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The Modern Independent
The Modern Independent
The Launchpad: Exploring the Transformative Power of Coaching for Personal and Professional Growth w/ Lia Izenberg
Gear up for an enriching conversation with Lia, an IndeAlum and successful coach. She shares her inspiring journey - from being an executive to founding her own business, guided by her experience with an executive coach and fueled by the desire to lead authentically. Experiences such as parenthood and coping with the global pandemic led her to pivot and align her path with her true passions and values.
Our conversation takes us from Lia building a successful coaching practice to navigating personal growth. Lia offers profound insights into supporting clients through transitions, marrying qualitative and quantitative data to create impactful strategic messages, and recognizing patterns to boost individual and team performance. As the conversation unfolds, we shed light on the power of tandem coaching and its benefits in succession planning, co-founder relationships, and managing organizational changes.
Here's a hint - it's not just about understanding and utilizing your superpowers and evolving for continued growth and success - but also understanding your liabilities and how to befriend them in the process.
As we bring the episode to a close, we share valuable insights about the mindset shifts necessary for successful entrepreneurship. We emphasize the importance of trust in the process, and creating a service or product that solves a personal need.
So, if you've ever wanted to start your own business or if you're just seeking guidance for personal and professional growth, this episode is packed with practical advice, insights, and wisdom.
Join us and let's explore the transformative power of coaching together.
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Welcome everybody to another episode of the Modern Independent. As always, I am your host, john Almacy, the head of community here at Indie Collective. Today, I am super excited to have another Indie alumni here with me for an episode of the Launchpad. If this is your first time listening to the Modern Independent, there's a couple of different types of shows that we have on side of the Modern Independent. The first one is called the Seven Figure Playbook. This one is a lot of experts that come in that have scaled organizations to Seven Figures and Beyond and are reaching back to try to provide frameworks or modes of reference for how they've achieved what they've been able to achieve while balancing their lives.
Speaker 1:We also have episodes called the Launchpad, and these episodes, like the one you're about to listen to today, are members that have not only graduated from the Indie Collective curriculum but have gone on to do amazing things just as they were doing prior to finding the Indie Collective curriculum, and they share ideas about where they're at in life, what they're working on, what that journey was like, and really are meant to be a place where you can feel related to. So I'm super, super excited today to have Leah with us here, and she is a consultant, coach and facilitator that helps mission-driven leaders, teams and organizations thrive during moments of transformation, whether focused on growing beyond the startup phase, planning for senior leadership transitions or making a right turn in their strategy as they navigate change. She partners with leaders and teams to clarify values, align strategy and look deeply inward so they can evolve themselves and their organizations. Leah, thank you for taking the time to come and hang out today.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 1:I am super excited too. I always love these Launchpad episodes Also, just because I get to dive back into what it was like going through the curriculum and the things that we pick up on Absolutely. I want to just start off, really, by giving you the floor to kind of lay out what you work on and why you're passionate about it, and so I know we were talking a little bit before the bikes came on, but you've now been in this lane for about a year, year and a half. What kind of landed you in this type of work and what has the last year and a half been like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's a great question. I started my business in I would say I think it was. It was like I had a soft launch in 2021, but I really kind of hit the ground running in January 2022. So it's been about a year and a half, a little more than that, and it came on the heels of a six month sabbatical that I took with my husband and young son, and that came on the heels of being a four year stint as a founding executive director of a nonprofit.
Speaker 2:I started my career in nonprofit. I was a teacher America teacher originally and then worked in educational equity nonprofits. After that and varying roles of leadership, I stopped to get my master's degree in there and right before I started my business, I was an executive leader and that was just such a transformational experience for me I think the biggest, both personally and professionally. So, like professionally, outside I was successful. I met my targets. It was great work experience.
Speaker 2:Internally, there was just a lot going on.
Speaker 2:I was learning how to lead in a different way and, I think, really grappling with what it meant to lead authentically. And so I kind of like reached this point when I was in that role, where I was like what got me here is not going to kind of get me there, but I didn't know what new ways of being would even look like and it felt like my whole world kind of blew up. And at that time I got an executive coach who was just an incredible steward for me in that point of my life and through that process I was kind of it became clear that I wanted to do for others what she was doing for me and that actually that would lean into my superpowers and be a lot more aligned and she was. So she kind of encouraged me to take the leap and I did, and so I took a sabbatical first, which was really great. That's a whole other story for another conversation. And then I started my business and practice when I came back and it happened really organically, I would say.
