Coaching The Pros Like A Pro
Mastering how to run your business effectively is one thing, but mastering your mind is an equally important task to maintain success! As our subjective opinions on business matters can cloud judgment, it's important to get the insights of an objective third party to ensure that you make the best decisions for your business, your team and for you!
Recently, our CEO Stacy Jones sat down with Kim Ades, who is the President and Founder of Frame of Mind Coaching. The two had a great conversation about the best ways for a business owner to keep a clear mind and run their business at optimum efficiency. In this blog, Hollywood Branded examines how your mindset drives success, and how Frame of Mind coach, Kim Ades uses this concept to coach her clients and help them shift their thinking to yield successful results.
A Little More About Kim
Kim Ades is the president and founder of Frame of Mind Coaching, the founder of Journal Engine software, an author, a speaker, a coach, and a mom of five. With over 15 years of coaching many of North America's most successful leaders, she is recognized as an expert in the area of thought mastery and mental toughness, and has a very unique philosophy and corky coaching style that helps her clients learn to deal with core issues and shift their thinking in order to yield extraordinary results.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: Can you start off by telling everyone and our listeners how you got here today to be a thought leader coach.
Answer: I have been studying leadership for like over 30 years, and I know I don't look that old, but trust me, I've been studying leadership for a long time. Ever since I was in school, I did my master's degree, I was always interested in leadership. But I'll jump ahead and I'll say that the last business I owned, we used to build simulation based assessments, and the purpose of those assessments was to help companies make better hiring decisions. I was really, really interested in the question of, "What's the difference between top performers and everybody else? Do they have a special skill? Are they smarter? Do they have a better upbringing? What is it?" We ended up testing for a series of things, we tested for their IQ, we tested for personality traits, we tested for behaviors. One of the things we discovered as a result of testing so many people in so many different industries, at different levels of leadership, is that extraordinary performer share one thing in common, and that one thing overrides all else. And that is that these people have a much, much higher degree of emotional resilience.
So what does that actually mean? What is emotional resilience? We've heard the term a million times, but let's define it for a minute. Emotional resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity with greater speed and agility. That's the definition. I'll add an extra layer to it, and leverage the adversity, do something good with it, turn it into some kind of advantage. Fast forward to the point where I was running this company for 10 years. I ended up selling the company and I get recruited by a coaching company whose mandate it is to help people live extraordinary lives. I think, "Wow, that's for me. I want to do that," and I go, and I work for this company and I watch how they coach. Basically what they do is they have calls with their clients every two weeks, it's a half an hour call. They create a business plan with actionable steps, and their job is to hold people accountable to making sure they do all the things they need to get done. Except I thought to myself, "Something's wrong with this picture, doesn't make sense," because people know what to do they're not doing it, right? We know how to lose weight.
So what's up with that? What's the real issue here? I started to connect some dots and I realized that something's missing, it's that mental toughness, it's that emotional resilience, it's that internal fortitude that helps people take the actions they know they should be taking, but for whatever reason they don't or when they do the outcome terms turns out badly.
I said, "I want to work with people and really help them get past that stumbling block," And that's when I started framing my coaching. I said, "What if I could really get into the minds and hearts of the people I coach and understand what is getting in their way and help them dramatically boost up their emotional resilience so that they could reach their goals with ease." So here we are, 16 years later, I've been doing this for a while. I have a team of coaches and I could talk about coaching all day and all night, if you let me.
Question: How do you identify stumbling blocks? I mean, everyone has them, we all have goals, whether it's personal, it's weight loss, it's financial, it's that you want to eat better or it's that you want to make a million dollars, $5 million or whatever it might be. I know we self sabotage as a species, and we're really, really good at doing that, but why is that? Why do we create these stumbling blocks internally?
Answer: So what is a stumbling block? Where does that actually come from? A stumbling block happens when our thinking does not coincide with the goals we have. It's that simple. When there's something happening in our mental processing that doesn't align with the desires that we have. We get stuck when we have opposing beliefs to the goals we have. Just as a very simple example, I want to lose weight, but it's my son's birthday. So we take him out and my mind is like, it's his birthday, I'm supposed to celebrate, right?
