192. Achieving Your Goals in 15 Minutes a Day with Liz
Have a script in your heart, but just can’t seem to get it down on the page?
Want to up level your career, but having trouble putting yourself out there for fear you’ll be rejected, possibly over and over?
Want to develop a deeper sense of self esteem but struggling to shift your view of yourself?
Then this week’s episode is perfect for you.
My client, Liz, joins us to share about her experience and takeaways from three months of one on one coaching with yours truly.
Liz is doing some seriously impressive things and the best news of all? She’s doing it in a way that feels good to her, doesn’t crowd her days with too much work, and is creating lots of delightful outcomes.
Catch the full episode to hear all about what Liz got out of our coaching package (and get some tips about how you can feel better, get more done, and set yourself up for a very satisfying life, in 15 minutes a day).
Want customized support creating your wildly delicious life? Let’s hop on a free consultation call.
I’ll help you understand the blockers you’re facing and how to handle them moving forward. And I’ll share how a three-month 1:1 coaching package could supercharge your progress as well as your satisfaction.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why lowering the stakes for success can actually lead to a lot more of it
How to get yourself to work on your big goals daily without burning out
Why it’s so important to make working on your goals more pleasurable
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week my client Liz joins us to talk about achieving your goals in 15 minutes a day.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Kori: Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. Today we have my client Liz in to talk about her experience of working with me in one-on-one coaching. Liz is a screenwriter, director, and professor, and we had such a fun time working together as I also have a background in writing. Liz, do you want to say hello to everyone and tell them a little bit about why you came to work with me?
Liz: Yes, absolutely. First of all, I’m so extremely honored and excited to be here. I have been a fan of the podcast for a long time and listened to it before I even started working with you. So very special to be here. And I came to one-on-one coaching with you because through another coach’s program I saw a webinar that you did. I am going to botch the title of it, so I’m not even going to try to say what it was, but it definitely had something to do with burnout, I think, work burnout.
Please feel free to correct this quote, but I just remember that you said something along the lines of, if you motivate yourself with shame and fear to accomplish things, then those accomplishments will feel like shame and fear when you get there.
But if you motivate yourself through, I forgot what you said, joy, fun, pleasure, whatever it was, that’s how it will feel when you get there. And it was one of those moments where I could just feel a veil being lifted and I was like, okay, I have to work with this person. I will be looking up her website.
Kori: I love that. Yeah, I also don’t remember the name of that training. It might have been, I think it was originally titled something about burnout, and then I think they re-titled it to be about perfectionism because so much of the content of that one in particular was about burnout from the perfectionist point of view. And a lot of perfectionists do try to fuel their effort with shame or anxiety or those kinds of unpleasant emotions. And then we wind up at the end of it feeling a lot more of those unpleasant emotions.
So I love that you, like that’s how you found me. And that that really resonated for you because I think that resonates for a lot of other people too. So that being said, that’s what resonated for you. And then when you hired me, you had that moment of like, oh, I definitely have to work with her. And so was it to change the way you related to your work so that you could learn to work with more joyful, enthusiastic, fun fuel than the guilt, the shame, the anxiety?
Liz: I think that that is what ultimately came out of our coaching for me. Today I was just writing, I actually finished a part of a rewrite on a script today. And you would be so proud of me, I’m giving myself stickers for accomplishing things. I still have to laugh when I say that.
Kori: Yes, we love stickers.
Liz: I’ll say it again, yes, I was giving myself stickers for accomplishing things. I have learned to set low expectations for myself. So for a while I was expecting myself to write for five minutes a day and do five minutes of career outreach a day, which seemed ridiculous to me, but also very doable, right?
So I would do those five minutes, give myself a sticker, feel as proud and accomplished as possible. Then at this point I’m doing 15 minutes a day of each. It’s often more, but if I have gotten that 15 minutes a day done, I will tell myself you did enough today. It’s so much the opposite of how I used to work.
So definitely a lot of that did come out of you and me coaching together and it’s created such, to quote Kori Linn, it’s created such a pleasure gloss over my experience of doing my work, which is amazing because I actually got into this work because I do love it.
I will be honest with you though, I probably started coaching only because I wanted to achieve more.
Kori: Yeah. I think that’s why a lot of people start coaching. They’re like, I want to do more. I want to hit these bigger goals. And listen, I also want to help you do more. I also want to help you hit bigger goals, but I also want that to be sustainable and I want it to be able to be something that can feel good. And for a lot of people, the pressure to achieve more often makes the work itself feel bad and then they actually achieve less.
So what you’re talking about of lowering your standards, a lot of listeners are probably like, what the hell? Why would I lower my standards? It’s like lowering what counts as success. And then you actually end up doing more, which leads to more success. That’s kind of the methodology there.
And have you found that by shifting what the definition of success is to those smaller increments, you are taking more action towards your goals and having a more enjoyable experience of it?
Liz: Absolutely. It is bonkers what you can get done in five minutes a day. Especially actually I have to say for my career outreach section, I just started randomly applying to things because my attitude was, well, got to fill up five minutes, got to fill up 15 minutes.
And so I just started applying for grants, opportunities. Now, lo and behold, I got selected to go to a producer’s workshop in Stowe, Vermont this June. I got a scholarship for this opportunity. I’m going to go take this amazing trip. And this, I swear to you, Kori, it’s because I spent 5 to 15 minutes a day just applying for stuff.
Kori: Okay, I did not know about this, listeners, before this moment. So I wish you could see me because I’m doing like little jazz hands. I’m so excited about it. This is the beauty of lowering your standards. Really, it’s not lowering your standards. It’s shrinking the amount of effort you have to do to consider yourself having done a good job.
But what Liz is talking about happens with me and tons of my clients where we’ll be sitting around thinking, well, like, well, I have to do this huge thing and then we’ll do nothing. Whereas if we’re like, okay, all I have to do is five minutes and then I get to high five myself, get stickers and I did a great job. Then we’re just looking around for like, what can we do in five minutes?
