My Personal Experience with a Coach: The Massive Transformation 12-Weeks Had on My Life and My Family

For the past 12 weeks, I’ve been working 1:1 with a coach. As a work/life harmony coach myself, I know first-hand the transformation that can come from working with a coach, even though I’ve never committed to it full-time myself. I needed a breakthrough in my life like those I’ve seen my clients achieve, and I wanted to find a way there faster than I ever could on my own. So, I splurged and hired a coach – and am I ever glad I did.

Typically, when someone asks me about how a coach can change their life, the first thing that comes to mind is the list of benefits that studies have published on the benefits of a coach. Instead of regurgitating that information, I wanted to share my personal experience in each of these “benefits” – the exact ways I have seen the shifts in not only my own life, but in my husband, my children, and even beyond.

Why I Sought 1:1 Coaching

First, let’s talk about why I decided to work with a coach in the first place. Given that I’m a mom of three boys that was working a full-time corporate job, building a side business, and still managed to get the kids to sports activities, daycare, and more – I think I can say I’m fairly productive. Productivity and high performance haven’t been an issue for me for many years.

However, I did feel like I needed to reach a new level in my life. I could feel that it was time for me to step up in my business, which I’m now doing full-time, but I didn’t want to lose any progress on my own personal work/life harmony. I didn’t want to lose the connection I’ve developed with my kids. I also didn’t want to lose the connection between my husband and I, which has managed to grow stronger since I started my work/life harmony quest.

But I needed a change. And I didn’t want to wait 2, 3, or 10 years for it to happen if I attempted it alone. I needed someone with a different perspective to help me find which areas in my life were “stuck,” where I was holding myself back, and figure out a plan to shift.

Of course, I have all the same obstacles coming to mind that my clients have had when I tentatively put up my hand for a coach. Can I really afford this? Do I really have the time for weekly sessions PLUS homework? Will this really make a difference? What if it doesn’t work for me?

After seeing the shifts it has made in my clients, in even as little as 6 weeks of doing weekly 1:1’s, I looked past my objections and committed to it. I found someone that’s at a higher level with her coaching business, a level where I am striving to be, and committed to 12 weeks of 1:1 sessions. Even going into the commitment knowing the benefits of coaching, I never could have imagined the breakthroughs and results that I’ve received. And I feel like they aren’t going to slow down anytime soon, but let’s get into them individually.

Benefit 1: Improved Self-Awareness

Through my journey in work/life harmony, including the training to become a certified coach myself, I have been developing my self-awareness “muscle” for quite some time now. So, to say that I was surprised to realize that I had managed to overlook a few big childhood belief systems that have been holding me back would be an understatement. That’s one of my favorite reasons for getting a coach – they listen to the words and phrases you are using. Even the ones you don’t hear yourself saying.

Through conversation or through reading the homework that I submit before our next session, my coach was picking up on limiting phrases I was using. Things like “I just can’t seem to …” or “I feel like a black sheep …” When reviewing them during our next session, I hadn’t even recalled writing some of those things! Yet, by bringing my attention to them, she helped me realize that there were some old belief systems that I had been conditioned with at a young age that were holding me back subconsciously.

Now, whenever I find myself telling “stories” – aka “Everyone already knows what I do” or “What if they don’t find it as valuable as I do” – I now pause. I can literally hear my coach’s voice in my mind telling me to dig deeper into the resistance and find what’s true. I now experiment when I am faced with a challenge and these stories pop up. It’s amazing to say that 90% of the time (maybe even more), the stories holding me back are never true. Therefore, I’m holding myself back without even realizing.

My coach has helped me come up with key phrases and questions that I can ask myself whenever I face these same stories, or any new stories that may come up in the future. I feel so much better equipped and confident to keep pushing forward with the tools and prompts that we’ve developed together.

