Season 1 | episode 13
Welcome to the Coaching Studio Podcast
This podcast features fun, lively conversations with masterful coaches who are creating an impact. Get to know them, their journey into coaching, and discover what wisdom they would offer you about being a better coach.
Let’s go!
the Coaching Studio Guest
I am very excited to welcome Emily Golden, MCC to the Coaching Studio Podcast.
Credits
- Host: Lyssa deHart, LICSW, MCC
- Music: Frolic by Harrison Amer
- Production Editing: Lyssa deHart
- Social Media and Communications: Michele Logan
About This Episode
Read the transcript of this episode of the Coaching Studio Podcast:
| Lyssa deHart | Hello, Lyssa here. Welcome to the Coaching Studio and today I have in the studio, Miss Emily Golden. She is an author, speaker, and Master Certified Coach with the ICF who specializes in executive leadership and career coaching. She has 17 years of corporate human resource experience, plus practical experience with more than 3, 000 hours of coaching. She has a deep understanding of the human mind, spirit, and potential. Her clients range from seasoned executives to emerging leaders, to career changers who utilize her support to close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. Emily’s ontological approach allows individuals to clarify their goals, shift beliefs and habits, take risks, execute brilliance, and make quantum leaps rather than incremental improvements. Her patience and brilliance allow others to discover Aha moments that enable what once seemed impossible. As a result, her clients emerged as leaders who bring value impact and connection to their professional and personal lives. Emily has also written a book called, The New Golden Rule: The Professional Perfectionist’s Guide to Greater Emotional Intelligence, A More Fulfilling Career, and a Better Life. And she has a brilliant review by Rich Lipton of The Prosperous Coach which I thought was just beautiful. Emily Golden is one of the most talented coaches I know with a background of years in talent acquisition. She understands people in organizations at the very deepest level. If you are a high-level leader like Emily’s clients, the New Golden Rule will help you understand yourself better in order to take your career and your life to the next level. Emily thank you so much for being on the Coaching Studio. I really appreciate this opportunity. |
| Emily Golden | Lyssa, thank you for having me. |
| Lyssa deHart | Yeah, so, you know that you know where I start on these questions, I really am curious about your coaching journey. How did you, how did you end up in this conversation with me today? |
| Emily Golden | Well, it’s a that’s a good question. Um I as you said, spent 17 years in corporate human resources, climbing the ladder and with each promotion or um, and each, you know, great performance review. I was just reckoning with a dissatisfaction, a feeling of I’m supposed to be happier, I’m supposed to be more satisfied with where I am and professionally, and I’m just, I’m not um that was happening as I was um as I became a mother and then as my daughter at the age of five was diagnosed with a neurological condition called Tourettes syndrome. So at the point, my daughter was diagnosed, the diagnosis hit me like a ton of bricks, partly because I was going to work and working my my my job, but then I would come home and I’d have my babies at home who were my, my, my respite my um my space, my my place to be happy to play, not always, of course, but um, there was something really comforting in that, and then all of a sudden my home life becomes fraught with this new diagnosis and the diagnosis is not a simple one. It was a very, she has a complex case, and at the beginning, it was very complex before we figured out how to best support her. I say all of this because it really did impact my journey professionally. About three years into her diagnosis, my husband and I made a joint decision to create our life so that I could make a career pivot. Um and what I mean by creating our life was we had to um I wanted to leave my job in corporate, but of course, at that point, um, I had the golden handcuffs, then I, we needed my income, so I couldn’t just up and leave. So we had to start planning for making that move, and I didn’t even know what it was that I wanted to do, but I knew that what I was doing, wasn’t it. But of course, I couldn’t speak about that, right? I couldn’t talk about that publicly. Um, so we wound up moving to an area where the cost of living was less. I got a job where I was working from home, um and I started to explore other career options. Um, I wound up finding coaching in that process and actually thought I would become a parent coach, and I signed up for a coach training program as part of that goal to become a parent coach. And I had created this vision for myself. As I went through the coach training program, though, it became abundantly clear that there were pieces of my corporate work that I didn’t want to lose. Um, and I loved working with professionals. So fast forward. I found myself well desiring um, a role as a leadership, career, and executive coach. Um, the rest is pretty much history. I started the coach training program while I was still working full time. I started building my coaching practice at night and on the weekends. And um, the, the journey, um I quickly, about a year into building my coaching practice was able to leave my full-time work and um, and make that pivot. Um, it was not an easy one. It was scary, but I truly have not looked back and I’ve now built golden resources. Um, I absolutely love the work I get to do with leaders and professionals. And um, I’m also able to show up as a mom in a much more present and powerful way for my children. |