And so many people think that nothing can be accomplished in five minutes. But as Liz has just revealed to us, in 5 to 15 minutes a day, you can apply for and get into and get a scholarship to like a super cool event. And that could be true for you also, listeners. Like you could probably be taking just five minutes a day. And I love that timeframe because even if you’re super busy, you can carve out five minutes a day.
And like what kind of amazing miraculous things could you do? Not because you’re setting out to do amazing miraculous things, but because you’re setting out to just do a little incremental effort consistently over time, but you can wind up in incredible places when you do that. Ooh, thank you so much for telling us about it, Liz. I’m so excited for you, but I’m also so excited for every listener who’s going to have something really cool happen because you were willing to go first and then tell them about it.
Liz: And I will add to that too. First of all, I’m just so excited about this. And for all the many people listening to this who have never met me before, this is basically the opposite of my personality. I was once in a writing group where everyone was saying, how should we motivate ourselves to achieve our goals? And I said, well, maybe we should set a really, really high goal and then we’ll fall short of it, but we’ll do more than we would have done otherwise.
And everyone looked at me with a sad face and they were like, we were thinking a pizza party. So I was not the pizza party suggester before. So this is really outside of my usual comfort zone. It did not sound appealing to me. I actually also came to you because I had set what I’ve heard other coaches refer to, and maybe you use this term too, as an impossible goal, right?
So I had set this certain impossible goal. I’m not going to go into details about it right now because it’s sort of in the works. And crazily enough, I talked to you, I remember maybe a few weeks ago or a month ago at a point where I was like, I have not accomplished this impossible goal. I have missed my deadline. And now it actually looks like I may have accomplished a very large portion of that impossible goal through not beating myself up so much, right?
So I had to kind of let it go. And I don’t love the term lower my standards, but like setting the bar so low that I could step over it. And I think I may have actually accomplished that goal.
Kori: Okay, I’m really excited about that. And let’s just riff on that a little bit. I think the idea of lowering your standards kind of feels like bleh to a lot of us. That’s why sometimes the way I explain this is like, lower your standard for what counts as like it’s done, it’s a success. But keep your high standard or even raise your high standard for what would be delightful, incredible, super fun, like extra bonus.
We don’t have to sell ourselves short on the cool things we want to create. But when the cool thing you want to create is so big and so daunting and overwhelming, then a lot of times people don’t do anything towards it. And then that’s when they actually don’t go anywhere at all.
So I think you’re learning a different way to succeed and achieve that involves a lot of lower stakes, right? Like when we take those standards for what counts as good enough or what counts as done or what counts as success, when we take those down, then it becomes doable, right? We’re like, oh, this is low stakes. I can do five minutes a day. I can do 15 minutes a day.
And then we don’t have to beat ourselves up. It’s all very doable. We can celebrate and give ourselves stickers. And that builds up this habit and this consistency of what I’m going to call doability. And the more doability we have, the more we’re like, oh, I can do things. And then we can raise the standards and the stakes back up a little, so we’re still doing pretty incredible things, in my opinion, if that extra effort is required. Sometimes it’s not, sometimes we do it in just five minutes a day.
So what you said earlier was that when you saw the webinar, it was kind of like that light bulb moment for you of like, oh, if I fuel myself with anxiety or shame, then my achievements will feel like anxiety and shame. Do you feel like learning to do this smaller approach, this five minute approach, this not beating yourself up even if you don’t hit it a hundred percent on the original timeline, or even if the timeline is getting close and you’re not sure if you’re going to hit it.
One of the things you were originally attracted to with coaching was the idea from that training I did about shifting what you use to fuel your achievement and also shifting the emotional experience of what it’s like to work towards your goals.
And it sounds like you’ve achieved that because now you have a much more pleasurable way of working and it’s more enjoyable. It feels more doable. And you are also getting a lot done, even if you’re not setting that wildly daunting goal that you were talking about, like with your pizza party friends.
Liz: Yes, definitely true. I’m experiencing a lot more pleasure, particularly in my experience of writing. And honestly, even in my experience of career outreach, it’s pretty pleasant to just go through my emails, send something out. I am drinking hot cocoa. I’m listening to music. I have a very nice smelling candle that I spend some money on because I really like the smell of it. And I will light that candle every time I’m writing, which just gives this sensorial pleasure to the experience of smell, taste, sound. And that just makes it fun.
And as I’ve heard you point out in your podcast, you haven’t said it exactly this way, but when things are fun, we want to do that.
Kori: So fun gets it done.
Liz: Exactly, fun gets it done.
Kori: I’m so glad you said that because I feel like when I talk about being satisfied as fuck, when I talk about living a delicious life, I think a lot of people are like, why? I just need to get promoted. I just need to get this thing. But when you make the effort feel good, first of all, it just feels good. That’s super fun. But second of all, it makes you more likely to stick with the thing long enough for you to then achieve the goal.
And you’re a writer, you want to write for your whole career, right? So it is in the interest of that goal for you to make writing feel good to do, because then it takes less willpower. It takes less discipline. It takes less “motivation” to achieve that because you’re like, oh, I like this thing.
Liz: Definitely. And I will say, combining with the short timeframe at this point, I do not usually write for only 15 minutes a day. But if I say to myself, hey, so could we write for 15 minutes right now, as opposed to like, okay, we’re going to write for a solid block of four hours. And this must be finished by the end and the stakes are high. I’m much more willing to sit down and write for 15 minutes.
And even though it’s not the point of it, when I do write for 15 minutes, I usually then want to keep writing because I’ve gotten over that hump of inertia and I’ve started and then it is fun, right? Then I’m enjoying it. But there’s something about just getting started and thinking about the task and either a small manageable feeling task, like I’m tired, but I could do 15 minutes as opposed to, I’m tired, there’s no way that I could write for two hours right now. Maybe I do end up writing for two hours, but taking it bit by bit makes it so much more manageable.