Benefit 2: Increased Accountability

When I first opted in for getting a coach, they asked me what kind of coach I was looking for. I said that I needed someone that is not just a cheerleader, but someone that is willing to push me and challenge me. I really wanted someone that wouldn't take my excuses and self-limiting beliefs. I needed someone that would challenge me to evaluate them, see them for what they are, and overcome them. I don’t need someone to tell keep me in a positive mindset. I personally have a really positive mindset already and I don't need help in that area.

Because I was working with my coach every single week, typically on the same day, this helped me stay very accountable. Not only did I have homework that I needed to finish before the next session, but I also needed to come up with my own commitments within each of the coaching sessions. This is the same system that I use with my clients, so I was happy to see this coach followed it as well. The day before the next session I always felt motivated to review my notes from the week before and make sure that I had completed my actions.

As I said previously, productivity has never really been an issue for me per se. Instead, my issue has been motivation and willingness to put myself out there fully – especially after the struggles of going through the COVID pandemic with three young children and remote schooling. As I am now a business owner, writer, and see myself as a role model for not only my children, but also my nieces and nephew, being authentic and speaking my truth is that much more important. Working with my coach, has really helped me push through my resistance to putting myself out there. It also helped me realize that what was holding me back were these stories in my head as I said before. Not to mention, by having someone asking me about how my actions went every single week, this has helped me stay committed to going through with completing the actions. This is different from when I create a task list for myself and try to stay accountable to myself.

Really having a coach has been such a fantastic experience in all aspects. Not only has my business vision improved, because I am so much clearer on the direction I now want to go, but it has also helped with my relationships, with my connection to higher meaning, and my creativity has blossomed. I think this is in part due to the fact that one of my actions was to start protecting 90 minutes every single day to writing. Writing is something I only recently realized is something that I love to do, but I still wasn't fully committing to writing every single day.

On top of this, I have also noticed that my accountability to myself has improved. I used to have a lot of habits that would help me not only stay motivated and disciplined, but they would also help me find joy in the day. As many people find I'm sure, I too fell into the trap of if the results were not there instantly, then maybe it wasn't working for me. However, in the past 12 weeks I have really focused on bringing back some of those habits and refocusing on the ones I know help me. And having a coach working with me one day per week, for only one hour per week, has really helped me stay in integrity with myself and my goals. It has helped me focus on what’s important to me and the future I’m trying to achieve.

Not only that, but I've also realized the only way to become the best version of the future self that I want to be is to simply start acting that way today. It wasn't through 12 weeks with the coach that I've realized this, but it has been a combination of many things, a synchronicity of many lessons. I've realized that our future is created today, and our past created today. So only by living as if I'm already the best future version of myself today, will I ever reach that future.

Benefit 3: Better Work/Life Harmony

Now of course I've already been working on work life harmony for quite some time now. This is a quest that I started without even realizing it back in 2017. My youngest was about to turn 1 year old, and I was facing having to return to my corporate role. I have been very fortunate that I have been working from home since 2010, so thankfully I didn't have to worry about going into an office. However, I was faced with the realization that my three kids would likely still get to know their daycare provider better than they would me. Not only that, but I was also not exercising as often as I usually would because I was now a stay-at-home mom with three kids and a full-time job.

I still found that working with a coach, particularly one that also values work life harmony, has really helped me maintain focus on keeping the harmonious aspects of my life in place. Instead of striving to push through struggle, to push through periods when my body needs rest, and going against cycles of motherhood or cycles of womanhood for that matter, I'm embracing a more harmonious state even while building and scaling my business.

What I have noticed, however, is actually the improved work life harmony of those closest to me. By me going through this process with the coach and talking about the things that I'm learning, I have noticed that others around me, those that are close to me, are actually starting to do the same without any prompt for me. Even my kids, who I've been talking with about work life harmony for quite some time now, have really embraced it since I left the corporate role and really started focusing on finding that harmony. Not only between work and career and my family life, but also with my emotional health, mental health, physical health, and spiritual health. My children are more open to having discussions with me about various aspects of their life, and I find we are laughing and dancing and just having more fun on a more consistent basis.

