171. Stop Choosing! Why Executive Coaching Is Failing High-Achieving Women

The coaching industry has failed high-achieving women. It's time to change that.

Have you ever felt like you’re living a double life? Like the "badass" CEO or high-performer at the office has to shape-shift into a completely different person the moment she pulls into her garage?

In this breakthrough episode, Laurie Reynoldson reveals why the coaching industry has done high-achieving women a massive disservice by forcing them to choose between "Executive Coaching" and "Life Coaching". Laurie shares how she finally "cracked the code" on why so many successful women still feel burned out and disconnected: you cannot separate the leader from the life she is living.

This week is all about the launch of a new umbrella of growth: Personal Leadership Development. It’s time to stop compartmentalizing your soul and start leading yourself with the same clarity and conviction you bring to everyone else.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The "One Identity" Truth: Why trying to be two different people at home and at work is the primary driver of midlife burnout.
• The Myers-Briggs Fallacy: Why up to 75% of personality test results may be skewed by your "conditioned" work mind rather than your authentic self.
• Masculine vs. Feminine Energy: How to marry the logical, "fix-it" masculine energy required for business with the intuitive, creative feminine energy your soul is yearning for.
• The Midlife "Crisis" Reframe: Why this season isn't a crisis, but a natural point of friction when your 20-year-old self’s decisions no longer fit the woman you are today.
• The Founding of the Mastermind: How Laurie’s new 9-month leadership experience bridges the gap between professional excellence and personal fulfillment.

Special Announcement: The Best Life Mastermind

Laurie is officially inviting founding members to the Best Life Mastermind, a nine-month personal leadership experience for women who are done waiting and ready to lead their whole life.

• Limited to 10 Women: An intimate "personal board of directors".
• Two Luxury Retreats: Sun Valley in September and Arizona in February.
• Ongoing Support: Monthly coaching calls and a private community away from the noise of social media.
• Join the Waitlist: Get first access before applications open to the public on June 1st.
• Link: schoolofmidlife.com/mastermind-link

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Transcript

Real quick, before we get into today's episode, I wanna talk to you about the Best Life Mastermind. 

For years, the coaching industry has given high-achieving women a choice, invest in your career or invest in your life, executive coaching or life coaching, leadership at work or clarity at home, as if our lives were separated into two different parts.

Here's what nobody has said out loud. You cannot separate the leader from the life she's living. If she's burned out at home, she's gonna be burned out at work. If she doesn't know what she wants from her life, then she doesn't fully know what she wants from her career either.

The Best Life Mastermind is built on a different premises, personal leadership development for the whole woman. Because the clearest, most fulfilled, most purposeful version of you, she shows up everywhere: at work, at home, in every room you walk into.

 I want to invite you to join me as a [00:01:00] founding member in the Best Life Mastermind. Here's what's included. Two in-person luxury retreats at award-winning destinations, Sun Valley, Idaho in September and the incredible Civana Wellness Resort & Spa in Arizona in February.

All accommodations, meals, and spa appointments will be included. Monthly personal leadership coaching calls and an intimate private community of like-minded women doing this work together, hosted off of social media and away from the noise. 

Nine months, 10 women, two in-person retreats, monthly coaching calls, everything included except your travel. 

Applications open June 1st, but the wait list is open right now. Go to schoolofmidlife.com/mastermind-link or click the link in the show notes to add your name. Now, let's get into today's episode.

Hello, my friends. It's Laurie. Welcome back to another episode of the School of Midlife podcast. [00:02:00] I am very excited about today's topic. If you've been following me on social media, if you listened to last week's episode, you know that I've been teasing it a little bit, and it's this entire concept of personal leadership development.

I have been coaching for six years now. I started with this idea that when people ask me what I did, I would just say that I was a coach for midlife women, and they didn't actually know what that meant. I have talked it on this podcast before how I've struggled with the idea of a life coach. And eventually, I did get to the point where life coach kinda made sense to me because at, at first, I was like, the women I coach are complete badasses.

You know, they run companies. They're doctors. They're lawyers. They're CFOs. They're at the top of their game. The last thing that they need is somebody to tell them how to do life, like, to, to teach them how to be all soft and [00:03:00] squishy and, and, and figure out about life. And then I was like, actually, there is something to that because as high achievers and high performers, we typically tend to lean into achievement and goal setting and figuring out what the next thing is.

