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 Talia Gutin. Talia is a Certified Life Coach and Mentor based in Brooklyn, New York.
NCA: Can you describe your coaching practice and the kinds of clients you typically work with?
Talia: At its essence, my coaching practice is based around helping women. My primary clients that I work with are women in their 20’s and early 30’s, helping them take personal responsibility and to create conscious relationships. It’s very much about getting to know yourself. Getting to know your own programming and patterns so that you can ultimately create a really healthy relationship with yourself, which is the gateway for creating a conscious, fulfilling partnership with another person.
Ultimately, I’m trying to help women rise as leaders in the world. That’s my biggest Why. What I have found in my own experience and with the many women that I’ve worked with over the years is that women sort of fall on two ends of the spectrum.
One is a woman who will lack boundaries and lack of clear sense of self and independence. When that woman comes to me, I’ll help her work on learning how to create healthy boundaries in her life and how to get in touch with her purpose. I’ll help her start to get clear on her values and how to live her values in her daily life until she becomes and feels independent in who she is.
The other end of the spectrum is women who are perhaps so independent in who they are and so purpose-driven that it actually has the impact of making them closed off to intimacy and relationships. The work I do with them is helping them take down those intense boundaries that have become too rigid over time and help them learn how to drop into their heart, learn how to open up to love and connection. Ultimately, this woman is the archetype of a female leader who is both a deeply independent woman and deeply open to love and intimacy.
I was 22 when I started coaching and I heard very, very frequently from other people, “You haven’t lived enough of your life to be a coach. What are you doing?” And I thought, “Thank God I’m starting this work when I’m 22 years old.” That was my reframe. I was like, “Yes, I get to start this work when I’m 22 years old so I get to shape my life through this work.”
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?
Talia: The biggest reward is seeing women grow and seeing them transform before my eyes. It’s seeing them sincerely choosing to show up differently in their lives and starting to connect the dots. That feels so incredibly fulfilling every single time. I serve as a facilitator or a reflector of their experiences, and when they’re able to start to connect those dots for themselves, that is incredible for me to witness as their coach.
I feel really fulfilled by this work because it feels like it’s my calling. There’s congruency there.
What’s challenging is when I get in my own way as a coach. When I try to problem-solve or to control the outcome. It’s when I have a fixed agenda for this woman that I’m working with versus just really trusting her and trusting that she is her greatest expert of her life. It’s when I forget that and I need to self-manage in that way.
NCA: Can you think of a mentor or a coach in your own career who was the most vital to your success and in what ways did this mentor help you thrive in your career?
Talia: My mentor/teacher is also a life coach. Her name is Coby Kozlowski. She helped shape the foundations of my own self leadership — of me truly taking responsibility for my own life and rising to my own potential. She’s someone who so beautifully models feminine leadership in the world — someone who stands in her power and is so beautifully intuitive and open.
She was the first person I met in my life where I saw what she was doing and I was like, “That’s what I want to be doing. What she’s doing — her coaching, her facilitation, her teaching, her leading, her speaking.” It was the first time that I was able to identify a path that I wanted to take in my life. She’s been incredible.
NCA: What is one piece of advice that you would offer somebody who is in the beginning stage of their coaching career and they might be battling some self-doubt in their ability to coach?
Talia: I was 22 when I started coaching and I heard very, very frequently from other people, “You haven’t lived enough of your life to be a coach. What are you doing?” And I thought, “Thank God I’m starting this work when I’m 22 years old.” That was my reframe. I was like, “Yes, I get to start this work when I’m 22 years old so I get to shape my life through this work.” Not to say that it’s any better than coming to it later in life, but it was just a way for me to reframe it.
One piece of advice is to get as much practice as you possibly can. Say yes to every opportunity to coach at the beginning stage. Basically, if you had a pulse, I would coach you. I reached out to everyone in my network, even to clients that were the worst fit for me. I had to work with them in order to know that they weren’t a good fit.
I said yes to any opportunity I could, just to practice. Over time that gave me the confidence so that when people say that to me I’m like, “I know what I’m doing. I’m good at this.” I feel confident in my abilities because I’ve thrown myself in the arena again and again and again and I’ve gotten super uncomfortable. Because there’s one thing to study coaching and there’s another thing to actually be doing it.
Lastly, the other piece that feels so important to me is the integrity piece. If I’m asking my clients to do something, am I doing that in my life? Am I embodying that thing I’m asking my client to embody in their lives? That also gave me a greater sense of confidence and integrity in my own work at the beginning, in the middle, and all throughout. The more that I lived what I was asking my clients to do and to live, the more confidence I felt as a coach and as a leader.