| Lyssa deHart | Yeah. Beautiful. And you know, you talked about something just now, which I think is, uh, I don’t know if it’s common, it feels common because I think I went through something similar, but this transition from one place where you knew a lot into this new space. It’s this sort of transformational journey that happens as people decide to become a coach and transition their career. How did you support yourself? I mean, not financially, but emotionally through that sort of, what is it can be a very, I don’t know, wonky transition, right? |
| Emily Golden | So the transition from one career to the next or the transit from not knowing what I was going to do? |
| Lyssa deHart | Either. |
| Emily Golden | Yeah, so the transition from one career to the next was really challenging because I um I didn’t know this until I started my work, in my transformational work and coaching, but so much of my value is rooted in what I know, what I knew. And so leaving my corporate work meant I’d have to like learn a whole new skill set and who was I in the in-between. Um and it was actually the best thing that could have happened to me because it had me come face to face with who am I separate from what I do in the world um and I now know that woman intimately. Which is a great thing to know because should that, should my career, you know, should I not be um the career woman that I am, I know who I am separate from all of it. Um and by the way, I don’t ever believe I will stop with the work of coaching because I just love it so much. Um but it was, it was absolutely scary um and you know, as a Master Certified Coach, working towards mastery and this work is some of the most confronting work you can do because you have to unlearn so much that as, that culturally you have learned in terms of relationship skills in terms of some of the very things that drew me to coaching, my ability to work with people, to get to know them well, to establish relationships, and um to build trust some of those things I had to unlearn how I was doing them because um my being was off, right? I was being forced, I was being, I was pushing my own agenda. |
| Lyssa deHart | Hold on can we just stop there real quick? Because I think that is one of those insights that is is is profound in this process of moving from PCC to MCC, right? Is this sense of, it’s not about throwing the baby out with the bathwater, you still need to find your own authentic voice and yet the way that we’re being is off of how were in presence with our own agenda for other people is not as useful as we could be. So I really appreciate that you brought that forward and I’m sorry, I interrupted you but that’s big stuff. Yeah. |
| Emily Golden | No, not at all. I mean it was, uh confronting and again transformational to learn how to hold that space and I think sometimes what would my career in corporate have been in talent acquisition and talent development had I learned these tools early on? |
| Lyssa deHart | Yeah. |
| Emily Golden | Had I been able to show up for the people that I supported in the same way that I can as a coach now, um I believe it would have been transformational for those people. So it was, it was quite the journey to make that shift um and I guess a big part was also believing that it was completely possible for me to start my own business. I never related to myself as an entrepreneur, which is so funny because now I think how did you not see that entrepreneurial life is ideal for you, Emily? But I just didn’t see it, I didn’t. |
| Lyssa deHart | You know and it is, that funny thing until you know it’s the irony, right? Of until you go, how would you know, right? Like we get, we get told as you know, young people, you need to get a career, you need to work for an organization and when I did something very similar going into private practice was I don’t know if I can do this, I just, I don’t even know if I like it and now I can’t even imagine my life in any other way, right? Yeah, so when you think about this coaching journey into MCC what was, what was one of the biggest insights you made about yourself and/or how it impacted your own personal life? This journey that you went through? |
| Emily Golden | The impact on my personal life has been nothing short of uh seismic. So first off I’ll start with my relationship with myself. I like many people listening, I’m sure um was my worst critic. I was so hard on myself and I thought that that was the way to achieve excellence. Like just beat yourself up or talk negatively to yourself. And though I wouldn’t have ever articulated it that way, I would have said no, no, I’m nice to myself. I really was not very nice to myself. Like I would use willpower and push and burn to achieve success. And I was unhappy. Like I was truly unhappy. So I learned to rebuild the relationship with myself. I learned to really, truly get to know what it is that I desire, what it is that I love. A lot of the time I would reflect on what lit me up as a kid because I batted away a lot of that. Um, my parents did the best they could and I had a lot of desire to to to be creative and to work with animals and all of that. And it just didn’t fit into our life when I was growing up. So, um I lost connection with that, right? So reconnected. And what did that, what did that light up in me? Um, still rebuilding the relationship with myself creating space. I am an um an extravert though. I have a lot of introverted tendencies. I love to sit in quiet. I love the silence. I love time alone. I love time with my thoughts. Um, so that has been transformational. My relationship with my husband. I think back to the early years of our marriage where I tried to change him. I worked really hard, in fact, to change him. Um, I wanted him to be, I wanted him to be someone that he wasn’t, which is so ironic because I married him for exactly who he is. Um but I couldn’t see that my own inability to be with my, myself was being mapped onto, like, changing him, like, oh, you should exercise more, oh, you should work more, oh, you should write all of these “shoulds” not a good look in a marriage by the way, at all. |
