Our main objective here at the National Coach Academy is to enable aspiring coaches to reach their full professional potential. One of the most effective ways to educate students about the world of coaching is by offering them a window into the world of real, practicing coaches and showing them all the different ways coaches make a difference in the lives of their clients.
We hope today’s interview adds another insightful glimpse into the dynamic world of coaching.
Today we are interviewing Farrah Blakely. Farrah is an Empowerment Coach specializing in coaching divorced women. She is based in Dallas, Texas.
NCA: Can you describe your coaching practice and the kinds of clients you typically work with?
Farrah: My coaching practice is online. I work with divorced women who are ready to connect to their internal GPS to attract their right love. I focus on divorced women because there are very few resources available to help you reestablish that next phase of life after you’ve gone through a divorce. Getting back into dating, knowing the best way to date, getting comfortable dating, and understanding what you want and how to go about it is scary and intimidating. I found there was a gap in that area and decided to offer my coaching services around that.
NCA: Other than getting back into the dating world, what other endeavor or goal have you found to be common among women that you work with?
Farrah: Having a sense of confidence and knowing how to speak up for themselves. How to take charge of their voice.
When you’re married, you apart of a partnership. It can be easy to mute yourself sometimes out of fear, resentment or you let your partner take the lead or you let them make all the decisions. Then when you come out of that and it’s been 10, 15, 20 years, you’re in the practice of not using that skill, you’re not used to using the muscle of speaking up for what you want when you want it. It goes hand in hand with learning to date again and put yourself back out there, but it also is a part of the foundation to create that confidence. It’s a skill that can up-level your career, love life and attracting what you want. It’s like a ripple effect throughout the other areas of your life when you can navigate that skill and master it.
NCA: In working with your clients, what would you say is the most rewarding part of that process and on the flip side of that, what is the most challenging aspect of the work that you do?
Farrah: The most rewarding part of coaching is helping someone make the shift. When you see the light bulb go off and when they get it. You’re not forcing them to get it, but they got it on their own and they can release that old belief or that old story or old habit that was keeping them stuck. That is rewarding. I love that part about coaching.
One of the challenges with coaching is that coaching is not telling people what to do. For a lot of people that haven’t been in the coaching space, they often think that coaching is just telling people what to do. They think, “Oh, I’m really good at giving advice and I’m really good at telling people how to do things.” But that’s not what coaching is. It’s not that at all.
Coaching is not cheerleading and coaching is not just encouraging people. It’s helping them establish their best path to get them to their goal. They are co-partnering with you as a coach to create that path. It’s not you as the coach creating the path or you as the coach cheering them on and being overly positive. Both of you come together in a mastermind for the purpose of carving out their path & creating the steps to get to their goal. The client decides the goal, not the coach. The client decides, “I want to go this far. I don’t want to go that far,” and the coach is there to listen and help them be as successful as possible within those parameters that they’re setting.
Coaching is not cheerleading and coaching is not just encouraging people. It’s helping them establish their best path to get them to their goal.
NCA: Can you think of a mentor or a coach in your own career who has been quite influential on your path to becoming a coach and how did this individual influence you and help you reach this point?
Farrah: Someone that has been very influential to me, though I have not worked with him directly, is Kain Ramsay. He is a life coach out of the UK. I actually found him by accident, but his teachings and the way he teaches are so impactful. It’s life changing. I actually found him when I was going through some personal stuff when I hadn’t yet decided to become a life coach. I took some of his classes and it was so impactful for me. I was able to understand myself better and I was able to identify what I wanted. That’s when I made the identification that I want to do life coaching. I wanted to help other people get this clear about their life and themselves.
I’ve never worked with him. I’ve never even talked to him before. But in all the things he does—his YouTube videos, his Facebook group — he’s down to earth. He keeps it real. It’s practical knowledge and he gives you the application of what this would look like in your life on a day to day, or what this would look like in a certain scenario with this situation going on. That’s what I like about him because I was able to take it and apply it.
Sometimes with coaching or any type of personal development, you read the book or you watch the video and you’re like, “Wow, that was so great,” but you don’t know how to apply it to your own life so that you can get results. But with Kain, he gives you the practical and application to take with you and I love that.
NCA: One of the most common challenges new coaches face is self-doubt. Some coaches call it Imposter Syndrome, where early on they feel somehow inadequate to take on the role of coach. What is one piece of advice that you would give to somebody who is in the beginning stage of their coaching career and dealing with these doubts in their mind?
Farrah: I felt the same way, but the guidance I received from another coach—she had been doing it for three, four years and was very successful—is to not discount all the stuff you did before you became a coach, which is what I was doing. All of my years of work and all of my years of study where I had degrees in other areas, I didn’t consider that to be inclusive to my coaching experience.
When I became a coach, I thought, “Oh, I’m a new coach. I really don’t have any experience,” but that wasn’t true. When I considered all of my work history and all of the schooling I completed, there were tons of times in those years where coaching played a part. I didn’t know at those times that’s what it was, but I looked back and I was able to identify certain situations where yes, I was coaching and I didn’t even realize it. I was doing this. That was a value-add and I didn’t even realize it.
I made that shift and I thought, “Yes, I am experienced. I’m not new to this the way I thought I was.” I’ve been doing this for 20-plus years. It just wasn’t under the title “coach” and I wasn’t getting paid to be a coach. I don’t think people realize that. They think “This was when I decided to become a coach,” so from that day forward, that’s what they’re looking at instead of considering all of the years of their work experience and life experience where it counts. All of that goes towards your skill level.
When I realized all that, that’s when my confidence increased. That’s when I said, “Okay, I can do this. I’ve got this.”
