Bill: Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us on episode number one of our podcast. My name is Bill Tierney. I'm a results coach and an IFS practitioner, and my partner is

Marty: I'm Martin Kettlehut and I am a business coach

Bill: and this is the Not Your Typical Life Coaching Podcast. Marty, you and I have known each other, I wanna say about seven years now.

Bill: Does that sound about right?

Marty: That sounds about right. I don't know exactly, but that's about right.

Bill: Yeah. Marty and I have been in the same mastermind group on a that meets on Friday mornings, and we've been meeting almost every single Friday morning since I think 2015 or so, 2016, somewhere in there, and off and in between and off and in between.

Bill: We actually finally met in person last year in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That's right. Yeah. Which was just more of a central location for both Marty and I and the other three coaches that meet on Friday mornings with us. And I think that the viewer listener is gonna have an opportunity to hear from Paula and Nora and Geoff as well in future episodes.

Bill: I think so too. All right, so today we're talking about the five common misconceptions about life coaching. Little background on why do we wanna talk about this.

Marty: They're probably more than five, but we're focusing on these five.

Bill: There's a ton more than five. I'm sure. These are just the five that we

Bill: think are probably pretty common to most folks. I

Marty: hear them more often. Yes.

Bill: Yeah. Let's just name them first and then let's go back and talk about each one for a few minutes. There is one. One common misconception is that life coaching is just like therapy. Another one that number two, let's call number two, is that there needs to be something wrong in order for you to need life coaching.

Bill: That's right. Number three. Coaches, life coaches make their clients do what their clients don't wanna do. That's how they get 'em to get results. Number four, life coaching is not affordable. And then number five, all coaches are the same. Look, you know you've got glasses. I'm bald. You're bald.

Bill: I've got glasses. Oh wait, I shaved.

Marty: We're both wearing blue shirts.

Bill: So you wanna take on, it's like therapy first, or shall I do that one?

Marty: I think you've given this a lot of thought, and you can tell your audience why too. You've given this a lot of thought because, and so let me ask you just about that.

Marty: If somebody comes to you, what's the first thing you would, how do you distinguish those two right off the bat therapy versus

Bill: coaching? What I say is that therapy is present and past focused, and life coaching is present and future focused. Now having said that there is, there's a gray area you might see in my nameplate there.

Bill: I'm Bill Tierney. I'm a results coach and an IFS practitioner. I'm a certified IFS practitioner, which means that I use the internal family systems therapy model. Even though I'm not a therapist I was trained in the IFS therapy model and so I was trained right alongside of therapist and learned a lot more about therapist and therapy and really had to work hard to figure out what is the difference between life coaching and therapy, because a couple years after I came outta my training, I was doing probably something that looked a lot more like therapy and a lot less like life coaching.

Bill: And gradually evolved back into life coaching. And here was the biggest difference that I noticed prior to being trained in the IFS model. I was helping people to achieve results by identifying objectives identifying measurements for those objectives, and then talking about. What could, what was getting in the way of clients getting the results that they wanted already.

Bill: Then I learned the therapy model and began going into the past using IFS and it was, while it was really effective in healing and resolving lifelong wounds I noticed with my clients that there wasn't a lot of, for forward progress. So just in the last couple of years, I've shifted back in the direction of let's look at results.

Bill: That's the primary focus and the way to measure how we're doing in life coaching and let's use the IFS therapy model to help people when they get stuck. So it's, I'm back to, let's look at what's happening presently and let's look at what you'd like the future to look like and how can I help you get there?

Bill: Whereas a therapist might look at, let's look at what's happening now and let's look at what's happened in the past that creates the 'now' that you're experiencing. And see if we can make that better, like managed suffering in therapy would be another way to, to look at it and manage possibility would be a way to look at what coaching is.

Marty: Interesting. Yeah. Cuz it seems like once you do get the past managed, there's going to be an almost automatic thrust forward into okay, now what's possible now that I don't have to carry that baggage around?

Bill: Yes. But interestingly, if there's not an intention, to do that, then it's very easy to stay in the next thing to heal about the past.

Bill: Think of it this way, I'm 68 years old. I didn't discover IFS until seven years ago, so when I was 60, 61 years old. Up to that point, I had continued to accumulate emotional wounds. In my life at a much slower pace. I've been sober now for over 40 years. I've been doing a lot less damage in my life and making a lot better choices.

