Ep #244: How to Access Your Genius as a Coach

Hi, this is Lindsay Dotzlaf and you are listening to Mastering Coaching Skills episode 244.

To really compete in the coaching industry, you have to be great at coaching. That’s why every week, I will be answering your questions, sharing my stories, and offering tips and advice so you can be the best at what you do. Let’s get to work.

Hey coach, I am so happy you are here today because I’m going to be talking about something that I feel very passionate about and will hopefully be very useful for you. We are going to talk about accessing your genius as a coach. Are you ready? I have realized that a lot of my brand, a lot of what I do with my clients is, and this might be obvious to you if you’ve been listening for a while, but it’s just becoming very very clear to me as I’m about to step into a whole rebranding, redoing some of my business. This is something that just keeps coming up over and over and over.

And one of my gifts as a coach is helping my clients find their way of doing things, finding their genius, finding what sets them apart as a coach, finding the coaching process that works for them without me saying, “Here’s how you do it,” and really just using some, maybe some frameworks and some different containers that I do this in different ways that I coach to really show them at every level how to make their coaching, their business, their just all of it even more them and even more aligned to their life and how they want to live and how they want to work and coach.

So, today we’re going to talk about how to access your genius as a coach. But first, I’m going to tell you a story about two dogs. Don’t worry if you don’t like dogs. It’s not actually about dogs. It just, I don’t know why this popped into my head. This is how my weird brain works sometimes. I’m going to tell you a story, then I’m going to bring it back around to finding your genius. Hopefully, this story will stick with you and be memorable so that you can think of it next time you are working on something and maybe trying too hard to access something that isn’t clear to you, which you’ll see what I mean about that in a minute.

But before we dive into the story, I want to let you know, okay, a few weeks ago, maybe even a month, maybe two months ago, I don’t know. It’s been a while. I mentioned on the podcast that I have a rebrand and a whole reimagining of my own business coming up. And I said in the show notes, we were going to put a link because I have an offer that is about to open up.

Like you getting a behind-the-scenes documentary style with some Q&As and community experience of me reimagining. I will be rebranding my podcast, rebranding actually my entire business, creating a new signature offer, which is the first time I’m saying that, but I’m very excited about it. Can’t wait for you to know what it is. And just in general, me redoing many things, realigning and or maybe aligning even more with my business values and being more open and clear about what those are. And I’m really excited, also really scared.

But anyway, I promised you a link however many episodes ago that was, and we never added a link because as sometimes my team has to point out to me, sometimes I put, what’s the saying? Like I put the cart before the horse or whatever. The link was not ready. I apologize.

This time, either the link will be ready, or if it’s not quite ready, which it will be soon, we will have a waitlist link so that you can be the first to get access to the offer. There’s going to be even a discount for the first 100 people that sign up and I cannot wait to dive into this with you. I’m so scared. It feels so vulnerable and it feels also like one of the most exciting things I’ve done in my business for a really long time, and I can’t wait for you to join.

And just in case you’re like, “Oh, great, another offer,” whatever. This is going to be a very low-price offer that is not necessarily a coaching space. There will be some organized Q&As, some access to some of the experts I’m working with and Q&As with them. It’s not like a group coaching program. It’s really more of just a behind-the-scenes. You get to witness me going through, really going through it. I’m sure on some days that’ll be a thing, but just really going through the entire process and seeing how I make all the decisions, my thought process, just all of it. So, we will put that link in the show notes if you want to join us. I cannot wait to have you.

So let’s dig in to this week’s topic. So accessing your genius as a coach. First, I want you to know about two dogs in my life, my two main dogs. Right now, especially if you’re my client, you’ve probably, or if you’ve come to workshops or whatever, on occasion my dog will be sleeping in the background of my room, of my office. Her name is Honey and she is a goldendoodle. Here’s what I’m going to tell you about her.