Kori: Yeah. I love that you point that out. I also think that if you write for 15 minutes every day, first of all, that adds up. That adds up to a lot of time every week, over the months, the year. And also like sometimes, yes, you’ll write more, but sometimes you’ll probably also write more powerfully. When we build up the consistent habit, when we make it pleasurable, you would also be amazed how much you can get done.
You, Liz, probably already know. But you, listeners, will be amazed how much you can get done in a 15 minute block when you don’t have to spend a bunch of time beating yourself up or talking yourself into it or all these other things. You can work so powerfully when you kind of have that consistent habit and when it feels yummy to do so.
Liz: Yeah. And I will say, since career outreach has been part of this bite-sized approach that I’m taking, I got a rejection from some program that I had applied to today and I didn’t even remember applying for it. So my level of disappointment was actually quite low because I was like, oh, I must’ve applied to that in some 15 minute period of just doing stuff. I was invested in the practice of applying instead of heavily invested in the outcome.
Kori: Okay. I’m obsessed with the fact that you said that because I think this is what everyone needs to know. A lot of people do not want to put themselves out there because they feel very sensitive to rejection. They feel very sensitive to not being liked or feeling silly or all these things, right?
But if you only put yourself out there like once every three months, you remember it, you know it, you’re anxious, you’re obsessed about it. Like every day you’re biting your nails. You’re like, are they going to email me? Whereas if you spend even that five minutes or up to the 15 minutes every day, you’re just going to have to come up with so many different things to put yourself out there to, or apply for, even though it is, like we said, such a small doable increment of time, it’s also a bunch of time. Like after you do the obvious first steps, you’ll be like, I just got to look around for some shit to apply to. I got to look around for a scholarship. I got to look around for a grant.
And then you apply to so many that you’re not so sensitive to the rejection. You’re not lying awake at night worrying what that one person thinks of you because you’ve planted a lot of seeds. And the more seeds you plant, first of all, if you plant a lot of seeds and some of them don’t bloom, not a big deal because you have a lot of other seeds and some of them are blooming.
So when you are rejected, I think it does feel so much less painful because you can also kind of see that bigger kind of math game of like, oh yeah, some things work out. Some things don’t. It’s all okay and I can continue to put myself out there in my little increments and you’re building something really beautiful and really powerful. And lots of real opportunities are coming through.
Liz: Yeah, I totally agree. You make me think I just bought a little packet of California wildflower seeds that you’re just supposed to sprinkle over the ground and then some of them come up and some of them don’t. But it’s a nice packet filled with varied seeds, so you’re going to get beautiful flowers one way or the other.
Kori: I love that visual. We both live in California, listeners. So we’re both like, yeah, California wildflowers, poppies. We love them.
Liz: Exactly.
Kori: Okay. So let’s do a few more questions about what it was like to work together. What would you say your favorite part of coaching with me one-on-one was?
Liz: I really am a big fan of your sense of humor.
Kori: Thank you.
Liz: I just like how, you know, I did end up inevitably working on some pretty deep stuff with you. To go back to that initial question of why did I come into coaching, I really did feel like even though I’ve always been a pretty hardworking person and somewhat ambitious person, I just felt like there were some internal things inside of me holding me back. So I wanted to try to unearth those in coaching and that can be some heavy stuff.
So I just really appreciated your sense of humor. You were never disrespectful, obviously, or making fun of me, but just like taking things with a lightness that made it a lot of fun to work with you.
And then I’m putting this word on you, I don’t know if you would use this, but I also feel like you have really good intuition. I think probably what sold me on working with you in the first place was, I think after I saw that webinar I had some type of consult call with you, right? You offered, I believe, a free consult of, I don’t know, 20 minutes or something like that. I can’t remember.
And I said something to you about having trouble earning money and you just had this great intuition. I’m probably saying this slightly wrong, but it was something along the lines of you asked me like how much money had I actually earned? And then when I laid it out, I saw that I had earned money up to a certain point. And then maybe something had scared me at that point.
It was just, you were very intuitive in helping me to see the problem in a different way than I had seen it before. Maybe that’s a little vague, but you just did it throughout and that was something that I valued very much.
Kori: I love that. Thank you. Yeah, I do think there’s a lot of intuition. And as a coach, I’ve now been in business for nearly six years. And so the more people I’ve coached too, the more I kind of get these little nudges of like, I’m going to ask about this or here’s an area where a lot of people have blind spots, so we’re just going to check in. But I love to hear about the experience from the client point of view.
And I do think often in coaching, we work on really heavy things. Not always, it’s not required, but a lot of times that’s part of what people bring. And I do think being able to approach that with humor is really helpful for being able to tackle it without feeling attacked by it. So I’m glad to hear that came through as well.
Were there any hesitations you had about coaching with me? And what are your thoughts on any of them now, if you had any?
Liz: I will say when I initially got into coaching through another coaching program, I probably had more hesitations about coaching in general. I think my biggest hesitation is that I am not a fan of diet culture and I thought of life coaches as being people who coach people to lose weight. So that turns out to absolutely sometimes be true, but not true across the board in any way.
So I think once I discovered what I will term feminist coaching, right, so coaches who felt like they were working more within my value system, I didn’t have as many hesitations. And really, by the time I got to you, I did not have a lot of hesitation. I had seen that webinar. I also trust my own intuition and I felt intuitively that you had something that I wanted. And we had a great consult call. So I didn’t have a lot of hesitations at that point.
Kori: Yeah, I love that you brought that up, though, because I think that you are correct that there is definitely a section of the coaching industry that is diet culture oriented. And one of my coaching certifications is actually from the other coach Liz has talked about whose program I’ve done a couple of trainings for, and she is body positive and anti-diet culture. Her additional coaching certification is in intersectional feminism.
And so I think that has really influenced the direction of my coaching and also just like my life and the people I’m friends with and the things I’ve learned about from them. And I think it’s interesting because I don’t coach on body image very much, but I do coach on it occasionally. And in addition, I think there are crossovers sometimes between diet culture as a way of eating and hustle culture as a way of working.