I'm supposed to toast and have a drink in his honor. I'm supposed to have birthday cake because if I don't have birthday cake, I'm not fully engaged in that celebration, I'm kind of sitting out. You can see how those ideas, those beliefs oppose my goal. And we have that all the time, the issue is that we're not conscious of what those beliefs are. My job as a coach is to help people become really aware of how their thinking is interfering with their ability to take the actions that will help them reach their goals.
So how do we coach people? Because it's that digging in piece that's really important, right? How do we get to the heart of the matter? Basically the way we coach people is we do two really interesting things that's significantly different from most organizations. Number one is, so we have a coaching call once a week and we record every call, and we ask our clients to listen to the recording. Here's the cool part, is that when you hear yourself speak about matters that are personal and important to you, you learn to become an observer of yourself, and you learn how to pay attention to the words you use, the stories you tell, your emotional triggers, where you get trapped over and over and over again. A huge part of building this emotional resilience is learning to step aside from yourself and observe your reactions, your responses, your what matters to you, and where you get sucked in over and over and over and over again.
That's part A. And when you listen to the recording, not only do you get to observe yourself, you get to hear all the stuff you miss in the first round of coaching. It's like getting coached twice. The second thing we do is ask our clients to journal in a private and secure online journal with their coach. What happens is at the beginning of the week, they get a journaling question or a prompt, and they start to journal. Their journal goes back to their coach who then reads in response to their journal with questions, with inquiries, with challenges, with comments. The goal is to go as deep as possible, to really understand how a person is wired and understand what they believe to be true about all subjects so that we can get a good grasp about why they're behaving the way they are behaving and why they're experiencing what they're experiencing. If they're not satisfied professionally, personally, in their relationships, there's a reason. And while they may not have control over all elements, they do have control over themselves. And our goal is to hand over control of themselves to them.
Question: So how do you proceed?
Answer: What happens is every call usually in coaching, right? Like you've heard about coaching experiences where you get on the call and the coach says to the client, "So what do you want to talk about today? What's on your agenda?" We don't really have that approach because when people are journaling, we can quickly identify the things that need to be addressed. We come to the call and we say, "We have an agenda. We want to talk about this, this, this, and this that showed up in your journals this week. Is there anything you want to add to that?"
In our coaching experience, the coach is really leading the process of discovery, and uncovering the fundamental beliefs that are getting in the way of a person's ability to thrive, to succeed, to reach their goals. On those calls, we go in, it's not like we have to catch up like, "What happened this week?" We're already up to date. Those calls are super powerful and they're moving someone ahead at a very, very rapid pace. What I have found is like people come in and they expect X let's say, and they get X plus Y plus Z, plus A, plus B, they get so more because they don't know what's there.
Question: Are there certain topics that you find that come up in the business community just over and over that you hear frequently?
Answer: I mean, we see people not firing quickly. Why? Because they have a belief, "Well, I won't find another person. Well, this person has a family. Well, what's it going to do to the rest of the morale? Well, I don't have time to fire them because then I have to find someone and train them and I don't have time for that," and so those are all beliefs, right? So they have reasons let's call them reasons, some sound like great reasons, but really what they are is a set beliefs that keep us stuck.
Other issues that come up often are "Well, I can't hire anybody because I can't afford it." Or, "I can't give this project to so and so because they don't have the skillset." Or, "I have to make sure it's done properly so it's better if I do it myself, it's easier if I do it for myself." Or, "I don't have time to deal with this conflict, it's just weighing me down so I'm just going to like let it pass." Or, "We're never going to make it, our prices are too high compared to our competitors. We have to change our prices. We need to be more competitive, and so the only way to do that is by lowering our price." Or, "You know what? It's my company and nobody else is as dedicated, no one else's as motivated, no one has the same kind of urgency that I do. And at the end of the day, everything rests on my shoulders alone and yeah, sure I can delegate, but the buck stops here," and on and on and on and on.