Speaker 1:Well, I love what you, the way that you just described that transition there that you, I realized I had the self, you know, recognition that I needed to coach. I engage with, coach coach transforms my life, inspires me to transform others. Like that is such a beautiful and organic way to to have your life. It feels almost like the universe is like kind of calling out to you to change paths. Right, it's like hey, I wanted you to have this experience because I need you over here.
Speaker 1:And then you chose to kind of answer that call and continue to develop yourself and go down that path.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, exactly. I realized that, and so it was kind of interesting, though, because a couple things happened. One in that moment, I started to lead in my executive director seat in a way that was much more aligned and authentic. So I realized, ah, this is actually possible to do, and I understand now kind of what it takes to do that and what it can look like. It wasn't just my coach. I got a lot of feedback from team members positive and critical and I was just learning a lot about myself in that time. It was a huge like moment and challenging moment of personal growth. I also became a parent.
Speaker 2:In that time, the pandemic happened, so, like all these things were converging and so I was like you know, I actually I know that I can do this now. I did it for a couple more years and then I realized that I actually wanted to be on the side of helping others do that versus doing it myself at that point, and I just needed a more sustainable lifestyle as well With a small child. We wanted to grow our family, and so it didn't. I knew when I came back from a sabbatical, I wasn't going to step back into an ED seat, and my coach was like listen, if you want the job that you're describing to me, you're going to have to make it, and so that is what I attempted to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. Well, and I think, continuing to kind of dive into that journey over the last year and a half, I think that there's well, actually, you know what. I'm going to kind of backtrack a little bit. Did it play out the way that you were expecting it to play out, or was it just kind of like I'm pivoting through different things, I'm navigating you know a bunch of different stuff and it just you're doing the next best thing as it was kind of coming along to you.
Speaker 2:It's a little bit of both. I mean, I would say that I went in with like a hope that I would do some great work, that I would learn some stuff, that I would get to coach people, that I would get to build a clientele, and I actually I created a really complicated plan for myself for the first year, with like a lot of metrics and a lot of targets and a lot of goals, not just revenue, but also what types of clients I wanted to have, et cetera. So I had a very clear vision maybe almost like two perspective of what it would look like for the year, and I think that was my way of like okay, let me try to put as much control around this thing that I can. You know you as a business owner, you can do certain things, but a lot is going to just happen, right, and you have to figure it out as you as it comes. And so in some ways yeah, it was, it was what I expected. In other ways it was better and in some ways it was harder, and I did decide that I was going to, kind of just I was going to.
Speaker 2:I didn't go very niche in the beginning and I'm still that's something I'm still on the journey of. I'm getting clearer and clearer over time about my ideal client, but I just decided that I would trust myself to, to take the projects that seemed, that seemed aligned, and not to take the ones I didn't. And I I actually would say that I got like way more work than I thought I would, which was cool. I made more money than I thought I would. I worked more than I wanted to and I learned so much about about being a business owner and I actually jumped into Indie Collective pretty early on in my business Like it was only a few months after I had launched a business that I started. So I was able to apply some of those things early on and still applying them. I feel like it's such a process.
Speaker 1:But yeah, it for sure is.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To multiple. I know people that are in their fourth cohort and they're multiple years out from their first cohort and they're still tinkering with.
Speaker 2:Exactly tinkering. Yeah, that's a good word for it?
