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 Elaine Taylor-Klaus. Elaine is a Professional Certified Coach, parenting coach, writer, speaker and Co-Founder of ImpactADHD®. Elaine provides Parent Support for managing “complex” kids with ADHD, anxiety and other challenges.
NCA: Can you describe your coaching practice and the kinds of clients you typically work with?
Elaine: My company is called ImpactADHD®. We’re an online resource for parents of what we call complex kids — kids with ADHD, learning disabilities, anxiety, depression, etc. I work pretty much exclusively with parents of complex kids. In ImpactADHD®, we do private coaching, we do group coaching and we do a lot of training. What we learned over time is that when you add coaching and support to training, it really reinforces the learning. So everything we do has some combination of the three for our particular audience.
I also have a separate part of my practice privately where I do certification coaching and mentor coaching for new coaches through a company called Touchstone Coaching.
NCA: What initially got you interested in this career path and what kind of degree or certifications did you need to complete, if any?
Elaine: I was a parent of complex kids myself, so I was thinking of a way to support other parents. I thought I was going to go back to graduate school and become a therapist. I had even taken the GREs and I couldn’t find a program that met my schedule as a mom with three small kids. So, I thought I was doing coaching as a stop-gap or interim measure.
Then I did a couple of coaching certifications and I went to a CTI coaching fundamentals weekend and I called my husband the first afternoon in tears and I said, “I found it. This is it.” I dove in and I’ve been exclusively coaching ever since. I discovered this modality for behavior change that was so empowering and so positive and so wellness-based, and that was a real attraction to me. I completed training with CTI, I did certification through their program and then I also did their leadership training program.
NCA: What is it about therapy that you decided was not the right fit for you?
Elaine: I think that therapy is really valuable. I don’t dismiss it. But I think that therapy starts with the assumption that there’s something wrong or something broken that needs to be fixed. And what I loved about coaching is that it started with the assumption that we’re creative and resourceful and whole and that there’s nothing broken. Here’s where we are, where do you want to go, what’s it going to take to get there. We can learn from the past but we don’t dwell there. I think that’s really powerful.
When I was pregnant and having kids, I worked with midwives instead of doctors because I wanted to feel empowered to own the process of being pregnant and delivering kids. I didn’t want to feel like I was sick and that there’s something broken or wrong with me because I was pregnant. What I do now is very much in line with that. Coaching is about what you want to achieve in your life and what’s standing in your way and what will help you get there.
It’s also about empowering you to believe that the answers are in you. You don’t need some outside person to come in and tell you what you need to do to be okay. You’re okay.
Here’s the analogy I love to use: If you came to me as an adult and said, “I never learned to ride a bicycle. I want to ride a bicycle,” a consultant or even a social worker would say, “Well, let’s talk about what’s going on with the problem.” They might get on the bicycle and show you how to ride it, right? Now, a therapist might say, “Well, let’s talk about why you never learned to ride a bike and what was interfering and what was the problem.” And a coach would hold the bike steady if you climb on and then run along beside you until you’re riding on your own.
That’s the core of coaching and I think that’s coaching’s differentiator.
NCA: What is the most rewarding part of your career and on the flip side, what is the most challenging aspect of the work that you do?
Elaine: The most rewarding part of my career is creating a space for families: for parents to reconnect and strengthen their relationship with their kids. It’s about building stronger families and coaching is just a vehicle for doing that. The added benefit is that there’s this cascade impact. So not only am I helping parents strengthen their relationships with their kids, but I’m also helping parents empower their kids to take ownership of their lives and to take a coach approach.
What I didn’t mention in my work with ImpactADHD® is we coach parents and then we train parents in coaching skills — what we call a coach approach. So we’re not training them to become coaches, but we’re training them to use skills from the world of coaching to improve their communication and their dynamics with their kids. There is this cascading impact — like a ripple effect — when supporting these parents. They are actually using these skills with their kids and the kids are learning how to be resilient, take ownership, overcome obstacles, and how to see possibilities in themselves, so it has a beautiful ripple effect.
The challenge, I think, is that a lot of people in the general world think they know what coaching is and they don’t, really. There’s this kind of steep learning curve to help people see what is this thing, really, and how is it different. I have met dozens of therapists that have said “I do coaching, I’m a therapist”, and it’s not the same thing at all. We actually teach a training program to train professionals, to certify them and become licensed to teach our curriculum in local communities. We have a lot of therapists in that program, and they often start off thinking they know what coaching is. By the end, they’re thinking “Wow, now I get the difference.” Oftentimes, they then want to become coaches because it’s so much more of an empowering modality.
