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The thought that led to huge personal growth for me
2021 is barely halfway over, and already, it has been an astonishing year of personal + professional growth for me.
When I say “astonishing,” I mean it. As in: no one is more astonished than me about how this year is turning out.
I’ve never felt more confident and skilled as a coach, and my clients have never gotten better results. My business has grown financially in ways that I used to be afraid to admit I wanted.
I feel physically well. Mentally sharp. Happy, a truly astonishing amount of the time.
Oh and: I freaking have 1-year-old twins.
Let's flash back to December 2019. I'm on the grey couch in my living room, crying to my husband: I’m not sure I can handle twins. I’m going to fall apart. My business is going to crumble.
Many factors helped make this year astonishing (Getting great childcare! All of these!). But there was one thought that I consciously decided to believe this year… and I think it made a huge difference.
Here it is: I believe I can learn anything with the right teacher.
It sounds simple, I know.
But don’t underestimate it.
I believe I can learn anything with the right teacher.
…
One example, of many:
In January, I admitted to myself that I wanted to grow my coaching practice — to reach more people, and to make more money — and I wasn’t sure how. I was a bit ashamed, to be honest, that I hadn’t figured out how to do it on my own already.
But I reflected on it and decided: I believe I can learn anything with the right teacher.
So instead of feeling ashamed… I went out and found a teacher — a coach. And she freakin’ rocked my world. It turned out that I could be more successful while feeling calmer and less tired.
I have done this on several key occasions this year. My teachers have been coaches, books, courses, a stylist, and a design agency. Many of my lessons are still in progress.
But mostly, I am astonished by the potency of the thought: I believe I can learn anything with the right teacher.
If I believe I can learn anything with the right teacher, then it’s totally fine that I don’t know how to do what I want to do yet.
My only job is to go and find my teacher.
Going and finding the right teacher takes patience. It takes humility. For me, it also took a decision: “I am willing to spend money to invest in myself.”
(That has been another lesson of this year. I have never invested in myself to the degree that I have in 2021. And yet: my investments have paid astonishing returns.)
…
I have good news: there’s still time for your 2021 to astonish you.
Do you believe that you can learn anything with the right teacher?
What would happen if you did believe it?
…
As always, I’m rooting for you in the week ahead. You’ve got this.
Katie
p.s. Would you like me to be your teacher?
I’m really, really good at helping people feel amazing about their lives.
Finally making progress on that screenplay. Finally finding a new job. Doing higher quality work, with fewer hours. Feeling: calmer, happier, more connected, more productive.
I’m currently fully booked, but I have 3 openings for new clients in October. I’m getting booked in advance now — so I’d recommend reaching out now if you’d like to have a fall start.
(Plus, how fun would it be to finish out the summer — lazing on the beach, reading a book with a cold La Croix next to you…knowing that you’re about to start a fun + life-changing life coaching engagement in the fall?)
Learn more about my work + apply for a consult here.
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Craving a big, dramatic change in your life? Read this first
Today I want to talk about how humans change.
But first, I want to talk about medical change — you’ll see why soon. Let’s talk about Atul Gawande, a surgeon and writer.
Gawande shares in “The Heroism of Incremental Care” that while he was in medical school, he watched a resident cut open the abdomen of a patient with a ruptured spleen in “two, quick moves,” cutting through the patient’s tendon “as if it were wrapping paper.”
He was amazed. A surgeon could make a huge difference in someone’s life — the difference between life and death — with just a few Big, Dramatic Actions.
Gawande wanted to be able to do those Big, Dramatic Actions, too.
And yet, as he moved through his career, he realized that there are many, many medical problems that cannot be solved with Big, Dramatic Actions. These medical issues are also extremely serious, but “two, quick moves” won’t resolve them.
One great example is chronic headaches and migraines, which can last for decades, occur daily and be so debilitating that people can’t work, maintain relationships, or even make personal commitments.
The John Graham Headache Center, in Boston, has a reputation for being successful with difficult headache cases. Gawande spent time with Elizabeth Loder, the Center’s lead physician, as she met with a new patient. He watched as Loder listened to a patient’s history and did an examination.
Then, he says:
“We came to the moment I’d been waiting for, the moment when I would see what made the clinic so effective. Would Loder diagnose a condition that had never been suspected? Would she suggest a treatment I’d never heard of? Would she have some special microvascular procedure she could perform that others couldn’t?”
Gawande was waiting for the Big, Dramatic Action.
But disappointingly, he found, “the answer was no.”
“No” to all of it.
There was no flashy diagnosis, no innovative procedure, and no fancy treatment. In fact, Loder spent most of the first meeting managing expectations — telling the patient that the process would be slow and incremental, and if their work produced anything more than a fifty percent reduction in the number and severity of headaches, “they’d call that a victory.”
And yet, Loder is one of the best doctors in the country at this. “The Heroism of Incremental Care” includes more detail on the many people whose lives she has radically changed for the better.
She is extremely skillful, but her work is gradual, iterative, and incremental.
Despite the fact that we all love the flashy, dramatic, quick, “heroic” intervention, it is often the slow, iterative interventions — done by doctors such as headache specialists, but also as primary care physicians and family doctors and geriatricians — that can be the most impactful.
…
Gawande’s writing is about the medical field, but can you see how it might apply to human change, more generally?
I see this all the time with my 1:1 life coaching clients. People come to me because they want more traction toward satisfaction, fulfillment, or well-being in their lives. They often think that they need to take dramatic action and want my help in figuring out which dramatic action to take.
Should I quit my job and try to become a TV writer?
Should I get a divorce?
And, of course, sometimes people do need to take a “bigger” action. But far more often, our work goes like this:
I get to know you as deeply as I can. We talk about how you’re doing now, what you’re yearning for, and what you’ve tried in the past. What has worked? What hasn’t?
Then, I point something out — a blind spot, a new model, a way of thinking about something you’re struggling with, a new thing to try.
You make a small shift, and we reconnect. We discuss our learnings, adjust, and try something new — another new idea, new model, new practice.
And yes, there are weeks when everything suddenly seems to change — it’s fun and exciting! But they typically follow many previous weeks in which we laid the groundwork.
The end result is often quite astonishingly deep + impactful. Just this week, a client of three months told me: Katie, I had no idea how deep life coaching was going to be.
But — there are no “two, quick moves” that resolve everything. There’s no Big, Dramatic Action. It is incremental, gradual, and iterative.
In my experience, most human changes — even the things that look big and flashy from the outside — ultimately happen like this.
With that in mind, here’s my questions for you:
In what areas of your life are you dreaming of a big, dramatic, flashy change?
What could you do to make small, incremental, undramatic progress toward that goal?
As always, I’m rooting for you. You’ve got this.
Katie
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