| Lyssa deHart | Not a very good looking in any relationship by the way. |
| Emily Golden | At all, so my marriage has transformed. Um, and it’s interesting because the very things I married him for were the very things I came back to as like, what bonds us together. He is my anchor, he is my biggest fan, he is my biggest support. And it is he who has really supported me to be able to grow this business the way that that it has, and we are truly in a partnership and I’m so proud of that. You know, in terms of personal life as well, my kiddos, I think about them, I think about the mother that I am today, that I would not be without this work. I am able to relate to my children as their highest and best, both of them have Tourette’s syndrome? Um both of them have different special needs. Both of them have things that they are amazing at and things that are real challenges for them. We don’t spend time focusing in the areas that there that are the challenges. We spend time building the muscle around what they’re great at and really sinking into how they can do more of that and be more of that. Um, both of my kids will often say things and then say, oh, that’s because my mom’s a coach, that I talk that way because my mom’s a coach. Um and I also love that I get to be a model for my children of what it looks like to have a career that you love, right? Like how cool is that? Now my kids get to know that they can do that too. |
| Lyssa deHart | Yeah, I think and I think that’s beautiful too because I think that for most of us, you know, we, it is a monkey, see monkey do experience, this whole human being thing. And if we see our parents having the capacity to have, be joyful in the work that they do, right? It opens a window of possibility for us too. And I think that’s beautiful that you’re modeling that. And you know, one of the things that came up as you’re talking about, sort of how you focus with your kids, I’m thinking about some of the work by um Richard Boyatzis out of Western Case University and really looking to the positive emotional attractors, right? Like what do you do well? How do you leverage that? How might you be able to use that skill in this other place? Like how, how do you learn from what you’ve done versus wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong? And I think we grow up in cultures and I don’t care what culture you grow up in, pretty much any human culture we’re designed to notice what we don’t like. So parents spend a lot of time noticing what they don’t like. I think coaches spend a lot of time noticing what they think the client needs to do differently and therefore going back to your earlier comment, it becomes that sort of agenda push, right? That they’ve got like, if you would just do this. I even remember hearing a coach say something and no judgment of the coach, very young coach, “If you want what I have, you need to do what I do, ” and it sort of comes out of this alcohol anonymous sort of perspective of if you want to be sober, then you need to not drink, right? Which is true, right? It’s pretty simple. And yet that doesn’t, that doesn’t cross all ways of being, right? Because we’re each such a unique thumbprint or fingerprint of who we are qualities and capacities. |
| Emily Golden | Absolutely. There’s something really incredible about celebrating successes and celebrating what we do well and I think we have, especially in our culture, I’m going to call it for lack of a better term, an addiction to what is broken, what is wrong, and what needs to be fixed. And frankly, I spent way too much time in my life trying to fix and perfect myself. Um, and my daughter being diagnosed at the age of five was the wake-up call that I needed because I would have created her in my image. And let me tell you she is not in my image at all. She is in some of the best ways I think, but she is the first person to say, “I love my body, I love myself, I accept myself wholly and fully, ” you know she has a physical, she has a medical condition that is a physical manifestation, right? Who better to learn that lesson from than her. |
| Lyssa deHart | Yeah, yeah, God and it’s true to and what, what a gift it is to bypass all that negative internal dialogue around being good enough and whatever ideas of perfection we might show up in the world with. Excuse me. Sorry. How do you keep your coaching passion alive? I mean I really hear the passion in your voice is you’re talking how do you, how do you maintain that and keep that alive in yourself? |
| Emily Golden | Well, the um honest response to that is I am a deeply passionate human and so I will always find passion in the work that I do. Um, I even found passion in the work I didn’t love when I was in my corporate days. Um, because I am so now aware of my vision and grounded in the vision of the work that I do. Um, that gives me a place to anchor when I’m not feeling super passionate. Um on the days that I’m not feeling super passionate. So the things that can take me out of feeling passion is my own physical well-being being off. I have a medical condition myself and it’s chronic and some days it flares and it flares big time and other days it’s not even a thought. Like today not even thinking about it. Um but that can, that can impact me. So um I really like to ground into my vision, my vision of bringing heart-based leadership um into organizations, working with organizations as organisms um for community and for transformation in and of themselves. I love working with neuro-diverse individuals. So humans who um I don’t you know have different neurological differences A. D. H. D., anxiety, um you know whatever it is, autism um and supporting them to become more emotionally intelligent and were able to play in the system of the organization. |