Speaker 1:Well, because I like to say tinkering, because it's like you know, they've built a product and they've built something successful that works. But I think, by nature of the types of people that the community attracts, we're all innate tinkers, you know. We're always trying to find, like how could this be, you know, nominally better, or what is this thing? That this new idea showed up? Like I wonder if we could apply the same framework that worked for this one on this one, and like let's start playing with that. And it just becomes this iterative game, you know, of sorts, over time.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, exactly iterative, and that was what my coach had told me as well. I my tendency is to want to put out a thing and have it be perfect, and so for me, like the process of launching this business has been a process of unlearning some of my own perfectionism and ways of being that I think like don't actually serve a business owner. Of course, I want to deliver excellence and have a great product, and I always am going to do that, but I think my tendency is to want to control and that's like something I've been trying to unlearn over time. So, and it's been really relevant for me now, after stepping away from my business for a maternity leave, I had a second baby in February of this year, so I stepped away from my business and I've been coming back over the last couple of months and it's been a whole, really different experience from the first time, so that's also just been really interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm wondering. I want to kind of back into I know we've been talking about like the business side and your journey over the last year but to kind of get back to the core of your coaching practice, do you have, like a coaching philosophy or is there some type of piece of that coaching that you really latched onto Like? This is why I'm a coach, this is why I do what I do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, when I found my coach, it was because I was in a dark place. I someone forwarded me an article and was just like, hey, this might be useful to you, and I read it and then I was like this person, I have to meet her. I feel so seen by what she wrote. I feel like she's saying words that I wasn't able to say, and so I just called her and we chatted and I felt so held and supported by her, and so what I learned from that, and what she and I even talked about, and what I even learned in my first year and a half doing this, is that so much of this work is about seeing people right, like that is why I wanted to do it. It's like people need a space to be radically held and supported and seen when they're doing really hard work.
Speaker 2:I would say that I'm not like a traditional coach in that I am a coach. I mean, I am a coach but I don't only ask questions, I do that and I mix in. It's like a coaching hybrid a little bit a coaching mentorship hybrid, a coaching support hybrid, coaching consulting hybrid and that is what my coach offered me and she was like offer what you needed right, and what's happened is that people have approached me that have been that really see themselves in my content that I put online, in the way that I talk about things and the sort of uniting theme that comes around with all of them is a couple of things. One is they're usually in that moment of transition or change they're at their high performers who worked really hard, got to a certain place and then looked around and said wait a minute, I'm not happy or I actually don't want this, I want something more, or I want something different, or I'm at a place where, now I'm at this, there's dissonance between my authentic self and what I feel like I have to do to perform for this role, and they understand that same thing that I was grappling with.
Speaker 2:What got me here is not going to get me there, and I need support to figure out A what does it even look like to do things different? B who am I authentically at this point in my life? And then C how do I untangle some of the ways of being that I've learned through conditioning that aren't mine, so I can chart a new path forward that's authentic and grounded in who I am, and that is really what I bring. So I do a lot of work with folks on defining their values, new ways of being that maybe they haven't thought before, realigning with their heart and still getting the work done and then helping them envision what it could look like to do and be differently in the future. So that is a lot of what I bring to the coaching work.
Speaker 1:I love all of that, but I'm to narrow down on one specific piece that I think, as a listener, I hear this very consistently in office hours, and so it's why I'm wanting to narrow in on this, because I know that there's a lot of people that are listening that deal with this. You said who is my authentic self at this point in my life? Right, and that acknowledgement that that authentic who you believe yourself to be, or what genuinely aligns with you, is allowed to shift in your life, I think is a huge thing, and if you're listening to this right now and you're in a place where you're like, hey, very similar to what we've just been discussing, I'm in between two places. Right, I feel attached to this previous version of me. I see this future version of me that could come into existence and I'm not really sure if the one that is currently here is that one or the previous or a mixture of both, and I think that is a perfect way to articulate somebody that needs a coach.
Speaker 2:That is the perfect time to bring a coach into your life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I mean I work with a lot of women who are getting promotions, who deal with a lot of imposter syndrome, and I mean I try to help them understand too that so much of the ways that we've learned to lead are because of social conditioning and systems that exist that are bigger than us, right, and so it's not just about, like you know, folks, we've done the same thing over and over, so you can intellectually know like I want to do something different, but we might not actually know what that even means, right, because we are so used to and we're surrounded by one way of being that feels like it's the most important way, and I like to help people understand that there's a different way to be.
Speaker 2:I mean, I had to, like when I would talk earlier about unlearning perfectionism, like the way that that showed up for me and the way that that showed up in terms of my ways of being, like it just wasn't authentically aligned with who I was as a person anymore, but it was how I learned that leaders had to be or I thought leaders had to be to be successful, and so I had to rethink that and, yeah, it was an incredible process and a really like liberating process and something I'm still working through as a business owner. Now you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's something like whether it's imposter syndrome or it's unwiring perfectionism or you know it's any of those things that were conditioned over a long period of time. You know that initial coming into awareness of that thing is one thing, but then the process I mean more and more research coming out right that the brain is a lot more plastic than we thought it was and.