So I think it’s interesting too, to see that like, there’s different ways to coach on anything. Like there’s a way to coach on achievement that is about being very regimented and being very organized and doing things in those bigger blocks of time or like going all in. And then there’s ways to, you know, work that are more like intuitive eating where it’s like, well, what feels good to you? And what are you craving and how could we get it done if any different way was possible?
So I thank you for sharing that that’s a hesitation you had with the industry. And I do think it’s helpful for everyone to know that that doesn’t have to be what coaching is. It doesn’t have to be about upholding societal bullshit. And a lot of times the kind of coaching I’m doing is 100% the opposite, where I’m like, let’s dismantle this socialization because it’s making us miserable and blocking us from making the choices we want to make or getting the things done we want to get done.
Liz: That’s such a great point. My experience is that at the point where somebody has dismantled their attachment to diet culture, it’s so in the air and the water everywhere that I find that people who have questioned that have questioned many other things as well.
Kori: Yeah, I agree.
Liz: And it’s something that I do appreciate about your coaching.
Kori: Yeah, I think once you begin to pick apart any piece of socialization, a lot of the other pieces begin to come undone too. Like I know for me stepping into my queer identity was also something where I was like, wait a minute, maybe a bunch of other stuff I believed to be true about the world and myself, maybe those things are also either incomplete or not the only option, maybe more things are possible.
Okay, is there anything else you would like listeners to know about how to create a wildly satisfying life, about what it’s like to work with me or anything else you want to share?
Liz: Well, I like what you just said about your comparison between intuitive eating and maybe I will call it intuitive working, which I don’t think is a term that I have ever heard before. But there’s something that I really got from, even from that first webinar of yours and then through our coaching, which is about the embodied experience of what I’m doing. Like really being present in it.
I am also a fan of meditation, not that that is necessary for coaching to work, but that’s just been such a key. Like being present, again, in the process has been really helpful. And I also just want to say I did end up having a breakthrough at the end of our coaching time together, which seems very detail oriented, but I had always thought that I had low self-esteem or felt bad about myself.
And through working it out with you back and forth in our coaching conversation, I realized that I didn’t actually feel bad about myself. I felt that it was unsafe to feel good about myself. And that distinction, it feels like splitting hairs, but it’s actually a huge distinction, right? Like to be able to find that I sort of had this well of self-esteem inside of me and that the issue really was working on finding the safety to express that on the outside. So I’m very grateful for that.
Kori: Yeah, I don’t think it’s at all splitting hairs actually, because this is a thing with coaching is when you find out where the issue actually is, then you can fix the issue there. And when you thought the issue was your self-esteem, then you had to work on your self-esteem. But if the self-esteem was already in good shape, then working on self-esteem wasn’t going to help you, right? It wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t going to solve the problem.
As soon as you figured out like, oh, I actually feel great about myself, it just doesn’t feel safe to express that. And maybe it doesn’t even feel safe to be aware of it in my own mind. Then we could begin to work on the piece that was actually the obstacle that was actually blocking you from having the experience you want it to have and was blocking you from enjoying your good self-esteem, right?
And so it’s a little bit like doing surgery. Not that I’m like a surgeon, y’all, I’m not. But it is a little bit like that in that doing surgery isn’t just like, oh, something in your leg hurts. We’re going to cut the whole thing off. It’s like, oh, we have to figure out which of these tiny bones or which of these ligaments or which of these tendons or which muscle and like, why. Why is it hurting like that?
And when you’re not quite sure what the problem is, there are some things you can try, but the more specific you get in there, the more detailed the solution can be. And I do think that is the benefit of working with a coach versus doing coaching on your own. Like, listen, the podcast is a free resource. I’m such a fan of DIY and I realize it’s a privilege to be able to work with a coach because it does cost money and not everyone has access to that resource.
But when you can work with a coach, when you’re willing and ready and excited to make that investment, it can really help you understand the deep intricacy of like, oh, this is the piece that wasn’t working. And then you can address that.
And I think the benefit of that is it can super speed up the solutioning, the resolution, the moving forward, because then you’re able to apply a very detailed solution versus like, it’s like my knee hurts, I ice it, right? Icing my knee is great, but it’s not solving a problem at the same intricate level. And it might take a lot longer and it actually might just treat the pain versus solving it.
Anyways, I’m deep in my metaphors here. But thank you so much, Liz, for sharing that because I think that’s a really great example of what can happen in one-on-one coaching where the coach’s laser focus is on you all the time in a good way. And also what can happen when you work with a coach over time. Because the very first coaching call can be super helpful, but as a coach gets to know you, that’s when we’re like, oh, I’ve put the pieces together. Here’s something that I think is going on that can help you super speed up your progress.
Liz: Yeah. And I’ll just add one more thing. First of all, I agree with that 100%. And I think that intuition that I appreciate in you is so great. It is sort of a diagnostic intuition, even though of course there’s no official diagnosis here.
But I found that you readjusted my sense of what the problem was so often with my self-coaching practice I’m then so much more capable of going in and helping myself to then work on the correct problem, right? Like coming up with solutions to the correct problem is not as hard as coming up with millions of solutions to the wrong problem.
And I also just wanted to add that during the time that I was working with you, you also offered this Slack messaging. And so I was able to write, maybe because I am a writer I like this, but I was able to write out my thoughts in between sessions to you. And that was so helpful to me also in sometimes getting to those coaching calls, like ready to bring something to the table that we could really dig into.
Kori: Yes, I love that you brought that up. The main coaching happens in 45 minute calls, but we have the Slack to chat in between. I think it’s nice to have multiple methodologies of connecting. Some people really feel more comfortable writing. Some people really like to verbally process things through, but that is part of what happens inside the one-on-one container and groups when I do groups, is there’s lots of ways to get coaching and support.
All right, Liz, is there anything else you want folks to know before we hop off of here?
Liz: I just had a great time coaching with you and I hope to come back soon. I just absolutely feel like you’re a great coach for pretty much any area of life. I started out working only on work stuff, but ended up working on some relationship stuff and that was great too. So yeah, you’re a tremendous resource and I’m so grateful for all your help.