So I said two dogs. She is currently our only dog, and we had a dog before her, which I will then tell you about in a second. She is a little neurotic. She’s quite anxious. She is, if you’ve ever been around a doodle of any sort, most of them are a little weird, but she’s also somehow the sweetest, most loving when she wants to be dog ever. But everything is on her terms.

But one thing that she is excellent at is napping all day. I always take photos of her napping and I always have this funny thought that is if she taught a masterclass or, you know, a webinar or something, she would be so good at teaching, like how to nap anywhere, anytime, no matter what’s going on around you. That would be the name of her masterclass. She is just excellent at it. She always looks so comfortable.

I am not a napper, which I hate. I cannot nap. If I do for some reason fall asleep, I mean, I can maybe nap if I’m sick, but that’s about the only time. But let’s say I’m really tired for whatever reason and I do fall asleep, my nap turns into like a four-hour situation and then it just really throws me off. So I just don’t nap. And when I try to take a short nap, I cannot.

So for those of you that can do that, it makes me very jealous. But when I see her just laying around looking so cozy, so snuggly all the time, I get very jealous. I’m like, I wish she could teach me how to do it. It’s like the thing she is best at in the world.

That and also telling time because around 5:00 every day, she will literally come into my office. If she’s not already in here, it’s like she’s woken up from her all-day napping sessions and she will turn my chair around. She has learned that my chair swivels and she can hook her face around the side. Because usually at that time I’m not on calls, so I’m just sitting at my desk working, typing, whatever. I’m not kidding. Almost exactly 5:00, she will come in and just start to turn my chair around most days if I’m working still at that time.

And it is the funniest thing. I used to think it was because she wanted me to come feed her, but now I’m like, nope, that is just, she’s just like, “Hey, I need attention.” She always just wants attention and pets. Like that is her time of day. She’s like, “Listen, I’ve been sleeping all day. Now I’m just ready for some rubs and pets and ear scratches.”

Okay, so that’s Honey, our current dog. She’s around, I don’t know, eight, let’s say. Somewhere around there. I should know her exact age. Before Honey, we had a dog, my husband and I had a dog that we got when we were, I don’t know, I think a little before we got married actually, and he was a lab and his name was Toby. And if you know about dogs or if you’ve ever been around a lab, what you probably know about a lab is that they are high energy, high octane all the time, 100%.

It was a perfect dog for us at the time. I had a Jeep. I was working, I think, real estate at the time. I had a couple jobs, but I had lots of time off in between. We would go to the dog park. We also lived in Bloomington, Indiana, which is a very dog-friendly town and very like different than the rest of Indiana. And he just lived his best life. Had so much attention, went everywhere with me.

This is obviously pre-kids because you just love your dogs a little differently, I think, once you have kids, if you have kids. Anyway, living his best life, but his number one skill and obsession in the world was a tennis ball or any kind of ball or a frisbee or anything really that you throw.

Now, mind you, just to go back for a second, Honey, our current dog, cannot catch a ball to save her life. You throw a ball at her, it will literally bounce on her head. In some ways, she is a genius, and in other ways, not so much. Toby, on the other hand, was just pure, constant energy and love. He only wanted to be with me 100% of the time, attached to my hip, would never nap if I was up doing something, would only want to be next to me until he got older, of course.

But he was just a ball of energy and love and obsessed with a ball, a frisbee, anything that would fly in the air. And he would almost injure himself to catch it or drown himself if we used to think, not me, some people used to think it was funny to throw rocks into the lake that was near us, and he would literally dive under the water looking for the rocks. It was the craziest thing. At one point, we had to go in and pull him out.

So if he were to teach a masterclass or a training or a webinar, it would be around how to never lose your ball, right? Or how to be the world’s best fetcher, right?

Now I know these are silly stories and if you love dogs, you’re probably like, “Oh, I love them. Say more.” But what I want you to actually consider about those two things is what I often see coaches doing, not on purpose, of course, is that if we just personify those two dogs for a second, right? And we turn them into humans and think like they can teach masterclasses, their genius is obviously the thing that is very natural to them. Right?