Bill: But still, I've been packing around childhood wounds from a traumatic, violent, alcoholic parents childhood. And never have really healed any of that. So every single day of my life, for x number of years, I was experiencing life through the lens formed by parts of me that made up. What was true in the world.

Bill: But that lens was really distorted by that violence that I was raised around and the alcoholism that I was raised around. And the really twisted ideas, the legacy ideas that I was handed and then took with me into my adult life. Now I start going to therapy. And the therapy's very effective.

Bill: And I'm dealing with one part of me at a time that took on the pain or the fear or the misinformed ideas from the past. And still carries them into the present moment. I can heal one part at a time. And how many hundreds, maybe thousands of parts of me got wounded along the way. So at some point, If I'm not, if I don't have an intention for why am I healing in the first place? Is it just so that I can feel better and manage my suffering? That's a great reason to go to therapy. Absolutely. But in life coaching, what I wanna do is have an intention of healing so as to experience the possibility of my, of the life I wanna be living.

Bill: Got it. Yeah.

Marty: Yeah, that's a really, I think you've distinguished it really well. Is there any, I mean on the, maybe some people might wanna know, like on the surface, is it like the same that you spend an hour with some, somebody talking and you are the action partner in the partnership?

Marty: The cost. Is it similar?

Bill: Good therapy. Yeah. Oh so much of therapy is covered by insurance. Now I know a lot of therapists are trying to get away from that because insurance companies are trying to dictate how they do therapy and dictate how much they can charge for therapy and how much they can't charge for therapy.

Bill: And so it's be becoming more and more difficult to do two things. This is what I'm getting from some therapists that I've talked to to make a profit in their business. And to be effective as a therapist with their clients because insurance companies are dictating. I see. How they do therapy and how much they can get paid for doing therapy.

Bill: The truth is therapy is as valuable as life coaching and in some cases even more valuable than life coaching. However the way the money works right now, mostly because of insurance life coaches make more than therapists do. Life coaches charge more than therapists do, and the people that can hire life coaches are people who both are in a financial position to be able to afford to do that.

Bill: And secondly, recognize the value of having someone help them change their perspective from focusing on the suffering that they're experiencing, to focusing on what's possible if they could heal that suffering. Got it. Got

Marty: it. Great. I think that gives people lot to chewing right

Bill: there. Why don't we move on then to the next topic and have, let's have you talk about it there.

Bill: There needs to be something wrong if you're gonna hire a life coach.

Marty: Yeah I've often gotten that impression or heard people actually say that. And. I can see why you would have that impression. Like every, I'm living my life. I'm a perfectly normal, healthy, capable person. Why would I ever go to a coach if there wasn't something wrong?

Marty: One of the easiest ways I think to distinguish why you might go to a coach is if you wanted to bust out of that, ordinariness that life. If you set a goal to accomplish something that you never accomplished before. Not that there's anything wrong, but why not?

Marty: Why not build an extension on the house. That's not a good example cuz you go to a contractor for that. But let's say you just wanted to have much more vibrant relationships or that you could make a lot more money than you currently do, and it just, but how do you get to that place?

Marty: So you might just have a goal that takes you beyond what has been the norm in your life. And there are three things mainly I see that the coach brings to that. And one is a structure. A lot of times we have like a project we're working on and it's, if there's time on Saturday you get to it, but maybe you're going in the wrong direction and you find that out three weeks later.

Marty: A coach helps you get focused in the right direction, gives you a weekly. Structure and steps to take. And secondly, hold you accountable to doing that so you don't fall off your path, but you stay with it. Even if there's trouble along the way, then there's somebody to handle that with.

Marty: So that you're, the accountability piece is really important. And finally, The third piece a coach is gonna make sure to help you find a, an easeful and joyous way to get this project off the ground and accomplish rather than, sometimes we, when we don't have any other input, we just assume it's got, this must be the way to do this.

Marty: And, but it's treacherous and or hard. And so I think structure, accountability and affinity for the project. That goes way beyond your norm is a big part of what the coach brings, even if there's

Bill: nothing wrong. Yeah, exactly. Would you agree if the client shows up in a coaching session with the context there's something wrong with me that I have this challenge that I need to ask for help around?