Kori: Thank you so much. And I can’t wait till you come back, you’re such a delight to coach. And for everyone out there listening, if you would like to work with me, I do currently offer single session calls, which you can find at KoriLinn.com/learnmore.
Or if you are looking to work together in a three month package, you can sign up for one of those free consults, like Liz was talking about, also at KoriLinn.com/learnmore. And we’ll have a conversation that, first of all, will be super helpful. And second of all, if it seems like a good fit, I’ll tell you how you can hire me.
All right, y’all that’s what I have for you this week. Have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Kori: Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. Today we have my client Liz in to talk about her experience of working with me in one-on-one coaching. Liz is a screenwriter, director, and professor, and we had such a fun time working together as I also have a background in writing. Liz, do you want to say hello to everyone and tell them a little bit about why you came to work with me?
Liz: Yes, absolutely. First of all, I’m so extremely honored and excited to be here. I have been a fan of the podcast for a long time and listened to it before I even started working with you. So very special to be here. And I came to one-on-one coaching with you because through another coach’s program I saw a webinar that you did. I am going to botch the title of it, so I’m not even going to try to say what it was, but it definitely had something to do with burnout, I think, work burnout.
Please feel free to correct this quote, but I just remember that you said something along the lines of, if you motivate yourself with shame and fear to accomplish things, then those accomplishments will feel like shame and fear when you get there.
But if you motivate yourself through, I forgot what you said, joy, fun, pleasure, whatever it was, that’s how it will feel when you get there. And it was one of those moments where I could just feel a veil being lifted and I was like, okay, I have to work with this person. I will be looking up her website.
Kori: I love that. Yeah, I also don’t remember the name of that training. It might have been, I think it was originally titled something about burnout, and then I think they re-titled it to be about perfectionism because so much of the content of that one in particular was about burnout from the perfectionist point of view. And a lot of perfectionists do try to fuel their effort with shame or anxiety or those kinds of unpleasant emotions. And then we wind up at the end of it feeling a lot more of those unpleasant emotions.
So I love that you, like that’s how you found me. And that that really resonated for you because I think that resonates for a lot of other people too. So that being said, that’s what resonated for you. And then when you hired me, you had that moment of like, oh, I definitely have to work with her. And so was it to change the way you related to your work so that you could learn to work with more joyful, enthusiastic, fun fuel than the guilt, the shame, the anxiety?
Liz: I think that that is what ultimately came out of our coaching for me. Today I was just writing, I actually finished a part of a rewrite on a script today. And you would be so proud of me, I’m giving myself stickers for accomplishing things. I still have to laugh when I say that.
Kori: Yes, we love stickers.
Liz: I’ll say it again, yes, I was giving myself stickers for accomplishing things. I have learned to set low expectations for myself. So for a while I was expecting myself to write for five minutes a day and do five minutes of career outreach a day, which seemed ridiculous to me, but also very doable, right?
So I would do those five minutes, give myself a sticker, feel as proud and accomplished as possible. Then at this point I’m doing 15 minutes a day of each. It’s often more, but if I have gotten that 15 minutes a day done, I will tell myself you did enough today. It’s so much the opposite of how I used to work.
So definitely a lot of that did come out of you and me coaching together and it’s created such, to quote Kori Linn, it’s created such a pleasure gloss over my experience of doing my work, which is amazing because I actually got into this work because I do love it.
I will be honest with you though, I probably started coaching only because I wanted to achieve more.
Kori: Yeah. I think that’s why a lot of people start coaching. They’re like, I want to do more. I want to hit these bigger goals. And listen, I also want to help you do more. I also want to help you hit bigger goals, but I also want that to be sustainable and I want it to be able to be something that can feel good. And for a lot of people, the pressure to achieve more often makes the work itself feel bad and then they actually achieve less.
So what you’re talking about of lowering your standards, a lot of listeners are probably like, what the hell? Why would I lower my standards? It’s like lowering what counts as success. And then you actually end up doing more, which leads to more success. That’s kind of the methodology there.
And have you found that by shifting what the definition of success is to those smaller increments, you are taking more action towards your goals and having a more enjoyable experience of it?
Liz: Absolutely. It is bonkers what you can get done in five minutes a day. Especially actually I have to say for my career outreach section, I just started randomly applying to things because my attitude was, well, got to fill up five minutes, got to fill up 15 minutes.
And so I just started applying for grants, opportunities. Now, lo and behold, I got selected to go to a producer’s workshop in Stowe, Vermont this June. I got a scholarship for this opportunity. I’m going to go take this amazing trip. And this, I swear to you, Kori, it’s because I spent 5 to 15 minutes a day just applying for stuff.
Kori: Okay, I did not know about this, listeners, before this moment. So I wish you could see me because I’m doing like little jazz hands. I’m so excited about it. This is the beauty of lowering your standards. Really, it’s not lowering your standards. It’s shrinking the amount of effort you have to do to consider yourself having done a good job.
But what Liz is talking about happens with me and tons of my clients where we’ll be sitting around thinking, well, like, well, I have to do this huge thing and then we’ll do nothing. Whereas if we’re like, okay, all I have to do is five minutes and then I get to high five myself, get stickers and I did a great job. Then we’re just looking around for like, what can we do in five minutes?
And so many people think that nothing can be accomplished in five minutes. But as Liz has just revealed to us, in 5 to 15 minutes a day, you can apply for and get into and get a scholarship to like a super cool event. And that could be true for you also, listeners. Like you could probably be taking just five minutes a day. And I love that timeframe because even if you’re super busy, you can carve out five minutes a day.
And like what kind of amazing miraculous things could you do? Not because you’re setting out to do amazing miraculous things, but because you’re setting out to just do a little incremental effort consistently over time, but you can wind up in incredible places when you do that. Ooh, thank you so much for telling us about it, Liz. I’m so excited for you, but I’m also so excited for every listener who’s going to have something really cool happen because you were willing to go first and then tell them about it.
