the basic human needs, but as far as realizing how we reach those needs, I find that when we're in alignment with what's most important with us, that we have a much more joyful and fulfilled life. 

Debbie: Well, that sounds amazing. I'm excited to hear everybody's talk, honestly. Two days of learning is going to be a great way to set everybody up for an amazing year.

All right, Stacy, take it away. 

Stacy: Hi, Debbie. Yeah, so I'm Stacy Bahnsen and I coach midlife women on how to pretty much that they can reinvent themselves at any age. You know, create a fulfilling life just to look forward to every day without the fear that it's too late.

I feel like you know me, I went through this transition myself at 49 and I'm not 49 anymore, but when I did, I was like, oh no, like what's next? I felt like the days blend into the weeks into the months, and I was like, just existing. And I decided that that's just not how I was gonna live anymore. And so I made some, you know, I actually hired a coach myself and just learned to live more of a, you know, a deliberate life and to make choices that I wanted to, create a future that I looked forward to versus just kind of existing cuz I didn't know what was next.

But it's true though, at any age we can just decide what's next and it takes a lot of mindset work and a lot of thought work to create the confidence to live into that. But it really can, you really can have a life full of joy and look forward to every day again, so.

Debbie: Yeah, so all the ladies that are on this podcast, for those of you listening, are all kind of talking about some similar themes for women. They all come from their own personal experience. They have some different types of certifications and different coaching experience. I will say, we are gonna have several different types of conversations at the summit. We'll be doing a podcast coming up on health and wellness.

We'll have several speakers on that. We also have a group of speakers that are gonna be talking about family kind of things, whether we're talking about coaching for your kids or preparing to take care of your loved ones, your aging loved ones. So we're gonna be having all the topics, but today we're just focused mostly on women.

So, Laura, go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us who you coach. 

Laura: Sure. Hi, I'm Laura McGill and the name of my company is Expand Your Possibilities, and where that came from was, I was stuck in a career for many decades and I just felt very unfulfilled, burnt out, and was taking care of everyone else's needs, but myself, right?

Taking care of my boss and my kids, and everybody but me and just felt like I needed a change. So I hired a coach and she really helped me expand my possibilities and taught me to slow down and stop doing so much and to be more. So, the insights I have from working with many women is that, yeah, we just say yes to everyone else and kind of ignore our own desires and needs and just leave ourselves feeling empty.

So what you're gonna learn today, or you know, in the summit from me, is how to say yes to yourself and how to be more self-compassionate. ‘Cause what we do is as well, when we don't, you know, meet up to these perfectionist kind of responsibilities, doing it all and doing it all well, that we tend to, you know, not be so kind to ourselves.

So we're gonna learn to be a little bit more self-compassionate and to see how that can really help us say yes to ourselves and achieve our goals. 

Debbie: Oh. So I wanna tell you, this sounds so exciting. The idea of this summit came to me for, you know, those of you guys who are wondering what this is all about.

I thought there's so many women that don't understand coaching. we here all understand coaching because we all hired coaches and that brought us to this place. But so many people could, gosh, benefit from coaching. In fact, I think everybody needs a coach, at least one coach, right? So I wanna have you guys that are listening to have an opportunity to be able to see, just have a glimpse of what each one of these ladies' specialties are.

Have a glimpse into what it would look like to make that particular shift in your life. So, Aida, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us who you coach. 

Aida: My name is Aida Makonnen Lopez, and I am the midlife upgrade coach for women. My coaching business is Aida Life Coaching. You can find me at aidalifecoaching.com.

And for the summit, I'll be talking about how to find joy, health and happiness in midlife. You know, there's this perception that midlife could be anywhere from 40 to 65. I'm right in the middle of it. I'm 55, and so I'm very passionate about helping other women, you know, discover that having a midlife crisis isn't you know, it's not like that's what everyone has to go through.

It can actually be the next best chapter in your life. So I really want women to find the joy, health and happiness midlife, improve their relationships, feel better about whether they have a career or if they wanna start a new business. it's just the beginning. 