So if I asked Honey, our current dog, the goldendoodle, to teach a masterclass or a training on fetching, it would be so much work, right? She would have to learn. I mean, I’m talking learn the basics because like I said, now you throw a ball, literally will bounce off her head. If you throw or toss her like a treat, forget it. She’s going to stand there. Maybe she’ll find it if she hears it hit the floor. She’s a mess. I don’t even know. She would have to put in so much work in order to teach that training.

And then if you reverse it, right? If you think about Toby, the lab, and you ask him to teach a masterclass on rest, on napping, no way. I mean, I can’t even imagine how he would have learned that. Right? That was not his skill. It would have been so hard.

But so often what I see coaches doing, again, not on purpose, is doing exactly those examples I just gave you. Right? Like having a very clear skill set, but then thinking that in order to know what they’re talking about, in order to be smart, in order to be able to teach something very clearly, in a smart way, in a clear way, they have to go learn all these things.

So often in my containers, one thing that I’m always talking about in some form because I can always spot this right away. It’s very easy and actually now that I’ve pointed it out to you, you might be able to start spotting it as well, at least in other coaches. It’s harder to spot, I think, in yourself. In yourself, it feels very true that you need to know more in order to be great at teaching something. But I can usually spot it.

And so I will always question it and kind of bring them back to like, “Wait a minute, that sounds difficult.” Like it sounds like you’re struggling with that. It sounds like that takes a lot of your effort instead of like, what can you access right now that’s just right there that you could just talk about? That’s your genius.

And also, I want to be very clear, experiencing this myself. There are many times I catch myself doing this and I would say pretty much 100% of you that are listening, I bet you do this in some form. Some of you do it, I’m sure, way worse, and some not. You might already be onto yourself. I have like briefly mentioned this in other podcast episodes, or if you’ve worked with me, you may have heard me talk about it.

But if you haven’t done either of those things, heard the episodes or worked with me, then you might not know you’re doing it. I guarantee you’re doing it somewhere.

Because here’s what happens. The thing that is so obvious to you will never feel like your genius. It becomes kind of like, “Doesn’t everybody know this?” So either a trait or skill that you just kind of have that you’re something you’ve been good at for a really long time, or maybe if you’ve been a coach for a really long time and you’re really good at pointing out people’s, you know, thought errors, let’s say, that becomes really obvious, right? And it’s like, why would you just teach a training on that when there’s so many other things?

But if you think about like your clients or the people who will potentially be your clients, probably have no idea what a thought error even is. I want you to sit with that for a second. I want you to just take a second right now, even push pause if you want, and think about like, “What’s the thing that just feels so obvious to you that you might even be like, doesn’t everybody know this? It’s so obvious.”

I remember very first hiring a coach because I worked with a coach for a while before I became a coach. And when I very first hired a coach, I was just blown away how much self-awareness I could create just with my thoughts and being intentional and paying attention to how was I feeling? What was I thinking about? What action was I taking from a place of thinking I had control over certain situations or thinking I didn’t, right? And just noticing all of that, and it just blew my mind every single day.

But now, 10 years later, I’m like, “Yeah, I mean, that’s obvious, right?” And I always have to remind myself, like, no, it’s not obvious. It’s not even obvious for all coaches. And so when I can access that and I can find that thing that like I could just get up on a stage or on a, you know, go on any podcast, go anywhere and just talk about that in a way that is very basic and almost maybe even a little boring to me because I have been thinking about it for so long.

But that could change someone’s life or blow someone’s mind. Right? And so if you think about those things, whatever the thing was you came up with when I asked you, like, what’s the thing that just feels really obvious to you? I need you to know that is truly your genius.

And I know it doesn’t feel like it because it feels effortless and we think that, you know, accessing that part of us should feel kind of harder or it should feel more contemplative or like you have to work to really get it out. And sometimes you do, depending on the situation. Sometimes, especially when you go deep and get into details and if you’re not used to doing it or you’re putting together like a talk or something you’ve never done before, you might have to like mine for some of the things.