Bill: Coach can help with that as well.

Marty: Absolutely. That, yeah. Exactly. I think that's one of the main things that I, if I look back on all the coaching relationships I've had, usually that's what's in the way is there's some assumption that there's something wrong. It's like being in disagreement with what is, and once, once you dismantle that, unpack that, you start to see oh, here's the way forward.

Bill: Yeah. Disagreement with what is. Or would you would you include in that disagreement with what is an unawareness of what it actually is?

Marty: Yes. There's two sides of the same

Bill: coin I say. So I, for example, I might believe that I'm not capable of overcoming this particular challenge that I brought to life coaching.

Bill: That would be an assumption that would have me misaligned with what is, because. What I've learned about not only myself, but every single one of my clients over the last 12 years, is that we are all capable far beyond what we believe we are. Truly. And so that misalignment with that reality what I've experienced a lot of my clients bring in to coaching. Exactly. Anything else you wanna say about that? That there needs to be something wrong.

Marty: No, I think that's

Bill: good. Okay. So the third common misconception that you and I decided we wanted to talk about today was that coaches make their clients do things that they don't wanna do.

Bill: And that was one of the ones that I came up with. So I'd love to talk about that a little bit. Okay. Yeah.

Marty: Has it, have you actually experienced that where somebody said, you're gonna make me do stuff I don't wanna do?

Bill: Yes. Yes. I've had a lot of clients that come to me and say, okay, I'm willing, Maya Copa.

Bill: And they, it's almost like they turn their backs and are waiting for me to crack a whip on them so that they can get motivated and do some work. And that just is not sustainable. It's just not a sustainable way to, to help people, in my opinion. I know that there are actual coaches out there that do that and we're gonna talk about all coaches are the same as the fifth misconception.

Bill: So I'll leave that part of this along. But when I was still a mortgage loan officer. And had the idea that I might just wanna be a therapist. By then I was already 55 years old and still had all of an high school education for my my higher education had reached all the way to grade 12 and I graduated.

Bill: Of course to be a therapist, you need a lot more education than that. I'd never gone to college and so I thought I'm a mortgage loan officer, I can do some part-time school and yeah sure. It'll take me till I'm 70 to become a therapist, but I think I wanna do that. There was something in me saying, I need to be working with people.

Bill: I really want to be able to help people. I think a lot of that came from my Alcoholism recovery and 12 step program where I was taught that you do service work and because I sponsored so many people in the 12 Step program and enjoyed that so much, I thought I really should just be doing that for a living as a therapist.

Bill: I see. So I went to a couple of quarters of school and spent a bunch of money. Loved it. I loved being in school. I loved learning, and I loved the idea of becoming a therapist. However I couldn't figure out a way to both pay for school without going into further debt and continue to support myself.

Bill: Making a living as a mortgage loan officer, it was just splitting my attention way too much. My focus. So I was complaining about how disappointed I was that I wasn't gonna be able to continue that with a friend. Her name is Billy. And Billy said, oh, you should talk to my life coach Carlos.

Bill: And I said, why? Why would I wanna talk to your life coach Carlos, and what does that have to do with me being disappointed that I'm not gonna be able to go to school anymore? And she said you just need to talk with him. Like Carlos is amazing. Okay, great. And so I hoped that she would just forget about it.

Bill: About two weeks later, she calls me up, did you call, did you talk to Carlos? And I said, no, I don't wanna talk to Carlos. Why would I talk to Carlos?

Bill: So she said, did you talk to your friend Carlos, or to my friend Carlos? And I said, no, I, why would I talk to Carlos? Why do you think he's so great? Why do you go to Carlos? And she said, because he makes me do what I don't want to do. Ah, there it is. I thought that's it. I will never hire a life coach. There was, I don't want I don't want somebody telling me what to do, what I don't wanna do, and I certainly don't wanna pay somebody to tell me what I don't wanna do.

Bill: Sounds like masochism. And since then I've learned that a lot of people believe that's what's gonna happen. They're gonna go to life coaching and they're gonna say, All right. I want to make more money. I wanna get a better job. I wanna improve my relationship. I want to do a better job at running my life.