Debbie: Yeah. So, so good. All right. I'd love to go around now and I would like to hear from each of you, maybe like a key takeaway that they would have, you know, a thought, a change, a shift that they walk away with after listening to you from your summit workshop. Thais, you wanna start?

Thais: Yes. So one of the concepts that I love the most in the whole life coaching industry, you know, cuz I talked about this a lot, it's the whole future self, right?

How can you create that person that you want to become? but we will discover together that it's not something outside of you that you just form in your mind. Yes, you do use your imagination, but then it's written new and you get to reach that to make it real in your life right now.

but we can't make that real until you discover what it is that you want. Mm-hmm. So that's a little bit of the teaser. It's not just setting up a goal. It's so much deeper than that. It's really setting up who you want to be and become in this new year.

Debbie: Ah, I love it. That sounds amazing.

Tina, how about you? You wanna share a little bit about what somebody could expect to take away when they meet with you?

Tina: Yeah. Well on the summit, I'll be talking about the six human needs. It's a concept from Tony Robbins and it's something that was really integral in my life, was digging down into that.

So I'll just be sharing the concepts. So with the six human needs, we can meet them in a positive or an empowering way, or a disempowering way. And when we start to understand why we're doing something with our behaviors, it changes the whole game. We can see things through a different lens.

And for me and for a lot of the women I've worked with, they've just had aha moments like, oh, this is why I've always been drawn to this, or this is why I keep repeating these patterns cuz it's meeting so many of these needs and we can look at different ways of meeting those needs. So it's just kind of an eye-opening, a glimpse into this process to see how you might look at life through the little different lens and how you could make some shifts in the new year.

Debbie: So you might be able to better understand if you had a bad habit that you wanna break as part of your goals for the new year. Mm-hmm. , you might have a better idea is what you're saying, about that through the talk that you're gonna. You know, be explaining the six human needs to us.Correct? Yeah. Oh, that's good. All right. Okay. Stacy, you're on. 

Stacy: Yeah, what I'm gonna, pretty much teach everybody is that you don't have to wait for until life isn't hard anymore, until you decide to be happy. That you will find out a lot of times everyone wants to just change their actions, hence, like, I know one of the ladies mentioned the New Year's resolutions and all that kind of thing. But it really is just changing your mindset about what your life currently looks like and what it can look like. We all wanna go straight to the action list versus, creating a new way of thinking about our life.

And once you learn how to create a new way of thinking, you're gonna just have so much clarity about like, who you are, what you think about yourself, what you believe, what your purpose is, and what your future really looks like. So in an all-encompassing kind of way, it's as simple and as difficult as that.

But it really is just a shift in your mindset that can then create the actions that you're looking for to have a new version of yourself. 

Debbie: All right. And you're helping women, kind of reinvent themselves. Mm-hmm.

Stacy: Yeah. and a lot of times we think that we have to throw away the current us to have this new us, but you could be actually really happy in your life where you are now with just a couple little things that you're not fulfilled with.

And a lot of times, you know, in midlife, our children have graduated, it's me and my husband now, or something of nature and like, what's left? Like, what's next for me and myself. So all the things that I used to believe about myself I might not believe anymore, because I've outgrown those thoughts or something.

So in reinventing yourself, you're almost thinking like, this is a thought. Do I still wanna think it or don't I wanna think it? And just questioning that is enough and saying, yeah, you know, I really do still wanna think this, or, no, I don't wanna think this anymore. And then we can move forward, you know, fairly quickly to say what do we wanna think and believe about ourselves and what do we want this life to look like?

so it's just a matter of taking the old thoughts, just kind of looking at 'em and deciding if it's something we wanna continue with and if it isn't, what else can we, you know, kind of do and think instead about certain topics? 

Debbie: One of the great things about coaching that has been a takeaway for me in my own growth through coaching is just the awareness that all of you guys are gonna bring to people.