I think the biggest obstacle is that we’re new, we’re young, we’re unregulated. Anybody can call themselves a coach. There’s some terrible, terrible coaches out there and there’s some spectacular coaches out there. But it’s really hard for the average consumer to know where to go or who to trust because anybody can call themselves a coach and hang out a shingle. That makes it really difficult for those of us who are actually doing the work, getting trained, and getting coached ourselves.
The ICF has the added challenge of having all these universities starting to teach life coaching from a kind of academic place. I can’t speak to the quality of the programs, the thing about coaching is the experiential piece. And what concerns me about having it become a degree is to make sure that we don’t lose that experiential training, not just teaching.
NCA: Can you talk a little more about the distinction between therapy and the coaching work that you do?
Elaine: Because I’m working with families with kids who are neurodiverse and I’m already bumping into this therapeutic wall, I have to be very conscious of when it’s a coaching issue, when it’s a therapeutic issue and when I need to refer. There’s a lot of ethics involved in the work that I do as well as conscious awareness.
There’s one client that comes to mind who had a child with fetal alcohol syndrome — and that’s just a whole different ball of wax. We take the position that everybody is creative, resourceful and whole — they’re not broken. Even kids with ADD and anxiety and depression are not broken. They have management issues that they need to learn to manage. But there is something different that happens when there is something broken. And with fetal alcohol syndrome, there is something broken in the brain. We haven’t medically made the advances we need to be able to approach that as effectively as I think we’ll be able to in the future.
What I’ve had to shift to in that environment when I have clients with particularly complicated, sometimes frighteningly complicated kids, is to shift from focusing on their kids to supporting and focusing on themselves and caring for themselves. I take a stand for them and their role as a caretaker. I ask their permission to change the agenda — to acknowledge what we can’t do in the confines of a coaching relationship and to shift the focus of the relationship to caring for them as a caregiver.
To me, that’s not hard. Knowing when to refer to a therapist is an absolutely essential role for a coach. You’ve got to know how to do that. It’s knowing when something is not coachable and something else is going on that needs to be addressed by a different resource.
I remember something I learned in coach training long, long ago that really has been a great guide to me: if the same issue keeps coming up again and again and again, refer to a therapist. If they’re bringing the same issue and you’re not making progress, then that’s probably not a coachable issue. I’ve been doing this for a long time and I get faced with the issue every day, so I do have a comfort with it that I think a lot of other coaches might not. We have to trust that we do what we do really well and we don’t do everything. We give ourselves permission to be able to say, “That’s not in my wheelhouse. That’s not in my realm.” It’s not only a value to us and to our clients, but it’s the ethical thing to do.
Or you be transparent about it. I’ve had many times where I’ve said this is a therapeutic issue and I want to refer you to a therapist. If you want to continue to coach with me on these other issues, I’m happy to do that. Transparency is a key role there.
NCA: Finally, what advice would you give someone looking to get started in the career path that you chose?
Elaine: Number 1: get a coach.
If you are not willing to invest in yourself and a coach, then why would anybody be willing to invest with you? The best coaches have coaches. And to think “I can go through a coaching school and get my minimum amount of coaching hours from a mentor or coach and then I’m done and now I know how to do it” is missing what the process of coaching is all about, which is a conscious, ongoing self discovery. The first thing is to commit to the excellence that happens when you hire your own coach.
Number 2: understand that unless you’re going in-house, to be a coach is to be an entrepreneur.
I was talking to a prospective mentor client and she was saying, “Well, I’m just going to hire someone else to do the marketing for me.” I think it’s essential to remember that coaching is about relationships, and the coaching engagement is about the connection between the client and the coach coming together and working together in the interest of a client. Sure, you can hire people and you can get administrative support — I’m a firm believer in all of that. But at the end of the day, you’re the one who they want to work with. So unless you’re an in-house coach at a corporation or company, part of being a coach is being an entrepreneur and building a business and taking a stand for who you are trying to support and understand that that’s your role as part of the business.
You’re not going to be coaching six hours a day, five days a week for most coaches. The coaching is going to be a percentage of what you do and if you can’t find a way to love the other work of building your business, then you’re going to be hard-pressed to be successful in building a business. There’s a ton of ways that you can use great coaching skills to be able to market your business, but knowing that part of your role is to market your business is an essential component.