How Does Coaching Work?

Sessions are virtual, or in-person if you’re local to St. Louis.

Each session begins with you identifying what you want to work on for the session. I will bring my tools and codependency/deconstruction/life purpose-informed insight, but you set the goals for our time together.

Once we identify what you want to achieve by the end of the session and why, we let the process unfold. At the end of the session, we will consider how successful we were and what the takeaways are.

Sessions are one hour.

Pricing

12 weeks

Weekly sessions, email, text support

$1775

If you feel the price is right, fantastic! I’m excited to see where this thing can go.

If you feel like you can’t justify spending money on coaching, I felt the same way! Well, I felt the same way until I worked with a coach.

If you’re thinking about paying money to talk to me for an hour, no, it’s not worth it. But if you’re thinking about it like spending money to achieve your goals, finally overcome destructive habits, or to make lasting improvements in your life, making an investment feels really different.

If you identify as being codependent, it’s likely you don’t feel worthy of the investment, or you feel like the investment has to have an external, tangible outcome. You are worthy of an investment. You making progress on your goals is enough of an outcome. You’re here to do your life. No one else has to participate in that.

Coaching Vs. Therapy

Coaching and therapy are two sides of the same coin and in some ways could result in the same solutions. The difference is that coaching is focused on progress toward a goal, whereas therapy can be focused on understanding the past, processing emotions, and learning about mental health issues.

If you have gained a lot of benefits from therapy and have begun to feel like you don’t really need to keep talking about your problems, and you want to continue working on yourself, coaching is a great option.

If you have never been to therapy, coaching can provide some of the same benefits of understanding yourself and others. You may find taking the time to look at experiences and be coached through them is all you need to heal, and you may find you need to take those issues to therapy. I have worked with clients where directing them to a therapist felt appropriate because of the layers of their problem relating to the past and possible toxic family dynamics.

Lastly, having a coach and a therapist is still useful. Sometimes you do need to spend more time unpacking the past and tending to mental health issues or the complexities of supporting a loved one who has mental health issues and a therapist can support your goals in that way.
From my experience, I can take the same issue to a counselor and a coach and experience similar benefits, but different takeaways. What I take from coaching will be focused on application toward my goals, whereas therapy might not always have a takeaway for me beyond insight or having an outlet.

When I started working with a coach, I felt like that was very much the next step I should have been taking after almost two years of consistent, deep work. I realized how much time I was spending focusing on myself as a victim instead of becoming my hero. 

While my counselor and my coach perform some of the same functions, therapy is less formal and more therapeutic than coaching. I do spend time understanding or discussing the past in coaching, but it’s more of a pit stop rather than the destination.

I do serve as a safe space for my clients and will give you a virtual shoulder to cry on, have your feelings, share your thoughts, and realize things. But that therapeutic process will not be the focus of our sessions. Sometimes, it may be clear devoting the session to venting or releasing will work for your greatest and highest good, but the overall theme of your coaching will be your goals.

In addition, while I have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, I am not trained as a therapist and not technically equipped to handle mental health issues or trauma. Thus, I can’t reliably provide insights on things like family systems or personality profiles. When I feel you would benefit from working with certain issues with a therapist, I will let you know because our time is best spent on what I am suited to manage.

It’s also worth noting that coaching is not a regulated industry like therapy. Sometimes this means it’s hard to trust someone selling themselves as a coach, and it also means coaching has many more paths to take.

Codependency

My definition of codependency is having a pattern of putting other people’s needs over your own. Codependent people are focused on external validation and usually lack a sense of self. This may be hard to conceptualize because maybe you can clearly identify your feelings, motivations, and even strengths, but you might not be considering yourself fully valid as a who is entitled to care and well-being without earning it.

That doesn’t mean you’re entitled to be cared for by others, but you are entitled to using your own resources to care for yourself instead of always directing those resources to other people.

Codependency encompasses perfectionism, people-pleasing, self-neglect, and falling into the position of the victim. I find these behaviors to be hindering my life in a new way nearly every week.

Recently, I have recognized how healing my perfectionism has made packing and traveling significantly less stressful because I can be practical and simple rather than pressuring on myself to dress perfectly and anticipate every possible scenario. People who have been deep in codependency tend to install the framework in every area of their lives leaving great opportunities for relief and expansion.

Because of my nearly lifelong experience with codependency and my transformative recovery, this is what I am uniquely suited to address. I know how the codependent thinks, what the codependent lacks, and how the recovery process can look.

Am I Codependent?

I was three years into my codependency journey before I learned the name for it. I knew my tendency to prioritize and anticipate my husband’s needs at the expense of my own was only hurting me. Slowly, I called back my energy, but when I learned the word “codependency,” I began to conceptualize the scope of my issue. It wasn’t just about my marriage, it was just about my habits in relationships, but it was about how I viewed myself.

The codependent typically doesn’t have a solid sense of self in that they don’t have a clear idea of what they need or deserve as a person, and their desires and concerns are typically based outside of themselves. Because they have distorted ideas about what is expected from them specifically, they often seek to over-perform or fail to perform at all because they find themselves too inadequate to try.

At the core, the codependent doesn’t believe they are blank enough without the extra: not enjoyable enough without bringing treats, not worth speaking to without being beautiful, not worth respect without pedigree, not worth friendship without generously meeting the friend’s needs.

Healing codependency opens up so many areas of life and thinking that it really can feel like being set free.