The biggest realization that I've had during these 12 weeks, when one of my goals was to overcome a poverty mindset or a worry of lack, was the change in my relationship with money. I no longer think of it as I need so much money per year in order to be happy, in order to have a healthy family, in order to make my family happy. Instead, we have had one of our poorest years as a family and yet we are the happiest we've ever been. We're having the more fun than we ever have, and I feel like we are so much more connected and there's so much more love in the house than ever before. It has helped me realize that money is not the answer to everything, no matter how much we make, that first we have to find that joy and that love within ourselves. The money helps with the 3D World problems of buying a house, buying food, and that kind of thing, but striving to make more money at a corporate job that makes you miserable, will not help anything in your family. At least that’s been my experience.

That isn't to say my stress levels have dropped completely. OI course there are still days when I feel stressed, or life decides to throw me a curveball, like when my dog suddenly relapses with her meningitis. However, it has helped me determine what daily habits help keep me calm and help me stay focused and more in control of my reaction to what is going on around me. I now love Mondays. Which is something I never could have said when I was working for corporate. In fact, I just in general love my life in every single way.

Benefit 4: Improved Relationships and Communication

Now because I was working with a productivity coach, or high-performance coach I guess would be the proper term, we did have a lot of focus on things like communication, energy, productivity, and so on. So, of course, when we were doing homework, many of the questions and prompts were related to these topics. I imagine that this will help my communication significantly in my business specifically. However, our discussion during coaching sessions really helped with building awareness around the things that were worrying me about my kids, even those that in the bigger picture of things don't matter. Things like making sure they're eating enough vegetables or trying to convince them to eat whatever meal I was making. This used to be a huge stress area in my life with the kids, even since they were young. In fact, I remember calling it a battle in one of our sessions, when we were talking about how stressed I get out over making meal plans.

The realization that came from that coaching session was my kids are great eaters. They are better eaters than I was at their age. They will happily sit down with a tray of vegetables and eat nothing else. To this day, I still struggle with getting enough vegetables because I just don't enjoy them. So why I felt the need to stress over what my kids were eating and whether or not they would eat what I would make really didn't make any sense in the bigger picture of things. And it wasn't until my coach helped me see this that I started to change my communication with the kids during mealtime. Even with my husband.

Now, our mealtimes are a lot more fun. We tend to have music playing, the boys tend to be helping me cook, and if they choose that they do not want to eat what I'm making, they are empowered to take control over their own meal and make something for themselves. They know that eating a wide range of foods, not just carbs but also not just fruit, is the best approach to making meals. So now they happily add vegetables to their plate, or yoghurts or proteins.

By dropping the need for everyone to eat the same meal plan at the dinner table, it has not only reduced my stress levels, but it is also reduced my husband’s stress levels and my kids’ stress around eating. This helps me feel like a better mother, not only because I'm not getting stressed out over meals, but also, I've realized I have taught them how to eat well, without worrying about what is “good” versus “bad”. They're more aware that moderation is key, and I feel like they are developing a healthier relationship with food than I ever had.

Regarding relationships, my coach has really helped me come to realize just how confident of a person I really am. She also helped me realize that a lot of my introverted tendencies as of late are likely a result of not only COVID but also becoming a mother. I could likely write a handful of articles just on the fear and the confusion that was being a mother for the first time, a second time, and even a third time. Not to mention raising those three kids through a COVID pandemic, through remote schooling, on top of all the regular everyday stresses and obstacles that a parent must face.

Now, as I continue to define what my new identity is, beyond being a mom or just a role, I’m finding that confidence, that inner trailblazer, and rising like a phoenix out of the ashes. I am feeling more and more like my true, authentic self. I am able to let go of a lot of that fear, and I've been able to say goodbye to a lot of those self-limiting beliefs. I believe this will help not only my kids, but my husband to do the same.

By helping me get out of my own way, by finding that inner confidence and that inner voice again, I've also been able to find not only one inner circle of other Trailblazers, but multiple. Prior to these 12 weeks, I had struggled with finding adult friends. Now I have built close relationships with almost a dozen fantastic women. I don't think I could have done that within a 12-week period without my coach.