| Lyssa deHart | How much fun? Yeah. And I think that is definitely a group of people who, when like any human being when they’re ready to really start working on these things can have such success in self-awareness. Just like the rest of us, just like everybody, all human beings. You know the attention we put on our own self-awareness seems to play out very usefully in our lives. I think that’s wonderful though. And what do you think, what do you think the biggest misconception about coaching is that you run across? |
| Emily Golden | I’m going to hire a coach as an accountability buddy. Yeah, that’s one and then the other is, I’m a coach and it’s my job to keep my client on track. So the accountability buddy first off, if you, you know we are far more than accountability buddies and I would even encourage, I encourage my clients to have an accountability buddy. Someone outside of me that they can build and establish a relationship with um to hold them to the practices that we co-create. I am not interested in an accountability buddy relationship. I am interested in transformation. The second thing is um as a coach, it’s my responsibility to keep my client on track. It is your client’s responsibility to keep your client on track. It is your responsibility to be supporting your client to identify what is getting in the way of achieving their desires and it is your responsibility to stand boldly and powerfully in the reflection of that. Um, your value as a coach and as a human is not dependent upon your client’s results. And I share that because I need to hear it over and over and over again. I love my clients. I love them so much. And um that may sound weird, but I do, I see their greatness and sometimes it’s painful to watch the icky sticky middle when they’re in the process of their own transformation. Um, and I always have to remind myself like this is their process, trust their process, they are not on my timeline, they are on their own timeline. |
| Lyssa deHart | Yeah, Yeah. And I mean, and I think it’s kind of funny like we have all kinds of stories and metaphors, but you cannot walk another person’s journey for them, right? I mean, you just can’t, you don’t live their life, we’re a short term solution for somebody else’s long-term experience. And I think there’s this sort of hubris that shows up in thinking that we know what’s best for them. But this accountability piece, I hear this a lot um also. And I remember one time I was working, I was having this sort of a chemistry conversation with somebody, I imagine you have had some of these where the person said what I’m really looking for is an accountability coach that you’ll really hold my feet to the fire. And I just started laughing. I’m like, I am not going to be that for you. That is not what I do. And I think there’s also this piece around, letting go of the idea that that’s my job. So that I can then choose the clients that resonate with me versus choosing just any client even though I’m not going to enjoy being somebody’s accountability partner. Like it is way more interesting to me, to your point, to find out like what’s in the way that they’re not holding themselves accountable, like you say it’s important to you, what’s going on there? Far more interesting, far more interesting. Yeah. What do you think is something that coaches on that journey to MCC themselves or at least coaching at a much more transformational level need to hear? |
| Emily Golden | It is um drop the formula, it is not a formulaic ah process. Um, I understand that it’s useful sometimes to have acronyms or tools or whatever. Be more of who you are. I feel like at the beginning of my coaching journey I had to unlearn a lot um and then I had to learn the competencies is and I had to really become intimately familiar with what coaching is and what coaching is not. And then once I got to the PCC level and I, you know coached for thousands of hours, it started to become like I need to actually sink into being more of who I am, um that person that always was there, but just was kind of hiding in the wings because she thought that she was gonna mess it up or she was gonna bring too much of herself into the space. So um, you know, the break real breakthroughs for me came when I finally was uh willing to bring my full self and um and take certain risks um to create that trust and intimacy at a real deep level. |
| Lyssa deHart | Can you think of, like when you talk about that um creating or trust in yourself to bring that forward? Do you, is there like some example that really illustrates that that evolution that you went through? |
| Emily Golden | So, I would, when I first started um my co-coaching, mentor coaching towards my MCC, I relied on silence, I overused silence. So it became almost formulaic for me and I would have assertions, I would see certain things, but I would be hesitant to bring them because I thought it would land as again, my agenda or I was putting me in the space. I can’t think of a specific example, but once I started to recognize that I had something to say and that by simply labeling it my assertion which I had been trained in, but for whatever reason, I just hadn’t been using. Or you know, saying, may I reflect boldly to you? That’s when things started to shift. And sometimes not even I didn’t even sometimes I didn’t even label it, I would just say this is what I’m hearing, this is what I’m sensing, this is the intuitive hit that I’m getting. Um, and that that’s the truth, like, that’s actually what’s happening in the moment and I had learned to censor that because it was getting in my way initially. |