One of the things that I've discovered is that leaders tend to get trapped in four key areas, like they struggle in four key areas. The first is that they feel isolated. And again, not COVID isolation, but leadership isolation. Where they do feel like the burden of responsibility is on their shoulders alone and it's not something they can share. They feel like they're in it alone. It's lonely at the top, right? You've heard of that.
The second one is that they tend to have friction with people. So people don't move fast enough, people don't get it, people don't care, people don't... There's just friction with people. And that happens professionally and personally. And they're internally frustrated with the attitude of others.
The third is that they feel a sense of chronic dissatisfaction. What does that mean? They are go getters, they're driven. And so even if they've achieved a whole bunch of stuff, even if they're all the way up here and their achievements, they say, "Well fine, but why am I not up here?" So they feel like they're always behind the eight ball. They feel like it's never enough, and they're never performing as well as they think they should be, and they're never feeling like they're maximizing their potential. There's always more, and they feel like it's never enough.
And last but not least, it's a term I invented called slippage. And here's what it means, is that leaders tend to let important things slip through the cracks. So it could be their health, could be their relationships, could be their parenting, could be they don't take time to have fun, to read books, to do the things that are important for their lives. And they let that stuff fall between the cracks or fall far down the line in terms of what's a priority. And so at the end of the day, as a person, they start to suffer because those things are required to fuel them, but they're just not on the agenda.
Question: What are some of the things that someone listening, if they don't hire you, which maybe everyone should hire you, but what are some of the steps someone can do to start unraveling some of this themselves?
Answer: I'm a big, big fan of journaling, as you know. I encourage people to journal and as they journal, ask themselves some critical questions. It could be like, "What happened yesterday? Why does this bother me?" But one of the big questions that I encourage you to ask yourself about everything that bothers you, everything that bothers you is what do I believe to be true about this? What do I believe to be true? And is this belief actually true?
Let's say I'm a leader and Oh, I'm frustrated because Bob didn't do X, Y, and Z. Then I might ask myself what do I believe to be true? Bob doesn't really care, then I ask myself, "Is that actually true? Could there be something else going on with Bob? Is there something else at play? Is it true that he doesn't care or are there other factors that I am not privy to or not considering?" The minute I asked myself those questions, what happens? My frustration decreases even just a little bit. So ask yourself that question, what do I believe to be true?
The other thing that I would recommend, and if you're okay with it, can I give everybody an exercise to do?
And guys write this down. And if you're really bold, I will engage with you on this one. Okay. So here's how it goes. Question number one, it's a journaling question, what do I really, really want more than anything? Like truly deeply. Not what my mother wants for me or my spouse or my children, not what my partner wants, not what I think I should want, but what do I truly deeply want inside? This is a good time to ask yourselves that question actually, while we're kind of in the house and reevaluating our lives. What do I really, really want?
Second question is, what's stopping me from having it? What's getting in the way and write down all the reason. By the way, all those reasons are your beliefs. What I have found is that when you ask people, what is it that they really, really want? A lot of times they get stuck. They can't write it down. They don't know what they really, really want, or they don't think they can have what they really, really want. So they're not comfortable writing it down or claiming it. or they haven't thought about it like that. They just think about their next step. They don't kind of take that 50 foot view and say, "What is it that I really, really want?"
The second thing is that when you list all the reasons that you don't have what you really, really want, what you started to understand is where you are actually stuck, and where you are telling stories that keep you trapped. So if you want to engage in this exercise, it's like so insightful. It wakes you up. It has you seeing what you've never seen before, just by asking yourself these two questions. But if anybody wants to have a conversation with a coach, send me these questions and I will hook you up with one of our coaches who will then review your responses to these two questions.
Check Out The Podcast!
Kim has SO MUCH great information from her experience in coaching, check out the podcast below to learn more about how to drive your business with the help of a professional coach!
Every week we have a marketing professional on our show to share their tips, tricks and lessons learned from their professional experience. Check out some of our other podcast blogs from earlier this year:
Every week we release a new podcast featuring guest's with so much knowledge about marketing, you don't want to miss one! How can you make sure you don't miss an episode? Click below to subscribe!
