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 Anza Goodbar. Anza is a Coach, Speaker, and Author based in Greenwood Village, Colorado.
NCA: Can you describe your coaching practice and the kinds of clients you typically work with?
Anza: My company focuses on women empowerment. Most of the women that I work with are middle-aged. Most of them are at a crossroads in their life. Maybe they’re becoming an empty-nester, maybe they’ve gone through a divorce, maybe they’ve lost a spouse, maybe they’re wanting to start their own business. They’ve retired and they want to start that next chapter in their lives.
And so one of the things that I have discovered through my career in coaching is that women show up the same way in three aspects of their life: in their work, in their personal relationships like friendship, and in a romantic relationship. And one of the biggest reasons that women don’t succeed is because they don’t feel worthy of asking for what they want or need or desire. And so that shows up in visibility issues in their business. It shows up in self-worth issues. It shows up in issues of not feeling like they are worthy of receiving money for the job that they’re doing.
Many women at this stage in life don’t have a great support system. People are like, “Oh, you should play it safe. Oh, don’t rock the boat.”, and so they really need someone to help bolster their confidence in their self and their level of self worth to really move forward.
NCA: What initially got you interested in this career path and what kind of degree or certifications did you need to complete, if any?
Anza: I have a degree in journalism and communication and when I decided I wanted to become a coach, I know that a lot of people just say, “Yay, I’m a coach!”, and then just start selling coaching services and I thought it was really important to be certified with a respectable company.
And having been a businesswoman for many years, I’ve followed a man by the name of John Maxwell and he’s a very well known leadership author. He’s written, I bet, 200 books on the topic of leadership and he offered a certification program for coaching, speaking, and training and that was the path that I took. I thought one, he’s very well known in the business world. He has great ethics and so, that was the path that I went knowing that I was going to want to do more training/teaching and speaking from the stage. And so it kind of gave me all of the ammunition that I needed to forge the path that I wanted to go down.
Many women at this stage in life don’t have a great support system. People are like, “Oh, you should play it safe. Oh, don’t rock the boat.”, and so they really need someone to help bolster their confidence in their self and their level of self worth to really move forward.
I think that it’s really important when you’re looking at starting a coaching business to have a business plan and an idea of where you want to go. Looking at what your strengths are, how you want to reach the people, how do you want to gain this ability and credibility in the industry because it’s really hard to stand out. There’s a lot of competition out there and so for me, I wanted to author books because that can give me a global reach. It also gives me a tangible item that I can sell from stage when I speak or if I go to a retreat. It also gives me a residual income outside of just working with private and group coaching clients.
I owned a mortgage brokerage company from 2004 to 2008 and when the mortgage industry crashed, I lost my business. And so that started me on a path of a virtual business. Back in the very beginning of the virtual assistance industry, I had a friend who was a virtual assistant and she kept saying, “You should hire someone.” And I was like, “It doesn’t make sense to have a virtual assistant in a brick-and-mortar company. I need everyone here to do things face-to-face with clients.” But when I had to close my business, my perspective changed.
And so, I went into the business thinking “Oh, he has this mortgage background. Oh, I have this planning background.” These are the types of clients I’m going to work with and what I ended up working with were people wanting to do startups. And so as I was working with people and they were either not able to get their business up the ground or they had plateaued and couldn’t get to the next level, I started to see that it wasn’t that they didn’t have good systems or processes in place.
It wasn’t that they didn’t have great products. It was there was something holding them back and so figuring out what is it that’s holding them back and that’s what got me into starting getting the certification because people throw around the word “mindset” all the time: “Oh, you need to have an entrepreneurial mindset or a business mindset or a positive mindset.”, or whatever but it’s more than that. It’s really being able to help people with their personal development and find out what fear is holding you back.
One of the clients that I worked with — her parents had told her when she was little that she would just be poor and she would struggle to pay her bills. And that was the life that she was living. And we had been doing business coaching for a couple of years when finally, we got to that. It wasn’t like a fear that was holding her back. It was a false belief that was holding her back. Once she was able to determine what the context of that conversation was and go back and process and have some conversations with her parents, she raised her rates six fold over the course of the next year. It totally changed her life.