Liz: And I will add to that too. First of all, I’m just so excited about this. And for all the many people listening to this who have never met me before, this is basically the opposite of my personality. I was once in a writing group where everyone was saying, how should we motivate ourselves to achieve our goals? And I said, well, maybe we should set a really, really high goal and then we’ll fall short of it, but we’ll do more than we would have done otherwise.
And everyone looked at me with a sad face and they were like, we were thinking a pizza party. So I was not the pizza party suggester before. So this is really outside of my usual comfort zone. It did not sound appealing to me. I actually also came to you because I had set what I’ve heard other coaches refer to, and maybe you use this term too, as an impossible goal, right?
So I had set this certain impossible goal. I’m not going to go into details about it right now because it’s sort of in the works. And crazily enough, I talked to you, I remember maybe a few weeks ago or a month ago at a point where I was like, I have not accomplished this impossible goal. I have missed my deadline. And now it actually looks like I may have accomplished a very large portion of that impossible goal through not beating myself up so much, right?
So I had to kind of let it go. And I don’t love the term lower my standards, but like setting the bar so low that I could step over it. And I think I may have actually accomplished that goal.
Kori: Okay, I’m really excited about that. And let’s just riff on that a little bit. I think the idea of lowering your standards kind of feels like bleh to a lot of us. That’s why sometimes the way I explain this is like, lower your standard for what counts as like it’s done, it’s a success. But keep your high standard or even raise your high standard for what would be delightful, incredible, super fun, like extra bonus.
We don’t have to sell ourselves short on the cool things we want to create. But when the cool thing you want to create is so big and so daunting and overwhelming, then a lot of times people don’t do anything towards it. And then that’s when they actually don’t go anywhere at all.
So I think you’re learning a different way to succeed and achieve that involves a lot of lower stakes, right? Like when we take those standards for what counts as good enough or what counts as done or what counts as success, when we take those down, then it becomes doable, right? We’re like, oh, this is low stakes. I can do five minutes a day. I can do 15 minutes a day.
And then we don’t have to beat ourselves up. It’s all very doable. We can celebrate and give ourselves stickers. And that builds up this habit and this consistency of what I’m going to call doability. And the more doability we have, the more we’re like, oh, I can do things. And then we can raise the standards and the stakes back up a little, so we’re still doing pretty incredible things, in my opinion, if that extra effort is required. Sometimes it’s not, sometimes we do it in just five minutes a day.
So what you said earlier was that when you saw the webinar, it was kind of like that light bulb moment for you of like, oh, if I fuel myself with anxiety or shame, then my achievements will feel like anxiety and shame. Do you feel like learning to do this smaller approach, this five minute approach, this not beating yourself up even if you don’t hit it a hundred percent on the original timeline, or even if the timeline is getting close and you’re not sure if you’re going to hit it.
One of the things you were originally attracted to with coaching was the idea from that training I did about shifting what you use to fuel your achievement and also shifting the emotional experience of what it’s like to work towards your goals.
And it sounds like you’ve achieved that because now you have a much more pleasurable way of working and it’s more enjoyable. It feels more doable. And you are also getting a lot done, even if you’re not setting that wildly daunting goal that you were talking about, like with your pizza party friends.
Liz: Yes, definitely true. I’m experiencing a lot more pleasure, particularly in my experience of writing. And honestly, even in my experience of career outreach, it’s pretty pleasant to just go through my emails, send something out. I am drinking hot cocoa. I’m listening to music. I have a very nice smelling candle that I spend some money on because I really like the smell of it. And I will light that candle every time I’m writing, which just gives this sensorial pleasure to the experience of smell, taste, sound. And that just makes it fun.
And as I’ve heard you point out in your podcast, you haven’t said it exactly this way, but when things are fun, we want to do that.
Kori: So fun gets it done.
Liz: Exactly, fun gets it done.
Kori: I’m so glad you said that because I feel like when I talk about being satisfied as fuck, when I talk about living a delicious life, I think a lot of people are like, why? I just need to get promoted. I just need to get this thing. But when you make the effort feel good, first of all, it just feels good. That’s super fun. But second of all, it makes you more likely to stick with the thing long enough for you to then achieve the goal.
And you’re a writer, you want to write for your whole career, right? So it is in the interest of that goal for you to make writing feel good to do, because then it takes less willpower. It takes less discipline. It takes less “motivation” to achieve that because you’re like, oh, I like this thing.
Liz: Definitely. And I will say, combining with the short timeframe at this point, I do not usually write for only 15 minutes a day. But if I say to myself, hey, so could we write for 15 minutes right now, as opposed to like, okay, we’re going to write for a solid block of four hours. And this must be finished by the end and the stakes are high. I’m much more willing to sit down and write for 15 minutes.
And even though it’s not the point of it, when I do write for 15 minutes, I usually then want to keep writing because I’ve gotten over that hump of inertia and I’ve started and then it is fun, right? Then I’m enjoying it. But there’s something about just getting started and thinking about the task and either a small manageable feeling task, like I’m tired, but I could do 15 minutes as opposed to, I’m tired, there’s no way that I could write for two hours right now. Maybe I do end up writing for two hours, but taking it bit by bit makes it so much more manageable.
Kori: Yeah. I love that you point that out. I also think that if you write for 15 minutes every day, first of all, that adds up. That adds up to a lot of time every week, over the months, the year. And also like sometimes, yes, you’ll write more, but sometimes you’ll probably also write more powerfully. When we build up the consistent habit, when we make it pleasurable, you would also be amazed how much you can get done.
You, Liz, probably already know. But you, listeners, will be amazed how much you can get done in a 15 minute block when you don’t have to spend a bunch of time beating yourself up or talking yourself into it or all these other things. You can work so powerfully when you kind of have that consistent habit and when it feels yummy to do so.