Benefit 5: Personal Growth and Development

Through my coaching, we didn't really talk about skill development a whole lot since that was not my focus. However, we did talk a little bit about some things like influence, researching cycles, and really getting clear on ways to improve my life as a woman. So, although we didn't specifically talk on skills or training that I could do, I am in the process of developing frameworks and strategies to help me excel.

And in a lot of ways, this has helped me gain even more clarity around my business vision and where I want to go in my future. I always had a future vision that was fairly clear, and I knew where I wanted to go, but by working with my coach for the last 12 weeks my clarity is improved tenfold. My clarity has improved around my vision for what I want my daily activities to look like, what kind of people I want to be empowering, and how I want to impact my kids’ futures.

This clarity of course is helping me determine my own personal growth development plan, which doesn't necessarily include educational skills, but they are skills that will help me in my business, my life, and my community.

My core values have not changed through the last 12 weeks, but that’s likely because I’ve been reviewing my core values annually for a few years now. They still relate to family, connection, growth, and adventure. However, I did enjoy thinking about the words I would use to describe my best future self. By always having these words around me, and more specifically words on how I want to make other people feel after they've interacted with me, my days are definitely more intentional and purposeful. In our last session, we even talked about the importance of my revisiting those words that I had chosen at the very first session. It seems that I have already outgrown a couple of them, but that's more likely because I used words that I knew I was already near. I think my coach knew that. Ha!

I would say the biggest change in my personal growth and development in the past 12 weeks has been around my mindset within my business. I feel like I was finally able to fully let go of the terrified young mom surviving the pandemic while working at a corporate role. She may have served me well in previous years, but it was time to let her go. My coach has helped me fully embrace the trailblazer within me, and inspired me to help others better on a similar path find their inner Trailblazers as well. I can't wait to continue this growth and development in my business and my life, as I continue to research and develop frameworks and strategies around these concepts that have helped me over the past 7 years.

Benefit 6: Increased Confidence and Self-Efficacy

When it comes to confidence, the biggest thing that my coach helped me realize was that I am confident. Although I frequently felt like an impostor in previous roles, and even now fight the urge to prove myself, working with my coach and doing the exercises really helped me to see that actually I am a confident person.

One of the actions that I committed to taking after a session was to talk to my mother. She always would comment about how confident I am and how she wishes she had even an ounce of my confidence. I always brushed off these comments previously, but my coach was not going to let me continue doing that. So, I approached my mom after our session, and I asked her. And hearing the things that she felt made me a confident woman, things like traveling the world by myself, getting a bachelor’s degree in science and a master’s degree in engineering, working in a male dominated field, traveling to consult at different mine sites, and so much more, made me realize how much I was overlooking of my achievements. Likely because I didn't think of them as anything that wasn't normal. I imagine that's something that women tend to do, or maybe it's just people in general.

We tend to think that because we lived an experience, it's just a normal experience. That we didn't do anything special. Now looking back over my past, over the things that I have overcome, over the achievements that I have had, I now realize that I am a strong, confident woman. I don't need to prove myself to have value. Another person’s opinion over my experience does not make my experience any less real or authentic. My experiences are valid and true to my life, and that's what matters for me. I don't think I would have realized these things without my coach. So, although we didn't specifically cover how to improve my confidence, she has helped me step into my confidence that was already there. I'll be forever grateful for that.

Extra Benefit: Positive changes and observations with my kids

The biggest surprise for me from this coaching experience, was actually in the changes that I noticed within my kids. I had read before of the changes that can happen to the people around you while you're while you were going through coaching, but I never fully understood what that could mean. Just to give you a simple example from what I'm trying to say here, let's go back to talking about the changes I made around meal plans.