Bill: Now tell me how to do it. The coach is gonna say you need to do this, and this, and then I'm gonna write down what you say you're gonna do, and then I'm gonna beat you up next week when you come back and say that you didn't do it, the

Marty: old cookie cutter approach, everybody just

Bill: do what I say.

Bill: Exactly. Yeah. And so I was delighted when I finally spoke with Carlos and learned that and by the way, I'm so and ever will always be grateful to Carlos for setting the standard of. What a good coach should do and who a good coach should be. And Carlos, he didn't spend a lot of time explaining anything to me.

Bill: I could just tell by the way he was talking with me that I was gonna be encouraged to be myself. And that was good enough. Coaches. Yeah. Yes. There are coaches out there that make their clients do what they don't want to do and there's a lot of 'em and there's a lot of 'em that charge a lot of money to do that, that actually works for some clients.

Bill: That's not my style of coaching. I happen to know that's not your style of coaching. But I do instead, as I get really curious with clients about what it is that they want. And then I help them get curious about what would stop them from actually getting that. Yeah. And that's a much different approach.

Bill: Very

Marty: different. Yeah. There's a certain similarity to the last misconception that there has to be something wrong that you would make, you go to a coach to this one, I'm gonna have to do something I don't wanna do. It's that again, it's that very thought. That is in the way that you're gonna have to do something you don't have to do to achieve the thing that you want.

Marty: Or, just like in the last one, there's something wrong and you don't want there to be anything wrong to or to admit that there's anything wrong. And so it's that very thought that it, that keeps you from achieving. And once that gets. Seen with under the microscope of coaching, then you are like, oh yeah I could do this a different way.

Marty: Let's find, or let's find a different way, to achieve the same thing.

Bill: Yeah. You wanna talk about the next one, which

Bill: is that life coaching is unaffordable?

Marty: Yeah. I would be happy to so, two things at the outset of talking about this, and I'd love to get your input too. One is that it's best to think of this as an investment as opposed to I'm like, you pay for a product or a service and you get that product or service, and that's the end of the exchange.

Marty: Investing in coaching, like you said, it's investing in having your true Self come out from under all the years of conditioning and all of the disempowering conversations that you've picked up in your head and that you've been racing around with it. This is an investment of that.

Marty: That's priceless. That's what I have found myself in getting coached, is that I would've paid three, four times as much as I paid for it. Now that I see how much more in my own skin and at home in this world I am and able to do what I want to do. So first of all, it's an investment, not like a flat fee.

Marty: You will get so much more out of it, and that's good to keep in mind in part because It might, look like your bank account's going down at first, but you're gonna be able to produce whatever you want out of coaching and so you'll pay that back to yourself and you'll be very happy that you made the investment.

Marty: It's priceless. So that's my first thing that I would say. What do you think

Bill: about this? As I listened to you say that I agree with everything that you said and one of the things that you said pointed to that there's gonna be a direct way to make up the money that you've spent money on coaching.

Bill: Yeah. By the money that you make. And that's not especially true unless money is gonna be your focus. For example, I very early in the conversation with the client will ask them, what is it that you hope working with me will help you achieve? And if their answer is, I wanna make more money, then I'm all about helping them put together whatever needs to happen in order for them to make that more money. A big part of that is understanding why. So you wanna make more money? Why? What if you made more money? What would that give you that you don't have now? And it's usually whatever that thing is that they're hoping money will give them, that's what they really want.

Bill: Of course. Much harder to measure. Happiness, joy, fulfillment, contentment, connection, and many of these other things they're hoping money is gonna give them. And most of my clients initially don't understand that's what they're hoping money will get them, they don't know that they're missing out on connection.

Bill: Or fulfillment or purpose or an opportunity to find purpose or to be generous. They don't know that until they go diving in deeper. Carlos, my first coach helped me to go in and understand myself in a way that I previously did not understand myself. So I guess my point is it's difficult many times to measure a return on the investment with life coaching.

Bill: Which is why it's so important, I believe, to set up measurements, ways to measure. What's typically not measurable. How do you measure happiness? How do you measure contentment and fulfillment? And then how do you put a price tag on that? One of, I remember with one of my clients, he had presented as I have anxiety and depression.

