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 Gabriella Taylor. Gabriella is a Professional Relationship Coach and Minister based in Malibu, CA. She is the creator of Foundations of Extraordinary Love, her signature online transformational educational program for women seeking relationship success.
NCA: Can you describe your coaching practice and the kinds of clients you typically work with?
Gabriella: I work with women who are really committed to learning how to stand up inside of themselves as women. To discover their voice, to honor who they are, to lean into what they truly yearn for since we live in a world where women have been shamed, criticized or taught to people-please and take care of others first.
I work in two different ways. I have a small sector of private clients that work with me for a year minimum and we do a deep level transformation in their lives. I also have women who go through my group programs which are relationship-oriented.
What connects these women is that they’re bright, they’re self-aware, they’ve been doing a lot of work on themselves for a long time, yet for whatever reason, they haven’t been able to connect the dots to a place where they actually feel at ease with themselves. While they may have achieved success in their lives or things are going well out here in the world, inside of them, they still aren’t comfortable in their own skin. The women who come to me in particular are really in this place where “I know everything. I know my psychology. I know my patternings. I have a clear sense of what my issues are but I’m still not happy.” That’s where the true transformation begins in our work together.
In terms of my groups, they come in because they have not only a yearning to be in a loving, sustainable relationship, but they also want to be in a relationship that supports them in experiencing more of who they are on the deepest level, instead of relationship as being a source of emotional drama or spin out or betrayal and mistrust.
I view relationships as vehicles that point us in the direction of our awakening is. I call my work psychospiritual. I have my Master’s degree in psychology, so there’s definitely a huge emphasis on re-sculpting our psychological matrix and orientation to life if it’s not working for us and shifting our psychological perspective and relationship with who we are as a human in a more positive, kind, loving way.
It’s also a spiritual journey. I am also an ordained minister and we are ultimately loving beings having a human experience, so I take into consideration the whole spectrum.
What we all want is just to feel good inside. That’s kind of what unites everyone together.
The more that we can really befriend ourselves and befriend our experience, that’s where the transformation and growth happens. Because if we’re in any level of urgency to get away from what we’re feeling or what’s going on in our life, it’s just going to lock it in.
NCA: What sorts of techniques or strategies do you find are most effective for the women that you work with in getting them to feel more in tune with their real selves?
Gabriella: There’s a high emphasis on emotional literacy, emotional development, and emotional maturation. For a lot of people and specifically for women there are things that happened in our past. Maybe we’re 8 years old, we’re 10 years old, we’re 12 years old and we stopped developing emotionally for one reason or another. Our bodies kept growing and we might be 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years old now, but there’s a part of us that’s frozen in time and underdeveloped emotionally because maybe there was something that happened in the home or in the culture that we grew up in that took precedence over our needs being met.
I identify strongly with Carl Rogers’ person-centered approach to the therapeutic model. The approach is less of a technique; it’s more of a way of being. The idea is to get curious with and match the client’s experience from the perspective that there’s nothing wrong with them. A lot of people go into transformational arenas with this deeply held belief that something’s wrong with them that needs to be fixed.
My perspective, calling upon my years spent in Buddhist monasteries, is the more that we can really befriend ourselves and befriend our experience, that’s where the transformation and growth happens. Because if we’re in any level of urgency to get away from what we’re feeling or what’s going on in our life, it’s just going to lock it in and it creates this cat-chasing-its-tail sort of style.
NCA: What kind of degree, certifications or training have you had to complete to become the coach you are today?
Gabriella: I’d say there’s two things: On the physical world level, I have my Master’s degree in psychology. I’ve done probably 15 different coaching certifications in different modalities. Everything ranging from somatic experiencing to body-centered psychotherapy to a lot of different things within the healing arts realm, to herbology, to energy healing modalities.
I’ve been in the transformational industry since 1994, so it’s been a really long time so I have a lot of tools under my belt. [laughing] It was in it before we even called it coaching.
And to be honest, my best teacher has been the school of life. I had a profoundly challenging early life which basically erupted in an overdose that led to a near-death experience and when I came out of that, when I woke up out of the coma, I had sort of what would be considered a quintessential spiritual awakening. And as an 18-year-old, a young girl, before email and cell phones and all of that, I just had this deep calling to go on a pilgrimage.
I bought a one-way ticket to Spain for $300, a backpack from L.L. Bean and commenced a multiple-year-long journey all around the world — Asia, Africa, Europe, living in monasteries, Ashrams, communes — so a lot of my training experientially came from learning how to put myself back together. Having endured a significant sexual abuse, having endured multiple hospitilazations for overdoses, two suicide attempts, two different mental institutes. I had come from a very difficult real-life experience.
Therefore, this work isn’t conceptual for me. I really get what it takes for someone to build bridges internally from the inside out and to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and really locate our inner fortitude in order to truly, truly shift our experience in life. So I’d say there’s life education, and then there’s all the trainings I’ve done that I draw upon when someone is in front of me, vulnerably and courageously opening to a new possibility in themselves.