I mean, w- we set a goal. We work our ass off to achieve it. We achieve it, and then we don't feel the way that we expected to feel, which oftentimes is, is tied to some sort of award or external validation or approval. And because we don't feel the way that we thought we would feel, then we are immediately on to the next, and it's a bigger goal.

It is a longer race. It is something more impressive than what we just finished. Because we expect, we think that what we're looking for is on the other side of the next thing, the next job, the next career, the next city, the [00:04:00] next marriage, the next workout, the next meal plan. Because we're not comfortable enough with where we are right now, who we are, we think that there is an answer for us out there , so we keep looking.

And after coaching women for years, I was like, you know what? Maybe what they actually need is a life coach. Instead of somebody who helps them just immediately set a new goal and get to achieving it, which absolutely I do. But there's something to be said for an accountability partner, a thought partner, somebody that you can converse with and have conversations about how you're feeling, and remind you that life is supposed to be fun. That it shouldn't just be this constant hamster wheel of do the thing, pack the calendar, achieve the goal, on to the [00:05:00] next, constantly striving for whatever is next, constantly performing, constantly showing up in a different way than we are.

Because on some level, we feel like our worth is tied to what we do. Whether you believe that or not, I am telling you, at the core of every woman is a lesson that we learned that our achievement, getting good grades, earning the top billing in the school play, captaining the soccer team, even just being the good kid in the family, there was some approval that we received, some validation, and our little bitty young little girl minds, at that point, before we even had any idea what we were doing, that's where this whole idea that what we were doing was tied to how we were performing.

And if we were performing well, [00:06:00] then we were worthy. And if we weren't performing well, there was a lot of opportunities for improvement. So I talked myself into that. I, you know, like, the, the... Enough mental gymnastics went around, and I was like, "Yes, okay, life coach, that makes sense even for high-performing women because they know how to do work.

I get that, but they need somebody to actually help them do life."

I finally cracked the code, though. It's been years, and I have finally cracked the code, and I have figured out that it's not me and how I coach, and it's not you as a high-achieving woman, high-performing woman, whatever age it is that you are. You're not the issue either. It's the industry.

Here's what I mean. For years, the coaching industry has given high-achieving women a choice: invest [00:07:00] in your career or invest in your life. You can choose executive coaching on the one hand or life coaching on the other. You choose either clarity at home or leadership at work. As if these two things were different, as if we were different people in different areas of our lives; right?

You literally cannot separate the leader from the life she's living. They're the same. Think about it this way. If you are burned out at home, you're burned out at work, too. I'm gonna give you an example of that in just a minute, but stick with me here. If you don't know what you want in your life, then there's a good chance that you don't fully know what you want with your career either.

Here's what I mean [00:08:00] by that. Think about at home. You have had a rough day. Drive into the garage, you come into the kitchen. Do your family members know that you've had a rough day before you even say anything? Of course they do. Of course they do. Just like if your husband's in a shitty mood, you know.

He doesn't even have to say anything. It's the energy, the way that we're showing up, the way we walk into the, into a room. Are we creating weather? Like, are, are things just whirling dervish? It's all energy. We don't even have to say anything.

If you take what happened at work and you take it home with you, and your people at home know, you're damn straight that if things are going heavy at home, your people at work know, right?

I mean, think about it. If your kid's not getting good grades in school, [00:09:00] or you are helping your parents who are suffering with dementia, and you're trying to move them out of their house to a place where they're gonna be safe and taken care of, Or your spouse lost his job, you've gotta believe that... when you go to the office, people know that there's something going on at home. I don't care how good you are at performing. I don't care how good you are at separating the two. The people around you know.

And the coaching industry has done this complete disservice to women by, like, selling this idea that we can be two separate people in the areas of our life where we spend the most time, at home and in the [00:10:00] office.

There's this, this idea that women can somehow compartmentalize our lives, that whatever we are doing at work stays at work, and whatever we're doing at home stays at home. And I don't care how good you are at separating the two, at setting and holding healthy boundaries so that work does tend to stay at work and life does tend to stay at home.

Even if you're fantastic at that, there's still gonna be spillover. You are not wired to be two separate people. And two might even just be generous. I mean, think about all of the different roles and responsibilities you have at home and in the office and in the community. It- so many. So you might be even parsing up your life into [00:11:00] even more than work-life parts.