That they do have some options to decide to think something different. Mm-hmm. , like it can be as simple as that. that you can choose to think anything you want really, but we don't spend enough time, I think, as women to sit down and really give ourselves the time to think through those things. But each of you, in your talks, of course, we're gonna walk people through some questions that they could, you know, answer themselves to be able to make some changes. So thank you, Stacy.

All right. Laura, how about you? What would you hope for somebody to have as a takeaway? I know your story is good, so what's your takeaway that you want somebody to have, after they meet with you at the summit? Well, what you just said is a great segue into what I was going to say, and that's that, power of awareness.

Laura: So really instead of just subconsciously thinking thoughts that self-sabotage our efforts. And saying yes to ourselves, to really just have that awareness of what I am thinking and having the power to choose thoughts that are kinder and more compassionate. And that will compel us to continue to, you know, say yes to our own health or our own wellbeing, or our own, you know, passions and desires.

So, as an example, and we'll do an exercise to help bring this out of them. But just as an example, I had, a client who was just dedicated her life to her career and law, but just is miserable and really wants to get out and do something much more creative, entrepreneurial.

And I asked her why she thinks she's stuck. And she said, well, I'm just, I'm too old. It's too late and I'm too old. And I said, aha, it's that thought that is stopping you from moving forward. So, we talked about it and I was like, is it true? And she discovered that there was a better thought for her that would be much more self-compassionate and help propel her forward.

So she's like, you know what? After she thought about it for a while, she said, you know, I could really bring more value to the world. And with that shift, she's now pursuing her dreams. So there's an example. 

Debbie: Oh my gosh, like coaching, in a way it is like you almost hold up a mirror in front of somebody and are able to help them see things that they could not see before sometimes that are such small shifts that can create such big, big, meaningful changes in somebody's lives. So, that's exciting. All right. Aida, you're up next. Tell us what you hope for somebody to, kind of take away from your talk at the summit. 

Aida: Well, in terms of a little tidbit teaser, I did quite a bit of research in preparation for the summit on women in midlife.

And what I found that found fascinating is that the female brain actually gets stronger and better in midlife and beyond. And another interesting fact is that women over 50 start more businesses than any other age group. Three things I'm gonna touch on too that I hope people take away from the summit is, you know, there's kind of three main areas.

So it's about engaging in your life. You know, choosing where you invest your energy intentionally. Another interesting subject that I studied was that there was a 20 year study done measuring all areas of wellbeing in women in midlife.

And they found that choosing purpose over happiness was the way to go. Sometimes we're always looking for happiness in our lives, but that can backfire. but choosing a purpose rarely fails. So it means figuring out your purpose in life, given your unique set of talents and capacity. So, very similar to what Tina, Laura, and Stacy said.

And, to go back to what Stacy mentioned about, your thinking and your thoughts, like what do you wanna keep? What's serving you? What's not serving you anymore? . And one of the analogies that I came across that I really liked is it's like cleaning your house. so you go through each room in your house and you look at what thoughts are there and decide, is this serving me? And you can move forward from there.

Debbie: So, so good All right. Does anybody wanna add anything that we should, temp somebody with? you guys are welcome to just speak up. Anything else you want somebody to know about your talk? I do wanna let you know that I will include all of the coaches' contact information, their websites, and social media in the show notes.

Because you could start your journey to improving your life today and not wait until we have the summit. You could give yourself that gift right now. So does anybody wanna add anything else as far as what you're gonna cover or what you wanna tease or tempt somebody with?

Aida: So my goal is to, you know, people look at midlife as it's a flyover heading to the end of life. And that midlife is a crisis, but it's actually a time of renewal. And, you know, I wanna encourage women to tell themselves that they are in a renewal, not a crisis. they're not in a prolonged stall, they're just shifting gears.

And I want women to be excited and truly believe that they have the power to create their next best chapter. And now is the time. So don't waste another moment.

Debbie: Yeah. So good. I wanna mention, you know, we're all kind of talking right here about women and improving women's lives. You're talking about being over 50.