Liz: Yeah. And I will say, since career outreach has been part of this bite-sized approach that I’m taking, I got a rejection from some program that I had applied to today and I didn’t even remember applying for it. So my level of disappointment was actually quite low because I was like, oh, I must’ve applied to that in some 15 minute period of just doing stuff. I was invested in the practice of applying instead of heavily invested in the outcome.
Kori: Okay. I’m obsessed with the fact that you said that because I think this is what everyone needs to know. A lot of people do not want to put themselves out there because they feel very sensitive to rejection. They feel very sensitive to not being liked or feeling silly or all these things, right?
But if you only put yourself out there like once every three months, you remember it, you know it, you’re anxious, you’re obsessed about it. Like every day you’re biting your nails. You’re like, are they going to email me? Whereas if you spend even that five minutes or up to the 15 minutes every day, you’re just going to have to come up with so many different things to put yourself out there to, or apply for, even though it is, like we said, such a small doable increment of time, it’s also a bunch of time. Like after you do the obvious first steps, you’ll be like, I just got to look around for some shit to apply to. I got to look around for a scholarship. I got to look around for a grant.
And then you apply to so many that you’re not so sensitive to the rejection. You’re not lying awake at night worrying what that one person thinks of you because you’ve planted a lot of seeds. And the more seeds you plant, first of all, if you plant a lot of seeds and some of them don’t bloom, not a big deal because you have a lot of other seeds and some of them are blooming.
So when you are rejected, I think it does feel so much less painful because you can also kind of see that bigger kind of math game of like, oh yeah, some things work out. Some things don’t. It’s all okay and I can continue to put myself out there in my little increments and you’re building something really beautiful and really powerful. And lots of real opportunities are coming through.
Liz: Yeah, I totally agree. You make me think I just bought a little packet of California wildflower seeds that you’re just supposed to sprinkle over the ground and then some of them come up and some of them don’t. But it’s a nice packet filled with varied seeds, so you’re going to get beautiful flowers one way or the other.
Kori: I love that visual. We both live in California, listeners. So we’re both like, yeah, California wildflowers, poppies. We love them.
Liz: Exactly.
Kori: Okay. So let’s do a few more questions about what it was like to work together. What would you say your favorite part of coaching with me one-on-one was?
Liz: I really am a big fan of your sense of humor.
Kori: Thank you.
Liz: I just like how, you know, I did end up inevitably working on some pretty deep stuff with you. To go back to that initial question of why did I come into coaching, I really did feel like even though I’ve always been a pretty hardworking person and somewhat ambitious person, I just felt like there were some internal things inside of me holding me back. So I wanted to try to unearth those in coaching and that can be some heavy stuff.
So I just really appreciated your sense of humor. You were never disrespectful, obviously, or making fun of me, but just like taking things with a lightness that made it a lot of fun to work with you.
And then I’m putting this word on you, I don’t know if you would use this, but I also feel like you have really good intuition. I think probably what sold me on working with you in the first place was, I think after I saw that webinar I had some type of consult call with you, right? You offered, I believe, a free consult of, I don’t know, 20 minutes or something like that. I can’t remember.
And I said something to you about having trouble earning money and you just had this great intuition. I’m probably saying this slightly wrong, but it was something along the lines of you asked me like how much money had I actually earned? And then when I laid it out, I saw that I had earned money up to a certain point. And then maybe something had scared me at that point.
It was just, you were very intuitive in helping me to see the problem in a different way than I had seen it before. Maybe that’s a little vague, but you just did it throughout and that was something that I valued very much.
Kori: I love that. Thank you. Yeah, I do think there’s a lot of intuition. And as a coach, I’ve now been in business for nearly six years. And so the more people I’ve coached too, the more I kind of get these little nudges of like, I’m going to ask about this or here’s an area where a lot of people have blind spots, so we’re just going to check in. But I love to hear about the experience from the client point of view.
And I do think often in coaching, we work on really heavy things. Not always, it’s not required, but a lot of times that’s part of what people bring. And I do think being able to approach that with humor is really helpful for being able to tackle it without feeling attacked by it. So I’m glad to hear that came through as well.
Were there any hesitations you had about coaching with me? And what are your thoughts on any of them now, if you had any?
Liz: I will say when I initially got into coaching through another coaching program, I probably had more hesitations about coaching in general. I think my biggest hesitation is that I am not a fan of diet culture and I thought of life coaches as being people who coach people to lose weight. So that turns out to absolutely sometimes be true, but not true across the board in any way.
So I think once I discovered what I will term feminist coaching, right, so coaches who felt like they were working more within my value system, I didn’t have as many hesitations. And really, by the time I got to you, I did not have a lot of hesitation. I had seen that webinar. I also trust my own intuition and I felt intuitively that you had something that I wanted. And we had a great consult call. So I didn’t have a lot of hesitations at that point.
Kori: Yeah, I love that you brought that up, though, because I think that you are correct that there is definitely a section of the coaching industry that is diet culture oriented. And one of my coaching certifications is actually from the other coach Liz has talked about whose program I’ve done a couple of trainings for, and she is body positive and anti-diet culture. Her additional coaching certification is in intersectional feminism.
And so I think that has really influenced the direction of my coaching and also just like my life and the people I’m friends with and the things I’ve learned about from them. And I think it’s interesting because I don’t coach on body image very much, but I do coach on it occasionally. And in addition, I think there are crossovers sometimes between diet culture as a way of eating and hustle culture as a way of working.
So I think it’s interesting too, to see that like, there’s different ways to coach on anything. Like there’s a way to coach on achievement that is about being very regimented and being very organized and doing things in those bigger blocks of time or like going all in. And then there’s ways to, you know, work that are more like intuitive eating where it’s like, well, what feels good to you? And what are you craving and how could we get it done if any different way was possible?
So I thank you for sharing that that’s a hesitation you had with the industry. And I do think it’s helpful for everyone to know that that doesn’t have to be what coaching is. It doesn’t have to be about upholding societal bullshit. And a lot of times the kind of coaching I’m doing is 100% the opposite, where I’m like, let’s dismantle this socialization because it’s making us miserable and blocking us from making the choices we want to make or getting the things done we want to get done.