Speaker 1:I say plastic for those of you that aren't familiar with the term neuroplasticity or the idea of the brain being able to rewire itself. When I say plastic, I don't mean, like you know, synonymous to rubber. I mean it is capable of rewiring itself or growing new connections and re. The biology is actually capable of changing. So you're absolutely right. Intellectually, you might know that you need to do something different, but your brain has these super highways that work way faster than your conscious mind.
Speaker 1:Exactly, exactly, and if you don't know how to kind of approach those, that can be a little bit of an uphill climb.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally, and you know you mentioned biology. Like with some of my clients, we go way back to try to understand why their responses to when they get triggered are a certain way. And for some people it's like when you know we talk about their youth or their interactions with a certain person and you know, and then we repeat these things over and over and so, yeah, but I love what you said about rewiring. I believe really deeply that everyone has the power to grow and I work really well with people that are, like, obsessed with that concept and want to learn and grow and change and practice being different in their work.
Speaker 1:That's another man. You just drag-dropped and nugged after nugget, practicing a different way of being. I think that's another really, really great way to phrase that that it is a practice, right Like it's like a yoga practice or practicing martial arts or any of those other types of things. It's not okay. I'm in this mind state now. I'm done.
Speaker 2:Exactly exactly, and so I'm. I think people that when they see my writing and they go to my website, I try to convey that there's a lot of nuance and that I am somebody who is still practicing these things and some days I'm better at it than others and it's about moving closer and closer to being an integrity. So, yeah, that's a little bit of the coaching philosophy and I apply that to my. I mean, I also have consulting work that I do, but that's very like facilitative and coaching oriented. So I would say like it's about helping teams and solve problems, and I apply a lot of the exact same tools to that work as well.
Speaker 1:Right, gotcha, gotcha. I'm curious about the way that you've produtized your coaching, but before, or like the different, like services that you offer and kind of diving into more of that minutiae's, but before we get into that headspace, you mentioned a little bit earlier in the conversation about how coaching really allows you to step into your superpower. In a sense, I'm curious what is that superpower for you or how did you discover it? Yeah yeah, now it's manifesting in your coaching practice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think as a human, I think I have a couple of things and I think, like I'm very left brain, right brain, like my mom is an artist, my dad is a doctor, so we were sort of like raised to be very artistic and also very analytical, and so I think I really I think my superpower is sort of marrying those two things in a lot of ways. So that's really helpful to leaders, right, because folks have to be able to do strategic thinking, see patterns, and I think I can do that really well. But I think, beneath all that, it's about empathy and connecting with folks. So I was one of the a funny story is that and I was an educator. So like I did that really well with students, I would say it just wasn't my focus. Like, over the years I was very focused on like I thought of myself as someone who just like hits goals because I work hard and I just like push, push, push, push, push and I'm willing to do the extra mile. Right, that was my like, maybe, yes, but that was my like perfectionism and my like achievement orientation speaking, okay, yes, but I'm also, I would say, like a deep, a deeply empathetic person who just really gets people and is able to quickly kind of meet somebody, understand where they're coming from, understand patterns of behavior really quickly, deeply intuitive, and I didn't really appreciate that fully until maybe 10 or so years ago.
Speaker 2:I started to read tarot cards, which was just like a fun thing to do with my sister-in-law. She invited me into it. For those of you I'll just like say really briefly, it's not telling the future, it's basically using like a pack of symbols. The way I think of it is, there are symbols and different ways of speaking about the human experience and the range of human experiences we can have in a deck of cards, right, and so when you read them you're just using that to get more insight in something you might already know. So I read tarot cards at a party, a big, huge, crazy party and I remember I had like 30 or 40 conversations, like five minute conversations, like back to back to back to back to back, and it was amazing how I started to A, see patterns across all those conversations, but B, like the ability to drop in quickly and really get to the heart of something with someone. I felt so like.
Speaker 2:I felt high afterwards, like on a high, and I was like this is what I meant to do, right, to see people, to hold space to help them get clarity on a thing that they can't see for themselves, and to be that person. I'm not gonna be a tarot card reader, that's probably not. I mean for my job, although I have like played around with that. I would like to make that little sub offering on another website maybe. But I realized like, oh wow, I'm really good at this, like connecting with people and helping to leverage like their own intuition to move forward and get clarity. So, yeah, that's a little bit of that, and I think I was just always in jobs where I had like a really high pressure environment where that part of myself was not what got to be centered. And so now that I'm moving into this different type of work, I get to re-center on that superpower, which is great.