You might have work, life, church, community, volunteerism- Family. I-- So many parts.

 high-achieving, high-performing, successful women will invest in leadership development. They'll invest in management coaching without hesitation. They'll-- They are interested in skills training and executive coaching. They understand a return on investment.

If you ask those same women to invest in a life coach, something shifts because it feels soft. It feels self-indulgent. And there's almost this undercurrent, this, this guilty feeling or a little bit of shame that goes along with it because if someone is telling them they need a life coach or even if they think... e-even if nobody's saying it, if they [00:12:00] start thinking that they might need a life coach, they think that they're admitting that they can't handle it, that something's wrong.

Everyone else seems to have it in check. Everyone else seems to know what's going on. Everyone else seems to be able to handle this. Why can't they?

So instead of giving women the tools to succeed in their entire lives, we tell them that they need to be better at time management. We, as a society, judge them for their choices.

As women, we're tough on other women. As women who have kids and some decide to stay home and some decide to go to the office, you better believe that some of the greatest critics are coming from inside the house.

We grew up in an era where we were told that we could do anything. Think [00:13:00] about that Enjoli perfume commercial. I talk about that all the time, but it's so true. You've got a woman who is in her very masculine-looking business suit. She can go, she can bring home the bacon. Then you see her cooking because she's frying it up in a pan. And then you see her in this like negligee. But she's never going to let you forget you're a man.

She can do it all because she's a woman. Hell yes, you're a woman. And also, it's okay to ask for help. And also, you don't have to do it all by yourself.

 When it comes to coaching then, the problem that we have had or the problem that I have had is my work falls somewhere in between. That's why I led with I'm a coach for high-achieving women. The problem with being in the middle is people like certainty. They want to know what [00:14:00] it is you do. And they don't necessarily want you to spend hours trying to explain it.

So when you say you're a coach, they don't know what that means. If you say you're an executive coach, they know exactly what that means. If you say you're a life coach, similarly, they know exactly what that means. Or at least what they think an executive coach is and what they think a life coach is.

They've got ideas about the different pools.

Here's what I finally figured out. There are not two of us. There is one of us. I don't care how good you are. There's still only one of you.

Shouldn't that person who shows up in the office be the same person who shows up at home and vice versa? If you're feeling burned out or run down or exhausted or stressed [00:15:00] out, part of that is because you're trying to be someone other than you're not. You're trying to show up in a way in different parts of your life that are not authentic or aligned to who you are inside.

I used to do that in the law firm all the time. I finally got to the point where I understood part of why I felt so burned out, part of why I, I suffered through a case of the Sundays for so long, was this idea that I am happy-go-lucky. I enjoy having friends and entertaining. I love the weekends. I love going for runs with my friends after work. I like being out and about around people.

The problem with work was who I had to be or who I thought I had to be when I showed up in the office. I mean, I've taken all of the personality tests. They all say I'm [00:16:00] an extrovert. They all say I'm a high achiever. They all say I'm highly competitive. They all say I'm very dominant.

Those tests were taken by asking me questions of my conditioned mind. Of course, you tell me I'm a competitor, watch me compete. You tell me I, I score highly on dominance, watch me go in, dominate a room. I will be a bulldog of an attorney. I'll be a bulldog of a negotiator, no problem. You tell me that I am an activator and an achiever.

You tell me all the things that I'm supposed to be good at, watch me live into them. They are self-fulfilling prophecies.

I would guess that at least 75% of us, and I'll tell you where I'm getting that, that number in just a second here, but I would guess that at least 75% of us show up differently at home. We're not as dominant. We're not as [00:17:00] achievement-oriented. We're not as competitive, and that's where the disconnect comes from.

I was listening to a podcast, and an expert in Myers-Briggs, so the ENTJ, the IF... I, I can't remember what they are. I'm an ENTJ, or at least I was when I took the test when I was in the middle of a very... You know, I was a partner in a small firm, in a very contentious firm, and man, I had to stand my ground every single day. So when I took the test and it's asking me questions, I, I performed exactly how I thought I should perform in the law firm.