Bill: I'm highly functioning. People don't know at work when I show up that I have depression and anxiety because I'm highly functioning. I'm a leader where I work, people are shocked. People would be shocked if they found out I have depression and anxiety. And my question to him was, so if someone could hand you a pill, let's say that you could take and that would eliminate your depression and your anxiety, what would you be experiencing instead?

Bill: And we talked about that and explored that for a while, and then I asked him, so if you could have that, what would that be worth to you? I think he said something like 30 or $40,000. He'd be, he'd he said, there's no amount of money. I'd pay a hundred thousand dollars for that. And so the value of the quality of life when compared to the cost of life coaching, regardless of what it is, and we don't all charge the same amount.

Bill: It is up to the client themselves. Is it worth it? They, that's ultimately boils down to that the client needs to decide, if I could get what I really want with the help of a life coach, would it be worth what the life coaches asking me for to support me in getting that? Anything else you wanna say about that?

Marty: I recognize that I'm coming at this from business coaching point of view, so it money is usually a central measure. That, and so that's why my comment was coming from, but even if money isn't what you're measuring. You are gonna come out of life coaching in a much more powerful place, such that people are going to want to pay you more for whatever you already do.

Marty: And you're gonna, you're gonna have more freedom of expression in life in general, and you can command more. So even if that's not the goal, that it's something that will be possible for you out of coaching. So that's right. All of this is pointing to our last topic, which is that not all coaches are the same.

Bill: That's right. Something that gave me another idea, another thought that I'd actually like to at least put into the space, and that is that look at the other side of the money, what is it that I, Joe, potential client of a life coach have to do to get the money? That I now will hand off to my life coach who's gonna help me have the life that I want.

Bill: If what it is that I'm doing to get that money is draining me and fatiguing me and just sucking the life out of me. What if life coaching could help me to shift that? In whatever way it shifts typically. Typically, if it's gonna be sustainable, it's gonna shift from the inside out. In other words, how I view what it is that I do, that I get the money that I get, that I pay my life coach to get the life that I want.

Bill: What if the result of that life coaching is that I have the life that I want and I generate the money that I earn in a way that I love and enjoy, that fills me up, that energizes me. And is aligned with my purpose. That's a great deal. Doesn't matter how much money you're paying.

Bill: Exactly. That's a great deal. It's a good deal. And one more thing I wanna add to this is that I believe so much in life coaching that I have paid thousands and thousands of dollars for life coaching. And I believe in my own business, I believe in my industry, I believe in the value of life coaching.

Bill: And so I'm willing to pay. Premium for quality life coaching. The fifth common misconception is all coaches are the same.

Marty: Yeah. One distinction I would wanna make right from the very beginning about the, about different kinds of coaches is there's a lot of coaching that is about process. It's about

Marty: Maybe a cookie cutter approach I've got this system. If you just do this system it's guaranteed to give you what you want. And, but it's not actually, but you will go through the process. I know many people that have been to other coaches and didn't get what they wanted, but they went through the whole system.

Marty: And there's another way I'm trying to frame this another piece of it. It's and a lot of books fall into the same category, like self-help books. It's a process. It's a system and you just throw yourself into it and see what comes out. And that's one that's on the one side. And, but there, then there's another whole school of coaching, which sometimes goes by the name ontological, which is about the way you're being and how that makes such a difference, not only in the way you go about it, the process or system that you use, but in how it feels to be going through that.

Marty: And the results I would say are much enhanced because there's an enjoyment of the process or it's, or an alignment with who you are. Again, going back to being right. And this is a whole different school of coaching than I think a lot of people are aware of. And there are different, training programs for coaches that offer this kind of coaching.

Marty: But I know that both you and I are trained in the ontological approach and I think it's really important to be aware, am I choosing somebody who's gonna run me through a system? That they, that it is worked for them, or maybe a few other people or is this gonna be based on who I am and who I need to be?

Marty: Or want to be Right those are two very different approaches. Absolutely.

Bill: And lemme just toss in that there are many coaches that do both and I'm one of those, I do have a system I see. And but my system is designed with one clear objective, and that is to develop Self-leadership. Now that term means Self with a capital S is how the internal family systems model refers to true Self, who we authentically and truly are.

Bill: The idea is that who we authentically and truly are has access to resources and qualities that those, let's call it parts of ourselves that that ego that our strategies that we employ. The attitudes that we bring into the world by themselves without being connected to that true authentic Self, they just don't, we don't have access to those same qualities and resources.