Speaker 1:Right, right. I think it's beautiful, regardless of the vessel that is used to spark those deep conversations, whether it's a list of CBT style questions or it's tarot cards, or it's being inside of the coaching framework and having a way of getting to the root. Absolutely. It is a superpower or a talent to be able to drop into a situation that is noisy, and not just mentally quite literally, a party is actually noisy.
Speaker 2:Totally. It was very noisy. That's why I stopped going in the end.
Speaker 1:Actually, I was like I'm losing my voice every time. To be able to be inside of that scenario and, through all of the chaos, be able to okay, we're here, me and you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1:We're in that space, that is such a beautiful gift.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you, and I think that's what I help executives do, because executives are facing a lot of noise so many different stakeholders, so much high expectations, so much noise from their own brain around what it looks like it means to be successful and they have to answer to all these different people and they lose sight of what their intuition is saying, and so I get to hold space for them to get clarity on that and move forward with courage and trust themselves that if they get it wrong, it's gonna be okay, right? So for each person, we sort of identify the voices in their head that are kind of creating limiting beliefs, or we call them saboteurs, right. And then how to identify those things over time and kind of tear them down and then build back up.
Speaker 1:Right, right. Have you noticed that that pattern detection and space holding superpower manifests outside of just people? Like, is it the same way when you look at data and other stuff like that that you're able? To kind of piece together these amorphous pieces of data into a picture.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. I do definitely, and have had to do that in so many of my professional roles, and I think I can also look at qualitative data. So a lot of what I sometimes help leadership teams do is work through change management, whether on their own team or in their organizations. So I helped an organization, for example their leadership team. They had just done this big strategic plan.
Speaker 2:So tons of data, tons of information, but they didn't know how to move it forward. They didn't have, they just didn't have, and they didn't have clear messages on what any of it meant. And so, boiling all of that information down, what they came up with in the strategic plan but then I also went and talked to people across the organization and heard what they were feeling about the plan and was able to kind of like take both of those things, smush them together and help them identify a clear set of messages that not they weren't just gonna say, but like that they really believed in and could stand behind around what this plan and what this next phase of the organization even was. And so that's one form of taking like qualitative and quantitative data together and putting it forward into something that's like a movement. I also do a lot of like I like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, turning a plan into a movement.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I think you know a plan is like it's not inspiring, it's not gonna inspire change, it's not emotional. I do what I try to really help people do is connect, like the human and the humanity and the emotion of a thing alongside the data and the actual strategy of a thing, and marry those two things together into something better. So I definitely think, like pattern recognition, I do a lot of like 360s for folks, for teams and also for individuals, and that's another way of sort of seeing patterns. It's like okay, all of these people are saying these things, creating like leveling that up into themes. I don't use like pre-created 360 tools necessarily. I like to just ask lots of questions and then see patterns across what I'm hearing from folks and then bring that to people, because those tools have a lot of biases and some of them are great, but I just I find there's like conversations to be really useful and so, yeah, pulling out what you hear and putting that forward and making sense of it is key.
Speaker 1:I think this is actually perfect. I went on the little rabbit hole that like really satisfied my curiosity, and now we're right back to talking about the products and the services you offer as coaches. So thank you for like doing my job for me, as the host, that was perfect.
Speaker 1:So that is the next place that I wanted to go, which was are there things that you're doing right now as a coach that, like, are really exciting to you, or new products or service offerings that you're putting out into the world that you're like? This is something that I'm excited to be working on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally, that's a great question. So coaching has always been the easiest thing for me to productize, because it's just like you sell a package right and so, like when I talk to a person, we come up with a set of objectives specific to their needs. They're usually I mean, this is another pattern recognition thing but they're usually you know, there's like 20 different objectives that I would say I pick and choose from that are almost always the same for the folks that are coming to me, and so we do that, and then the process is sort of the product but it's like okay, it's gonna be this many sessions, it's gonna be this much of an investment, but I'm looking for other ways to productize some of my other work. One of the things that I'm really excited about is I just launched a tandem coaching package or program, that's, coaching pairs of leaders.