But what I want you to leave this podcast knowing today is that there’s a difference between that and then it feeling hard because you’re thinking you have to go out and obtain more knowledge or refine the knowledge you have in order to help your clients or potential clients. It probably feels like common sense, whatever your thing is, right? Often times we dismiss it.

That is actually your superpower. It is the thing that your clients will ultimately hire you for. One thought you might have and to pay attention to if it ever pops up is the thought, “Oh, doesn’t everyone know this or can’t everyone do this?” Because those are the things that are your genius that the answer always is no, absolutely not. Not everyone knows it, not everyone can do it, otherwise they would be. Right?

You can also consider that your genius could be kind of the thing that people seek you out for naturally in conversations, whether it’s about coaching or not. It could be people in your life, it could be the things your clients are consistently asking you about. There’s just some patterns there that if you start to pay attention to them, you will really start to notice like, “Oh, these are the things.” Like other people might even know your genius better than you do.

One of the main problems I see often when, for those of you that are consistently not recognizing what your natural abilities and what your natural genius is, is that then when you don’t see it, you think that you have to keep learning. You have to and listen, I love learning. I want to be very clear about that. There are really good reasons to keep learning, but this reason is not one that’s super effective. Right? You think that you have to keep learning and then what happens is you get into this trap where you’re never quite good enough. And so then you just have to keep learning and have to keep learning without accessing what’s already there.

And when you do that, it can actually start to dilute your natural genius, your natural instincts and your voice that would just be coming out so much more easily otherwise. And there is a difference between learning to enhance your natural gifts, right? So like knowing what your genius is, knowing, here’s the thing I could just stand up and talk about right now, and then building on that and going from there versus putting it to the side and thinking you have to replace that. You have to know more. You have to know something completely different.

And I want you to even consider that even before you were a coach, you have natural talents that do play into your genius as a coach. I promise you, whether maybe you’re a great listener, maybe you’re a great cheerleader, maybe you’re a great motivator, maybe you are really good at putting kind of thought puzzles together, right? Like whatever those things are, those are your natural talents. And I promise you, if you can start to embrace them in your coaching, they could also be the thing that sets you apart from other coaches, right? That like makes your coaching special.

This is one thing that I’m really noticing about myself and starting to really take note of, which I have already, I mean, I’ve been doing this for a long time, but doing it on a much deeper level. And if you join, it’s called Coach Unfiltered, the three-month experience where you kind of get to see behind the scenes, you will start to see me doing this and talking about it and really thinking through how I access these things for myself.

But here’s a test you can use to kind of ask yourself right now to figure out what your specific genius is. You can just ask yourself and, you know, maybe do it after the podcast or just pause it and start to write down and take notes. But if you could just stand up right now and talk about anything without notes, without cue cards, without anything, what would it be?

And I’m sure you’re going to have maybe some silly answers, like things that have nothing to do with coaching. That’s great. For sure, write those down because who knows? Maybe they will come into your coaching at some point or they could be stories that you use in your content or if you have a podcast or anything like that.

But then I want you to think about the skills that it takes to be a coach and what are the ones that just come more naturally to you or that you’ve worked on for so long since being a coach that they are like second nature. Right? Is it creating awareness? Is it helping your clients strategize something? Is it being a great listener? All those examples I gave previously. What are your just natural strengths? What could you just stand up and talk about right now?

Now, I know for some of you, that might be like, “I know, but it feels scary.” Like the stand-up and talk-about part might feel scary, but that’s okay. That’s a different topic. What we’re thinking about right now is just what are your natural skills?

And then ask yourself and be very honest, are you accessing them in your business and with your clients and in your coaching and in your coaching processes, right? Here’s another way you can ask it. What are the topics that light you up in conversations? Not necessarily coaching conversations, but you could go there too.