My clients are coming to me and talking about the things that they’ve never spoken to another human about and they’re letting me in to the inner sanctum of where they struggle most and yearn the most. To me, I do have a responsibility to be sufficiently equipped in the psychological arena because it’s a real error in approach to think that we can just go in there and start opening people up, but not actually have the skills that help them repair what’s being opened up. I think it’s really important to have both the street cred and also psycho-educational experience too.
I had come from a very difficult real-life experience. This work isn’t conceptual for me. I really get what it takes for someone to build bridges internally from the inside out and to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and really locate our inner fortitude in order to truly, truly shift our experience in life.
NCA: Absolutely. In working with clients, what would you say 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?
Gabriella: I think the most rewarding is easy. When someone comes to me, no matter if they’ve won Grammy’s, are an heiress to a fortune or simply seeking a new path of fulfillment— whether they’re in the winter season of their life or someone else who has been stuck in a miserable career or a miserable marriage for 20 years and there’s just something inside of them that knows that there’s got to be more.
Seeing these women come alive and have a sense of self in this world that has really largely prized women in disappearing themselves, not rocking the boat, being pretty and pleasing or being in a masculine-dominant career which has led to their relationship life being in shambles, to me that is so rewarding to witness. It’s a miracle of women actualizing themselves. To me that’s what’s magnificent.
I think the hardest part — and there’s two responses that come up — one is when people do come into my office and they’re more committed to their suffering than they are to their liberation. It’s hard. I respect it because I know that they’re working out something in themselves that is between them and their soul, but it’s just hard to see people that will stay in really painful experiences, both internal dynamics that are painful like self-attack or self-judgement or just stay in abusive scenarios one way or another. There’s a part of them that is kind of collapsed or given up and doesn’t think that actual goodness is possible for them. It just really is heartbreaking.
If our baseline, if our set point, our stasis is around abuse or self-attack or intense inner criticism, our neurobiology doesn’t recognize it, but it’s safe to expand beyond those known parameters. No different from a thermometer on the wall that might be set for 68 degrees with air conditioning and when it’s really hot, it goes up to 78 degrees. It’s going to regulate itself and bring it back down to 68.
It’s so important to recognize that we are neurologically hard-wired to maintain an equilibrium at whatever our emotional and psychological baselines are. I think it’s very misunderstood in a lot of popular personal development culture that we’re working with our neurobiological wiring where we literally need to create new neural nets to even allow expansion to occur. It’s not like you can just talk yourself into it.
NCA: Can you think of a mentor who was the most vital to your success as a coach and in what ways did this mentor help you thrive in your career?
Gabriella: Hands down, Drs. Ron & Mary Hulnick from the University of Santa Monica. Their work through their spiritual psychology programs is absolutely groundbreaking. They’ve been doing this for 40+ years and their work, their perspective, and their ability to create a highly specialized Master’s degree program in the area of spiritual psychology and their ability to create a truly profound, transformative curriculum — it’s life changing.
Their curriculum so beautifully embodies principles and practices that truly support each one of us in actualizing the skills, the mindsets, the inner attitudes, the forgiveness to be able to let some of these deeply held things go. To finally just let things go. Take off the backpack that we’ve been carrying and to move closer to living a life that matches what brings us alive. I was introduced for their work in 2005 and it’s been hugely, hugely influential.
My biggest encouragement would be to really stay close to who you are and to create a business model that matches who you are and to not try and go it alone. […] One of my other mentors, Dr. Claire Zammit, has a saying: “We can’t become ourselves by ourselves.”
In the relational psychology realms, the work of Dr. David Richo has been really, really supportive for me because he comes in both as a clinician and as a Buddhist, so bringing the Buddhist mindset into a clinical practice within the area of relational psychology, it’s just really beautiful and his work has really influenced me positively.
NCA: What is one piece of advice you would give to somebody who’s just starting out and wants to become a coach but they’re not quite sure what niche to occupy or how to get started, what’s one piece of advice you’d give for that person?
Gabriella: I would say one, take your time. Two, figure out who you are. And three, build a business model around who you are.
Get the training you need. Set up the structures of support that you need that really models who you are and brings out your best including the caseload, the number of clients that you take in, if you do things virtually online or in person, if you do retreat, live events — whatever the offerings are.
My biggest encouragement would be to really stay close to who you are and to create a business model that matches who you are and to not try and go it alone. I know a lot of people that are well-intentioned and had beautiful aspirations to help, but they think they don’t need mentorship. They think they don’t need coaching. They think they don’t need training and then they just kind of try and go it alone and it just creates a lot of stress. Get support as well.
One of my other mentors, Dr. Claire Zammit, has a saying: “We can’t become ourselves by ourselves.”