Liz: That’s such a great point. My experience is that at the point where somebody has dismantled their attachment to diet culture, it’s so in the air and the water everywhere that I find that people who have questioned that have questioned many other things as well.
Kori: Yeah, I agree.
Liz: And it’s something that I do appreciate about your coaching.
Kori: Yeah, I think once you begin to pick apart any piece of socialization, a lot of the other pieces begin to come undone too. Like I know for me stepping into my queer identity was also something where I was like, wait a minute, maybe a bunch of other stuff I believed to be true about the world and myself, maybe those things are also either incomplete or not the only option, maybe more things are possible.
Okay, is there anything else you would like listeners to know about how to create a wildly satisfying life, about what it’s like to work with me or anything else you want to share?
Liz: Well, I like what you just said about your comparison between intuitive eating and maybe I will call it intuitive working, which I don’t think is a term that I have ever heard before. But there’s something that I really got from, even from that first webinar of yours and then through our coaching, which is about the embodied experience of what I’m doing. Like really being present in it.
I am also a fan of meditation, not that that is necessary for coaching to work, but that’s just been such a key. Like being present, again, in the process has been really helpful. And I also just want to say I did end up having a breakthrough at the end of our coaching time together, which seems very detail oriented, but I had always thought that I had low self-esteem or felt bad about myself.
And through working it out with you back and forth in our coaching conversation, I realized that I didn’t actually feel bad about myself. I felt that it was unsafe to feel good about myself. And that distinction, it feels like splitting hairs, but it’s actually a huge distinction, right? Like to be able to find that I sort of had this well of self-esteem inside of me and that the issue really was working on finding the safety to express that on the outside. So I’m very grateful for that.
Kori: Yeah, I don’t think it’s at all splitting hairs actually, because this is a thing with coaching is when you find out where the issue actually is, then you can fix the issue there. And when you thought the issue was your self-esteem, then you had to work on your self-esteem. But if the self-esteem was already in good shape, then working on self-esteem wasn’t going to help you, right? It wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t going to solve the problem.
As soon as you figured out like, oh, I actually feel great about myself, it just doesn’t feel safe to express that. And maybe it doesn’t even feel safe to be aware of it in my own mind. Then we could begin to work on the piece that was actually the obstacle that was actually blocking you from having the experience you want it to have and was blocking you from enjoying your good self-esteem, right?
And so it’s a little bit like doing surgery. Not that I’m like a surgeon, y’all, I’m not. But it is a little bit like that in that doing surgery isn’t just like, oh, something in your leg hurts. We’re going to cut the whole thing off. It’s like, oh, we have to figure out which of these tiny bones or which of these ligaments or which of these tendons or which muscle and like, why. Why is it hurting like that?
And when you’re not quite sure what the problem is, there are some things you can try, but the more specific you get in there, the more detailed the solution can be. And I do think that is the benefit of working with a coach versus doing coaching on your own. Like, listen, the podcast is a free resource. I’m such a fan of DIY and I realize it’s a privilege to be able to work with a coach because it does cost money and not everyone has access to that resource.
But when you can work with a coach, when you’re willing and ready and excited to make that investment, it can really help you understand the deep intricacy of like, oh, this is the piece that wasn’t working. And then you can address that.
And I think the benefit of that is it can super speed up the solutioning, the resolution, the moving forward, because then you’re able to apply a very detailed solution versus like, it’s like my knee hurts, I ice it, right? Icing my knee is great, but it’s not solving a problem at the same intricate level. And it might take a lot longer and it actually might just treat the pain versus solving it.
Anyways, I’m deep in my metaphors here. But thank you so much, Liz, for sharing that because I think that’s a really great example of what can happen in one-on-one coaching where the coach’s laser focus is on you all the time in a good way. And also what can happen when you work with a coach over time. Because the very first coaching call can be super helpful, but as a coach gets to know you, that’s when we’re like, oh, I’ve put the pieces together. Here’s something that I think is going on that can help you super speed up your progress.
Liz: Yeah. And I’ll just add one more thing. First of all, I agree with that 100%. And I think that intuition that I appreciate in you is so great. It is sort of a diagnostic intuition, even though of course there’s no official diagnosis here.
But I found that you readjusted my sense of what the problem was so often with my self-coaching practice I’m then so much more capable of going in and helping myself to then work on the correct problem, right? Like coming up with solutions to the correct problem is not as hard as coming up with millions of solutions to the wrong problem.
And I also just wanted to add that during the time that I was working with you, you also offered this Slack messaging. And so I was able to write, maybe because I am a writer I like this, but I was able to write out my thoughts in between sessions to you. And that was so helpful to me also in sometimes getting to those coaching calls, like ready to bring something to the table that we could really dig into.
Kori: Yes, I love that you brought that up. The main coaching happens in 45 minute calls, but we have the Slack to chat in between. I think it’s nice to have multiple methodologies of connecting. Some people really feel more comfortable writing. Some people really like to verbally process things through, but that is part of what happens inside the one-on-one container and groups when I do groups, is there’s lots of ways to get coaching and support.
All right, Liz, is there anything else you want folks to know before we hop off of here?
Liz: I just had a great time coaching with you and I hope to come back soon. I just absolutely feel like you’re a great coach for pretty much any area of life. I started out working only on work stuff, but ended up working on some relationship stuff and that was great too. So yeah, you’re a tremendous resource and I’m so grateful for all your help.
Kori: Thank you so much. And I can’t wait till you come back, you’re such a delight to coach. And for everyone out there listening, if you would like to work with me, I do currently offer single session calls, which you can find at KoriLinn.com/learnmore.
Or if you are looking to work together in a three month package, you can sign up for one of those free consults, like Liz was talking about, also at KoriLinn.com/learnmore. And we’ll have a conversation that, first of all, will be super helpful. And second of all, if it seems like a good fit, I’ll tell you how you can hire me.
All right, y’all that’s what I have for you this week. Have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
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