Or what are the things that your friends or your family come to you for advice about or to talk to about? Like what patterns can you notice? Almost like what feels so natural you could teach it in your sleep. Like if I came into your room tonight, which would be super creepy, I know, don’t worry, I’m not going to do it. If I came into your room in the middle of the night and woke you up and said, “Hey, I need you to come teach a thing.” What’s the thing that you could be like, “Okay, yeah, I got this,” even though you’re half asleep?

And then, are you accessing those in your marketing, in your business, in your coaching conversations, in your coaching processes, with your clients, all the places? And how can you—if you are, amazing, how can you turn that up even more? And if you aren’t, or you’re not sure, how can you lean even more into this?

And here’s what I will say. Sometimes accessing this can actually feel quite uncomfortable because it might feel a little more vulnerable or personal. I have noticed this as I’m starting to go through this process for myself. I have noticed that coming up, like, “Ooh, this feels a little vulnerable to talk about.” And even to say like, “Ooh, I’m great at this thing.” Right? We’re not used to saying that. I mean, I encourage all of my clients to own it and be great at whatever they’re great at. But it’s not something normally that we’re taught to own and talk about.

It can also feel a little uncomfortable because it might be like, “Oh, that’s too simple. I couldn’t possibly charge for that.” When I promise you that some of those things are your most valuable offerings. And then it might also feel uncomfortable because sometimes owning your natural gifts and claiming them and talking about them can feel a lot scarier or a lot more vulnerable than hiding behind someone else’s framework, someone else’s teaching, someone else’s, you know, model that you are using and adopting to be yours.

Which by the way, not saying don’t ever do that, clearly. Of course, learning is amazing, all the things. But it can feel very different to own your own gift. It can feel a lot scarier, a lot more vulnerable than going and learning a new thing and then coming back to your clients, to your audience, to whoever, and saying, “Oh, here’s this thing that I learned from so and so. Like, let me teach you.”

So here are a couple things that I want to give you permission to do. I want to give you permission to be obvious. I want to give you permission to believe that your obvious is someone else’s breakthrough. I promise you. I want to give you permission to stop apologizing for anything that comes naturally to you, and natural talents and gifts that you just have. Amazing, right? Congratulations. You have them. You were born that way or you’ve developed them over your lifetime, just like everyone else. Everyone has them. Yours are just different than others.

I want also to give you permission to package and present your natural genius without diminishing it, without pushing it to the side, without saying like, “Oh, that’s obvious,” or, “You probably already know this, but,” or, you know, any type of excusing it instead of just claiming it.

And then last, I also want to give you permission to stop chasing that next thing, to stop thinking that you need more, more, more, more, more because you’re not enough the way you are right now because that’s not true. And give you permission to feel relief and the results that can come when you stop trying to be someone else’s version of brilliance. Okay? Let that sink in. Maybe rewind. Listen to those permissions all over again if you need to. If this really hit for you, if it like hit something, maybe listen to this one again.

I hope you loved this random story about my dogs and that you love Honey even more now if you’re a dog person and you see her on my calls. I promise you she’s a real dog. She is always napping, like I said. So often my clients, if she’s in my office, they joke that she just looks like a fake dog because she does, because she rarely moves unless she starts having like a dream and then she starts doing weird things. That’s pretty much the only time because she just sleeps. At this stage of my life, she is the right dog for me. If I had my previous dog now, that would be a challenge.

All right, friends, I hope that this was helpful. Let me know how it landed for you. Also, check the show notes. Join me for my own business reimagining. I am so excited about it. I feel just the most renewed sense of energy in my business. I have always loved my business. I’ve always loved coaching my clients, but I currently have just a fire that feels really great and really motivating and I can’t wait for you to be in on it. So, hopefully I will see you there. Otherwise, I will see you next week. Goodbye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Mastering Coaching Skills. If you want to learn more about my work, come visit me at lindsaydotzlafcoaching.com. That’s Lindsay with an A, D-O-T-Z-L-A-F.com. see you next week.