Speaker 2:Last year one of my most fun engagements I had was with a coaching client who at the end of our time together, she was like hey, can you come work with me and my boss, I'm taking over for her and from this organization she's the founder. There's a lot of dynamics there. Can you come help us work through that and figure out our transition and I was like sure I don't know what that means, but I know I can do it and I created basically a sort of scope and sequence for them of five sessions where we dug into really their relationship dynamics, kind of named some things. We went into visioning a new vision together of kind of what they wanted to be true and got aligned and then we talked about how to operationalize it over the course of our time together. It was so successful that I realized and I'm actually doing it again now with a different pair, different set of issues, but same sort of general scope and sequence and I was like, okay, this is what they meant in the IndieCollective by Product Guys.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna put this out there, this tandem coaching, and I don't really see it being done as much out there. There's a lot of independent coaching. I also do team coaching. There's a lot of that out there as well, but this sort of like working through with a co-leader piece. We just don't spend as much time on our most critical working relationships and yet we do the work through relationship. It's the most important thing we can do. So I put it together and put it out there and that's been really, really cool and I feel really excited about working with folks in relationship with others to help them increase their impact.
Speaker 1:And so, as a lot of the types of clients that you're picturing engaging with, is it those leaders that are in transition, kind of passing something onto a new leader? Is it a really close set of co-founders that are trying to figure out how to navigate the CEO-COO relationship? Is it? What are? What situations? Are those pairs of people typically in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean right now, it's all of the above right, I would say it's well, everybody you mentioned right, like I love the succession idea and I also think, like generally, folks that work really closely together, that are responsible for a shared set of goals, that are generally on the same, like same or very close levels of leadership, because I think there's a lot of really intense power dynamics that can come up when you have a leader and a director port, and so those situations I think that can totally work for this kind of coaching. It requires something different. What I've noticed from the two pairs I've done this with so far is that they are really really like love each other, have worked together a long time, have some really calcified dynamics and then are at this point of where the relationship has to change, and so I think it's really less about, like, the demographic and more about the psychographic. They're like in this moment together and then they're realizing again like what got us here is not going to get us where we want to go. Right, right, what we were doing for a while worked and now shit's changed and we need to actually change course and we're stuck, and that is what really excites me. So I think that can definitely be co-founders, because your organization is changing a mile a minute.
Speaker 2:Every six months you have a new job, right, and I know so many co-founders who have parted, who were friends in the beginning and then parted ways not so amicable to you, right. Yeah, you're raising your hand. That is a lot of. It is like they didn't have the support they needed to really navigate what was coming up for them and to really co-envision what it could look like to work together successfully. So that is really about that inflection point. I think Succession is a great example. Or with the second pair I'm working with. Someone went on, leave and then came back and things are different, and the person that she's coming back to is like I'm different. Now we have to re-navig, negotiate this whole relationship Now that you're returning like things are not the same, and so I love that. Those moments are such awesome, exciting opportunities for Transformation.
Speaker 1:I think yeah, yeah, I agree, agreed, and it's a. It's a place where it can be very pivotal in the, in the future of the organization the health, the mental health of the Individuals leading that organization. So I love the idea of what a couple of different parts that you've explained so far. Right, the pattern detection piece. I really enjoy holding space for people, but then also not just holding space for each of those people individually, but also holding space for the relationship which is almost like a third person in the effect.