Thais got younger kids at home, Laura's got younger kids at home. We're gonna be covering topics that support women who have kind of families in all ranges. Does anybody else want to add to what you're gonna be talking about at the summit or what you want women to know today?

Laura: There's a quote, and I think it really encapsulates what I'm trained to help women do. and it's, as you grow older, you'll discover that you have two hands. One for helping yourself and the other for helping others. and that's by Maya Angelo and I just think that, you know, in the summit, I'm gonna give you permission to say yes to yourselves because by spreading yourself too thin, you're not helping anybody. And you'll be much better service to others if you serve yourself first, right? So you gotta fill your own cup. And in the summit, I will give you that permission. And your life is gonna be better balanced, more healthy and  fulfilling as a result.

Debbie: Oh wow. Alright, Thais, go for it. 

Thais: I was just going to say that, we've been working on this summit for a few weeks now and I am always so impressed with what each coach has to bring.

All of us here, we have done the work for ourselves and you continue to do. And just seeing the progress of the first ideas, what we had and what we have right now, even listening to all of them speaking about this right now, it's just so exciting. And I am super excited for the summit.

I think it's gonna be phenomenal. women all over the world are coming and it's gonna be very fun and fulfilling and exciting and yes, I'm just very happy to be here with this group and be a part  of the summit. 

Debbie: Oh my gosh, I'm excited too. So I wanna shift gears just a little bit and I wanna talk about the work that we have done.

So I know if you're listening to this podcast, it's likely that you're a coach and that you're here because you're working on building a business, a coaching business. And so that's what these ladies are doing too. And I'll just give you a quick backstory that when I was thinking about these women growing their businesses, I had two objectives in mind and one was, how do I get them in front of more people?

And how do we also help those people understand the benefits of coaching? Now we do that through the copywriting that we do and the marketing that we do. You know, email and workshops and social media, all of that that we work on when we do the work inside the business building boutique. But my thought was this summit was a great opportunity for you guys as my clients to really hone your message to get very clear about that, but also to give an opportunity for women to just have a glimpse into what coaching with each of you could be like. So, do you guys wanna talk a little bit about the kind of the process of pulling, we've been hard at it, I'll tell you that. pulling your talk together or how you decided and wanna share any details with anybody who is, you know, thinking about growing their business, kind of what this has been like.

Laura: I have to say that there was a lot of topics I felt like I could have spoken about, right? It's so vast, but in talking to this group and introducing the different ideas that were possible for the summit, they really as being great coaches, honed in on when my inflection changed and my body language changed, and how I was really passionate about one particular topic.

And that was interesting to me because you know, that's what coaches do, right? We notice things, we observe things, and we hold up that mirror that you were talking about. So that was insightful to me that, you know, they were able to do that for me and that's what we do for other people. And that really helped me, you know, pull together what I was going to do for the summit. 

Debbie: That's interesting because I should share that we had lots of extra coaching sessions with the summit speakers, and what Lori's talking about is that we met together and we had, gosh, a two or three hour discussion about what our anticipated topics would be.

And we all wanted to be able to provide a variety of topics from different points of view. And everybody was so good at noticing like, oh yeah, that's the best topic that people want to hear about. Or that's, like you said, Laura, the best topic for you to share. So, it's been a challenging and exciting process with a lot of extra work.

So, you guys have all written your workshops, done your speeches really thought through exactly. Aida, it sounds like you've done a lot of research. Yes. fascinating. Learning about myself. learning about yourself. That's right. That's right. anybody else wanna share about what it's been like to put the talk together, and also before I let you talk, what you think you will do with this talk that you now have created to build your business further in the future.

Thais:  I think it's interesting, Debbie, when we start working with you, one of the things that you teach us is to really hone in the message and see what you want to be knowing Right? As life coaches, we can coach in anything really.

So it's like Laura was just saying, it's hard for you to get one topic and say, okay, I'll go with this you know, small topic and that's all we're gonna talk about because we have so many ideas. We just wanna expand everything. And this specific talk, I feel like it was really well designed to see what I want to always talk about.