By embracing the idea of empowering my kids to make decisions around their own food, not only has mealtime become less stressful and more fun, but I've noticed the independence of my children has also increased. Not only about food, which is what surprises me. While working through stepping into my own confidence again and working hard to empower them to make their own decisions about meals, they have also stepped into their own confidence even more. Their own independence. Not only are they helping cook meals now, but they also turn on music and help do dishes, clean up the table after supper without a fight, do their chores. My sons are also more confident in making their own decisions about what they want to do. They still love TV, and they still love video games of course, but they also now say things like “oh I've had too much TV, I need to go outside for awhile for a break”.

Of course, that's not to say that we never argue, I don't think we'll ever get rid of that. But as they are becoming preteens and teenagers, I'm glad to see that they’re taking steps into making decisions for themselves, healthy decisions. Because we aren't fighting over mealtimes, we also are laughing more and I see them smiling frequently. My oldest has even felt empowered to start making lunches for him and his brothers. Sometimes he helps me and sometimes he's already had it done before I even have had a chance to look at it. Since he's babysitting age, he's also offering to start babysitting for us. I've also noticed as I am making more friends as an adult, and putting myself out there to find them, he's also been making more friends and telling me about how he's trying new things at school. I've said it before and I'll probably be saying it for a long time, it never ceases to surprise me how much my children pick up on what is going on in my life, even when I'm not talking to them about it.

Just in 12 weeks, I've noticed our communication has improved, their confidence and independence has increased, and the overall energy of the house is a higher vibration. When I sit down to read one of my books about business or about researching cycle syncing and different methods, they now frequently turn off the TV to come sit in the room with me and read books of their own. I don't think we realize as parents, just how much our own actions, whether we verbalize them or not, really influence our children's behaviors, lives, and growth.

Now, my kids get the added benefit of having a coach as a mom, so sometimes they get tired of the open-ended questions I ask them when they're asking me for advice. Ha! However, I am always grateful to notice that simply by improving my own mindset and my own work life harmony directly impacts how they look at life. I am so grateful that I chose to start this quest for work life harmony while they were young, so that I can hopefully impart what success truly looks like in life. And I hope that they never have the poverty mindset, or the relationship with money and food that I had. I'm sure we aren't perfect parents, and there will probably be some belief systems or things they will have to work through when they're older, but I feel like I can let mom guilt go, knowing that I’m doing my best and they are learning right alongside me.

Challenges and Breakthroughs

When I went through my notes from my 12 weeks of sessions, several breakthroughs really stuck out for me. We've already kind of talked about all of them above, but to summarize:

• I have finally left the corporate mindset, and the lack mindset, in the past and embraced my inner Trailblazer.
• I have been able to let go of mom guilt, mainly because my children are empowered to make more decisions for themselves, including meal planning, healthy habits, and learning from mistakes.
• I am fully embracing the cycles and phases of both womanhood and motherhood. I am researching strategies and frameworks to use both life cycles to help me succeed, not hinder me. I embrace my womanhood as a strength that will help me breakthrough to the next level and beyond.
• I'm fully stepping into my confidence and putting myself out there authentically and wholly to continue building my inner circle and attracting the right people into my community.
• I will continue to share my growth points and fumbles, no matter how much they scare me or embarrass me, in order to help even one other woman out there who's going through what I have gone through. I will no longer do everything alone and behind the shadows. I have found my inner voice, and I will use it every day from now on.

Conclusion: Reflecting on the Coaching Experience

As I said at the beginning of this article, I never fully realized how much I would change internally from a 12-week coaching program. Even after seeing it within my clients, I never fully understood just how impactful it can be. I can definitely understand why celebrities and CEOs of large corporations like to have a coach. Especially when you can find one that looks beyond your career, one that considers all aspects of your life. The growth that I've had internally, the transformation, I know will continue bringing new levels of growth to my external environment for months, maybe even years, to come.

Productivity wise, I would say I had a very productive 12 weeks. I started a podcast, I edited my book for my publisher (which launches in September!), I revamped and rebranded my business. I can't wait to see what comes next.

"The best way to predict your future is to create it." – Abraham Lincoln