Speaker 1:Yes, and allowing them to kind of navigate that restructuring of that third person. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yes, I mean, I think relationships it totally they take on there. They have their own dynamics that really require both people playing into it, and so one of my favorite things to do is kind of help people. I mean, like I had this pair I'm working with now in our first conversation they were just talking, talking, talking. I was like hang on, here's what I see Happening right now, and they just were both like floored. They were like we've worked together 11 years and we've never seen that before. And so these dynamics, like they just are in the background, like running all the time, and we have to bring attention to them to see how they might be hindering or helping us meet our goals.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. I love that I Am gonna move on to the next section. Even I feel like I could talk to you about this idea. They this part for the entire rest of the podcast. But Me too I so, having been through this portion of the journey, right and recognizing your superpower, having taken, having taken that superpower and placed it into a business, and now being in the tinkering phase and and having clients and finding success, but then building new things and putting it out I mean it sounds like what you know when I was the person outside of Indy have not started a business yet. This type of podcast would give me hope.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, okay, I can make it there. I can make it to the point where this type of stuff is happening and like now my problems are how do I scale and how do I get better at it, not how do I start from the ground up. Um, if, if you had a friend or like a close, you know Person in your network that wanted to kind of jump into this or that, are there pieces of advice that If you were to rewind a couple of years, that you'd be like this is absolutely something that you need to have? Or or somebody gave me this piece of advice when I first started. It was transformational for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally, and I think it's so funny I, when I was, when I first heard of my executive director job, I was responsible for like Basically taking a national nonprofit model and like building it from the ground up here in the Bay Area and I remember I used to just like drive around in my car like feeling dejected a lot of the times. I would get a lot of nose from like funders, from partners, from all the things, and I will listen to how I built this by Guy Ross and I would be like I mean these are like you know, air B&B, like all you know, all of these like crazy companies. But it would just help me to realize like it's a shit show in the beginning and it definitely is supposed to be like that and you can still Make progress even when it's a shit show. And I will say like my first and Indic collective cohort felt like a shit show for me. I was like doing the work, getting the clients. I was so overwhelmed. Those firehose and I was like all of my like Shadows were coming out of the closet. It was like I was like, oh my god, I have to go. Everything, I had to do everything. I have to get it perfect, I have to get it right, and so, like, the biggest thing I would say is like you don't. I had a very successful first year without doing like a lot of the things that I would like Indic collective was saying to do, but it did help me think differently and put bugs in my ear that have changed the way that I've done things later.
Speaker 2:So my it's like trust yourself and know that you will integrate the things over time and you can get started, even if it feels like a shit show. So I and I remember my coach was like I'm gonna push you out of the nest, go. And she just like was like you stop, you know. Like she's like a website's not gonna save you. Don't make a website. I did make a website and I still would do that again, but I think I do think there's an element of just like trusting the process right, and my my coach told me to be of service and that was really huge. She was like go, like Be helpful to people, like that's what you want to do. And so I remember when I first started out, I kind of offered free coaching sessions to folks. I was like and I basically sent it to a bunch of connectors I know and I said, hey, like, if you know someone who wants a free coaching session, like I'm here and it was great. I got to practice, I got to test some things, I got some clients and I really did intend to just be of service in that space, and so I definitely think that's huge and and it's something that I that I still do when I can it's like, how do I create value?
Speaker 2:And it doesn't always have to be something that someone's paying me for, that that comes later. Like I'm a relationship builder first and foremost and I want to be of service to others. I've gotten a lot of like great value from some of the indie collective presenters. I go to their free webinars, I do all their free stuff and then for some of them, I end up then like paying for it on the line, but that that was key.
Speaker 2:And Then I think, like for me, whenever I've been in a mode of, like you know, creating something that I love, that I believe in, I've always felt more empowered and more in a place of abundance. Then, when I start to try to do something, that actually just doesn't feel authentic to me. That may seem obvious, but you'll if you're in indie collective or if you're going down this path, you're gonna get a lot. There's gonna be a lot of noise and you're gonna have to slow down and come back to like, what do?
Speaker 2:What's like a thing that I love, and I think for a lot of people it's the thing that they needed at the time when they didn't have it. So create that, if nothing else, right, and put that out there. Some people might take you up on it, some people might not, but but whenever I'm Struggling, I go back to that place and I write the things that I need to hear. I create the things that I wish I'd had. I say the things that I wish someone had said to me, and that is the place from which I feel the most abundance and connected both to myself and to others that I'm talking to, and so those are a couple of of pieces, are really more mindset things. Then, like tactical advice. I got some of that too, but less of that I still go to, like the webinars.
Speaker 1:When you're in those early stages, though, I think that the mindset advice is tactical in some sense, because you're, you're, there's so much noise, there's so many things going on that even telling somebody, hey, hey, I acknowledge the fact that you're being hit with a fire hose.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's okay. You know, the majority of people feel that I have that conversation inside of office hours all the time and then giving people permission to slow down before they speed up, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, we don't need to constantly be just like oh, I'm improving, I'm improving, I'm improving, I'm improving, I'm improving. There's days where you're going to make the most progress by doing absolutely nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and releasing that and kind of acknowledging that piece. So I think that those keys right there just Even even if, if nothing more, be of service, even when your life is a shit store.