Mm-hmm. , right? So I can use this talk right now, anywhere I can go to podcasts, I can go to Instagram lives with peers and write to different coaches. And I know the message that I have to share. I don't need to keep coming up with new ideas. In this topic, it's the whole, right? It's everything that I talk about, but it's the main point.

 and I think that was very helpful that now I know I have already something that I can present in different summits, I can present to other coaches. it just made it all so much easier, even to be known as someone, like I really want to be known as the future self coach, right? So how can I do that? It's presenting the same message over and over again.

Debbie: Yeah. Yeah. Getting better and better at your message every time you do it too. So, yeah. Right. Stacy? 

Stacy: Yeah, I think the one thing I wanted to mention that, what we all are in this industry for is because we really, truly do wanna help people.

And we know that based on our experiences, that you don't have to live like this anymore, whatever like this means to you. And it was interesting as we're talking, Debbie did keep reminding us and we kept reminding each other and saying, what is it that our audience really needs? And what can we do to truly authentically help women across the board in any aspect of their life?

And, kind of hone in on that so that we all do, cuz everyone is so, I think very just intelligent and really does want to offer as much as of themselves as they possibly can. Like how can we all kind of differentiate our message a little bit, but then, you know, make sure our audience has some takeaways that they can learn from it just by attending the summit.

And, I personally would love to work with each one of the women and have them coach me all day long, but those are all so good , and that's something I learned too. But Debbie, I think it's great as a team when we are on that call and everyone, it's truly just helping each other to get to the end result.

But you keep us, you know, on task and on point and make sure that, you know, it's very a supportive environment to work with. So, yeah.

Debbie: Thank you. I think that, I mean, for sure we all want the listeners to leave the summit and be empowered with tools and ideas and awareness and just a new perspective to take Laura's word, what's possible for you in 2023? Tina, did you wanna add?

Tina: Yeah, I was just gonna say, what a great opportunity this has been. One, I love collaborating with others and to be able to hear what the other women are speaking about. And all's been great.

And also putting on a summit like this is a huge undertaking. And I know you've done so much work, but it's been like a plug and play right? As far as knowing the content and how to run through that and the marketing and all the different pieces. So not only are we coming out with a signature talk, but we're also learning a lot along the way with all the pieces of the puzzle that you have to put into effect to pull off something like this. So it's been a great learning experience for me and I appreciate all that you've done to put it together. 

Debbie: Well, thank you. I am going to have, by the way, since this is a podcast you're listening to in January, I'm gonna do a recap of this summit and the key takeaways from a business point of view. But I'm also going to be having a real, in-depth, time with my clients to really let them see exactly what I did to put this together. We're gonna put all of the marketing details together so that everybody here that I work with can have the same opportunity to go and do this in their business too.

So, this summit format or workshop or whatever it's going to be in your business, you know, when we work together, this'll be something for sure going forward that everybody can benefit from. And just knowing how to do a signature talk. I mean, it's like once you do it one time, now you can do it again.

But sometimes you just need that starting point. So I appreciate every one of you. Does anyone wanna add anything before we wrap it up today? Alright, I will see you guys all January 13th and 14th at our summit. It is going at a fast pace you guys. I'm just gonna tell you, these ladies have 30 minutes to talk and they're gonna give you their best in 30 minutes.

We are gonna have time for you guys to get questions answered and to have some open coaching. So I want you to be there all day long ready to take notes both on Friday and Saturday, the 13th and 14th of January. So go register right now, designlivethrive.com. You guys, everyone, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for being amazing. And I'll see you all very soon. 

Debbie: Okay ladies, that is it for today. Before we go, I want to invite you to head over to debbieshadid.com. I have this incredible Canva training, specifically designed for life coaches where I'm gonna teach you how to use Canva to create beautiful graphics to market your life coaching. All right. Have an amazing week.

I'll talk to you very soon. Bye bye.