Bill: So the goal is get to Self-leadership. Help the client to identify who they really are and begin to have the experience of, and tap into those resources and qualities so that they can dramatically increase their capacity for what they're capable of in life.

Marty: And I think the other thing about the, that kind of approach is that the results are more sustainable too.

Marty: Sometimes, you can do somebody's process and it'll work for a month or two, and then because it's not based in who you are, it's propped up for a short while, but it's not sustainable. And if it comes, like you said earlier, from the inside. That's right.

Marty: Then it's gonna be something based on what's infinitely and eternally true. And so it's gonna have a sustainability like nothing

Bill: else. Compared to possibly a strategy that's designed to manipulate a particular outcome for a temporary piece of time as long as you continue to pump the effort into it.

Bill: Exactly right. Yeah. The thing I've discovered about self and self-energy and self resources is that it's self-sustainable. That once I've tapped into who I authentically am, not only am I not drained, and not only do I have to continue to. Do I not have to continue to pump energy into it? It energizes me.

Bill: It's like a self-charging battery. It's incredible. We have talked about the five common misconceptions. This is episode one. Let's summarize. We talked about that. One of the common misconceptions is it's like therapy, and yes, in some ways it, it is, but life coaching and therapy are two completely different approaches to how to help a person.

Bill: And how what kind of help a person can expect to get. Both are very valuable and it's up to the therapist and the client and the life coach and the client to help determine what is most appropriate. And a good life coach is gonna say, you're probably more suited to therapy for a while to do some healing.

Bill: So you can get to the point where you can start tapping into that your true, authentic Self and into your true power. So that's number one. Number two was there needs to be something wrong. Give us just a brief summary about that. Marty, please. No. Yeah.

Marty: The answer is no, there doesn't, right? It might just be that you want take live to another level, as they say and the coach is gonna help bring structure to that, that you can rely on to produce the result.

Marty: Accountability. To hold you to staying in the process to till you get what you want and a way of going about it that has to be an enjoyable

Bill: process. I wanna toss out there that one of the episodes, Marty, you and I talked just before we hit record today, and we've got over 60 different topics and counting that there's to talk about.

Bill: And one of those topics is what I call compassionate accountability, which is dramatically different than shaming accountability. So it's like therapies of misconception. There needs to be something wrong as a misconception. Coaches make their clients do things they don't wanna do. No. A good life coach, in my opinion, will help the clients identify what they wanna do and understand why it is that they don't want to do what they think they have to do to get to the point where there's choice.

Bill: Where there's clarity and where, as you said earlier, who they are being as they attempt to overcome the challenge or achieve the objective is empowered.

Marty: I loved what you just said, that there's choice. That might be one of the cornerstones of coaching is, whether it's because something's wrong or whether it's because you have a project that takes you to another level.

Marty: The coach is always helping you generate more choices about what to do and how to do it, and that's, and we tend to fall into these tunnels of thinking and the coach is always gonna give you more choices and open things up for you.

Bill: Yeah. And reminds me another topic that we'll talk about in a later episode, and probably that episode will be called, 'I only do what I wanna do.'

Marty: Good. Yes. We also talked about whether coaching is affordable. The misconception being that I, I'm not gonna be able to afford that. And under, and in that, just to summarize what we said is first of all, this is an investment in being your true Self and it's priceless.

Bill: And then the final one is all coaches are the same. And I think the viewer listener probably can already tell that between you and I, Marty they would have a complete, they would have different experiences if you are their coach and if I were their coach. That's true. You and I obviously are not competing with each other.

Bill: There's plenty of clients to go around. There's, frankly, there's not enough good coaches to take care of all the clients that really deserve a good coach. I, I believe that, of course, it's up to the client to determine is this a good fit for me or not? Does this coach get me?

Bill: Does this coach actually resonate and understand where I'm coming from and what it is that I want and will their approach work to support me in getting what I want?

Marty: Implied in all of this is, shop, shop your coach. Have a session with several and see how, see what's gonna work best for

Bill: you.

Bill: Yeah, that's right. Thanks for joining us in episode number one. We'll look forward to seeing you again and the next episode. Thanks Marty. Thank you.