Speaker 2:Totally, totally, even if it's being of service to yourself, right, like, sometimes the thing that I need to do the most is like I need to go just like Meditate or exercise or read like and for me, I do a lot of processing via writing and I find that that's like a great because it helps me process and usually those pieces end up becoming something that helps other people. I had a client once tell me like oh my God, I read your blog and I felt so, seen exactly what I had experienced with my own coach when I read her blog, and so those are the best for me. So I'm like I'm writing for myself and I'm putting it out there for others and so, like that is my practice that I come back to when I feel overwhelmed or stuck.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love that. Well, we're coming up to the end of our time here together, which does not feel feasible because it's been fast, yeah, it's been quick. I can always tell when, like, there's been a really solid podcast, when I like teleport and I'm like, oh, we're starting, pam, we're ending.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1:So I always like to end these shows with a question that you know kind of dives into some tactical resources and things of that nature, and it doesn't have to be, you know anything business related, it doesn't have to be like a self-help book or anything like that. But I'm always curious whether people consider themselves readers, watchers or listeners. So you know books, YouTube channels or podcasts and then if, depending on which one, you kind of feel like you fall into, is there a book, a YouTube channel or a podcast that you would recommend that you find interesting, brings light into your life?
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh my gosh, it's so funny. You told me you were going to answer this question and it's like or ask this question, and I was like, think about it. Think about it, because whenever I get asked this question on the spot, I'm always like, ah, I consume like an absurd amount of podcasts and books.
Speaker 1:I'm with you Like too many.
Speaker 2:And then I freeze. So when I get asked this question but I will say, and I mean this is going to be like everyone's going to have read this. So I don't think it's necessarily like the cool kind of off, like like, oh, I'd never heard of that moment. But for me, dare to lead was both so I'm a reader and a listener. Dare to lead was huge and I still really love um Bernay Brown's podcasts. I think they're just helpful. She has, like really interesting guests on that talk a lot about um, just this idea, this like doing the work from a human and heart centered perspective. So I love.
Speaker 2:So when I read Dare to lead, I just saw myself in it. I saw myself in it in so many ways and so I loved that and I love her podcast as well. And the other person that I love is Adrienne Marie Brown. She wrote Emergent Strategy, which was a huge helpful text to like rethink the way that we think about strategy and about and it's really the epitome of like how do we do things in a different way, and she really breaks down what it looks like to do things differently and she's just an incredible um person and and and and teacher. So those are a couple of examples of folks that I that I love to listen to, I love that I always I, um, I also make huge Bernay Brown fan um listen to her podcast pretty frequently.
Speaker 1:Her and Adam Grant yeah, he's for two. There's a reason for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's for two. There's a reason why they're so like popular.
Speaker 1:It's like they're seeing people Just to come out with a new book I'm excited for he's about to be releasing a new one.
Speaker 2:Um, so I'm excited for that to come out and give that a read.
Speaker 1:Um well, so, hey, thanks for taking the time to come and hang out. I know that all of us are super busy, so this has been a lot of fun, Um of course.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me so much. It was really fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah and um, if anybody wants to try to get in touch with you, where is a good place? Linkedin? Do you have a website? Um, where can people find you on the internet?
Speaker 2:Yeah, people can find me on my website, which is liaisenbergcom, um, and I don't know if I should spell it or if that.
Speaker 1:I can put the link in the chat.
Speaker 2:You're going to put it Okay If you're listening to this, go, go into the show description and you'll find it Okay, great To this website liaisenbergcom. Um, you can also find me on LinkedIn, but, um, but yeah, my website is great. There's a contact form there as well, or it's not too hard to find my email, which is just liaisenbergcom, and I love to have conversations with all kinds of people, so please reach out. Um, it'd be great to just connect and learn more about what you're up to. And, um, yeah, e and relationship together.
Speaker 1:Love it. And then, if you're listening to this and um, indie Collective is something that you've been thinking about and this episode, for whatever reason, is the one that pushed you over the edge to want to talk to more and come and hang out. You can reach out to me Jan looks like Jan, jan at Indie Collectiveio or you can find us on LinkedIn Indie Collective on LinkedIn, um, or my personal LinkedIn is a great way to reach out to us as well. Um, same same idea. I'm not. I don't just host office hours for people inside of the community. If you need a half hour cause you're a freelancer, that's like really trying to figure out how to take themselves to the next level and you don't know which way to go Um, feel free to message me and I would be down to sit down and have a conversation about that. So, um, until next time. This has been another episode of the moderate independent here at Indie Collective. I hope you have an amazing rest of your week. Talk to you soon.