So, just being able to be more comprehensive in the services and the way I’m able to help my clients succeed. As you learn more about what makes people tick, you want to help people in a meaningful level so that they can live their best life and whether that’s through helping them create deeper, more intimate relationships or creating a more successful business or becoming a better parent — just becoming that best version was really what was driving me to want to get into the coaching side of the business.
People throw around the word “mindset” all the time: “Oh, you need to have an entrepreneurial mindset or a business mindset or a positive mindset” or whatever but it’s more than that. It’s really being able to help people with their personal development and find out what fear is holding you back.
NCA: What is the most rewarding part of your career?
Anza: I think it’s when people have that “Aha!” moment where all of a sudden they get clarity and can start to connect the dots. It’s like, “I’ve been struggling for so long with XYZ and this has been a cycle and I can’t break the cycle.” And as you help them with their own self-awareness that they get to that point where “Oh, I get it now.”
Just for an instance, I use journaling as a primary tool in my coaching business and at first, people are very resistant. You know, it’s just a silly exercise and they don’t see the value in doing it but I work with them to give them structure and prompts and whatnot and they start to see patterns on their own.
One of my clients would say that a particular issue was no big deal and I’m like, “You know what? It’s a very big deal. We’ve been talking about this one issue for two years now.” And they don’t realize it and I think “Go back and read in your journal and see what you’ve been writing.”, and it’s like, it’s all there on a day-to-day basis. I don’t realize it because I’ve been so comfortable with that way of thinking that I just didn’t realize the spiral that that was creating and to be able to go back and look at things in a journal and say, “This is the pattern that I have. This is the way I process things and keep coming to the same conclusion.”
It’s also a great tool to be able to help people build confidence and see their successes and to be able to have that celebration with them. You’re there as their support, their encourager but you get to participate in those celebrations that it’s so life-changing so many people.
NCA: What is the most challenging aspect of the work that you do?
Anza: When the issue seems so clear to me and they just don’t get it. And you try to ask the right questions and you try to help them see how a small thing could make a profound difference. Sometimes that’s really difficult for me. To not just say, “What? This is the issue. If you would just do this.”, you know, but to help them find the solution on their own sometimes is very challenging. And sometimes it’s really heart-breaking when you see them go through the same cycle and you see them truly hurting and being frustrated and feeling like they’re not making progress. That, I think, is the most difficult part.
NCA: Can you think of one client or mentor who challenged your beliefs or made you rethink the way you approach your clients or your work?
Anza: So, I’m going to say my coach is probably one of the people who has helped me transform. We all look at like through filters and I am a pretty stable, fundamental Christian woman and I know that in the coaching business, a lot of people are into the big woo-woo-woo stuff and all of the very new-aged spiritual side of things. And for a long time, my mind was really closed to that. I didn’t believe it. It felt like everything needed to fit through my Judeo-Christian lens and it was really limiting the amount of people that I worked with.
I was okay with that, but then I went to a retreat with her and I found a way — the “Law of Attraction,” that’s very prevalent in the coaching world — and I found a way for the Law of Attraction to make sense to scripture for me. So I can teach the Law of Attraction all day long and feel comfortable that I’m not just doing woo-woo fantasy technique or theory to make somebody feel better, but I feel that I can back it up with scripture for my client to really need that but I also can be open to some other more woo-woo ideas that can help people on their own self discovery.
NCA: Finally, what advice would you give someone looking to get started in the career path that you chose?
Anza: The first piece of advice that I would say is make sure that you write a business plan because coaching is not a get-rich-fast kind of industry. It takes a lot of time and energy to build credibility. I would definitely say work with a mentor who can help guide you on your path and be really clear about the type of person that you want to work with because that clarity is going to help you attract the tribe that you’re meant to work with. I think those are the three big things: Have a business plan, have a mentor, and just be really clear about the change that you want to effect with the group of people that you want to work with.