| Lyssa deHart | Yeah, I mean I’m really hearing that transparency and self-trust really showing up. You know, it’s funny I was talking to somebody else about this also, but one of the things that I see that is very similar is like your intuitive hit maybe right on. But the coach then goes on the assumption that it’s right and doesn’t just even ask the client. Like here’s the intuitive hit that I’m getting, what do you make of this? Um And then the client is always a choice to go, no, not me. I don’t know how that applies. And then it’s really funny too because sometimes when they say that several sessions later they may come back and be like, you know that intuitive hit that you had like two or three sessions ago, I think we need to talk about it now. Have you ever had that experience happen where they weren’t ready in that moment, but because you shared it transparently, but then weren’t attached, like no, no we really do need to explore this. They come back later when they’ve had a chance to sit with it right? |
| Emily Golden | And along those lines, I’m never, um never shocked but always surprised when a client comes back and says you reflected X. Or you said X in a session and it really stuck with me and I’m thinking, I did? What? I said or I don’t remember saying that or well of all the things that came out in that session, that’s the thing that landed with you. Huh? |
| Lyssa deHart | And that’s it, Emily. That is exactly it. Which is we can never assume we know what’s going to light up the client’s brain, right? We have to just ask them, we have to throw things out there and see what lights them up and not be attached to it. I love that. It’s beautiful. Yeah. So tell me, what are you up to in your world today? What are you doing? |
| Emily Golden | So a few exciting things. First off, I am um registering for a free webinar on The Three Lies You’ve Been Believing That Keep You in a Professional Rut. Um And after that webinar, there will be an opportunity to enroll in an online training program that I have created based on my book, The New Golden Rule. And I’m very excited about it. Um It’s The New Golden Rule a Professional’s Journey Into Personal Development. So it’s all about, you know, my assertion is that the best leaders are doing their own personal development work. This is access to that. Um so that’s that’s one thing I’m up to. The second thing I’m up to, um up to right now is spending more time working inside of organizations. I’ve got a few corporate clients that I just, I’m so excited to be partnering with both individually and on, you know, workshop and training levels. I have a team of other coaches that I’m so blessed to be able to get to partner with under The Golden Resources umbrella. And then the third thing that I’m working on that I’m really excited about is I’m going to get certified as, a um as a Breathwork Coach. I during the pandemic started to hone a breathwork practice and I have found it to be an incredibly powerful healing modality and um manifestation modality. I can’t describe it any other way. But since I started the breathwork there have been certain a new level of intuition that has begun to take hold um in my practice and I want to hone that. So in addition to the breathwork, I’m also working with a coach specifically around developing the spiritual side of life. |
| Lyssa deHart |
Yeah, I love that intersection and you know, it’s sort of interesting as you were saying that the thing that showed up for me is, you know, you can go maybe depending on who you are six months or so without food, you can go maybe two weeks without water, but you can go how many minutes without breath? Like breath is so vitally important to our capacity to be present, to be alive, frankly, um wonderful. And I’ll have links to your website below and people will be able to come and find you. Oh my gosh, thank you so much for being on the Coaching Studio and talking with me today, I really appreciate hearing about your journey and about your wisdom and your insights. This has been just so much fun. |
| Emily Golden | Thank you for having me, thank you for providing the opportunity to share with you and to share with your listeners my journey and hopefully for someone listening, it sparked some new awareness or resonated on some level, it’s really been a pleasure for me to be here with you. |
| Lyssa deHart | You know, and just real quickly also, I want to just throw this out because you’re such a beautiful example of this, very few coaches just do coaching right? Like they’re, they’re like these multiple things that coaches are doing and you’re such a great example of these sort of multiple, you know, streams of interests that you’re working on and I think that’s really important for coaches to hear also. That it’s not like you leave your business and you start your coaching business and then all you do is coaching, there’s like all these different things that you may be doing that all feed on and build the foundation of your business. |
| Emily Golden | Yeah, that’s part of the fun, I think. |
| Lyssa deHart | I think so too, it keeps it, it is ever-changing and keeps your brain alive. Thank you. |
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Lyssa deHart, LICSW, MCC
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Lyssa deHart ditched her therapy practice to become a Leadership Confidence Coach. Along the way she discovered a passion for professional coaching and wanted to find ways to share that passion with the world. Come join her in discovering and meeting some of the most amazing professional coaches on the planet. Her goal is to inspire coaches. Lyssa is the author of StoryJacking: Change Your Dialogue, Transform Your Life , and The Reflective Coach. Lyssa is an ICF PCC Assessor, Certified Mentor Coach, and budding Coach SuperVisor. Lyssa uses her understanding of the ICF Core Competencies, combined with her knowledge of Neuroscience, to work with people to become extraordinary professional coaches. Let's Go!
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