So I, I'm listening to this podcast, and this expert is on, and he, he said, "For most people, at least 75% of them, at least one of the numbers is incorrect." Think about that If you've, if you are using a tool like the Myers-Briggs as an [00:18:00] assessment to tell you who you are and how you should act and behave in a certain arena, in a certain part of your life, and that's wrong, huh, that changes things, doesn't it? Changes things.

So what I finally figured out is I don't want to live in a world or perpetuate a coaching industry that is going to ask you to choose. To make a decision whether you want guidance in your personal life or you want help with your work life, because I don't think they're different. I think that that's where the burnout and the overwhelm and the stress comes from, trying to be two people, trying to be more than two people, trying to fit and shape-shift and change who you are and how you show up [00:19:00] depending on the circumstances.

That's not doing any of us any good. That is just perpetuating this idea that you either... You've gotta make a choice. Do you want executive coaching? Do you want life coaching? And that there is nothing in the middle. That's where I think the coaching industry has gone wrong.

So you know me. I don't ever just say, "Here's the problem. Go figure it out. Here's the problem. Yay. Yeah, we, we identified a problem. What are we gonna do now?" Here's what we're gonna do now. I have finally realized that what I do with my clients is not life coaching. It's not executive coaching. It's not skills training.

It is all of it rolled into one, an umbrella that I call personal leadership development. I don't see personal leadership development as the middle ground between executive coaching and life coaching. Instead, I see it as the work of our lives to become [00:20:00] one woman in one life who leads herself with the same clarity and conviction she has always brought to every other part of her life.

One person, one identity. She is herself. How can she learn to lead herself in a way that's authentic and aligned in every area of her life? That's personal leadership development. ' Methods and frameworks and practical solutions That allow you to show up as your clearest, your most fulfilled, the most purposeful version of you who shows up everywhere.

At work, at home, in every single room that you walk into. [00:21:00] You don't have to, you don't have to give yourself a pep talk before you walk into a meeting in the office. You don't have to sit in your car and recalibrate and take a couple of deep breaths because you've had a tough day before you start walking into your house.

Yes, you may have a tough day, but that concern, that burnout, that stress that you're feeling 'cause you don't wanna bring that home, you're not gonna feel that anymore because you're not having to put on airs in every different part of your life. Does this make sense? I'm... Like, I'm so fired up about it.

It's taken me years to figure this out, but

... It's almost the marrying of the masculine and the feminine. Here's what I mean by that. To compete in and be successful in the way that we have been taught to compete, most of us have to show up in a [00:22:00] very masculine sort of way.

Let's talk about the difference between masculine and feminine. Masculine says, " I'm gonna compete. I'm logical. I'm, I'm going to fix things. I'm not going to show emotion." Which I've talked about before how one of my biggest concerns, my biggest fears at work was, was crying, like letting somebody see that I was emotional.

We've got that on the masculine side. Those types of feelings and thoughts that we have to be perfect, that we have to be the smartest one in the room, that we have to have an answer figured out before anybody even asks us a question, that's all masculine. That is the society in which we've been raised.

That's the measure by which we have, uh, w- we've gauged our success our entire lives up until now.

And on the [00:23:00] other side, we have all of the feminine feelings, intuition, emotion, creativity, problem-solving. Interesting that women are better problem-solvers 'cause they have higher EQ. But we were raised in a society that says you gotta tamp down that feminine.

If you wanna succeed, you gotta swallow those emotions. Put a pin in that creativity. Don't trust your intuition. Don't cry. Don't show emotion. Gah, that's awful.

That's where the disconnect comes from. We were raised one way, and now we're starting to feel another way, and we can't figure out why that is.

So because we've not felt this way before, we just, well, it must be a midlife crisis. I guess that's what's going on here. Don't let them [00:24:00] try and tell you that there is anything wrong with how you're feeling. This is so natural, and it's particularly natural because of the way we were raised.

It's also why it is so common for women in midlife To feel this way. Because regardless of whether you hit midlife in your late 30s because you got married early and you had kids early and they are graduating and out of the house, so you're in midlife in your mid to late 30s, or maybe midlife hasn't happened for you until you're well into your 60s and maybe early 70s.

It's a really wide range. There's no, there's no one answer, one age on when you hit midlife. It's a mindset. When do you want to choose to actually start doing something for you, to figure out what's possible for [00:25:00] you as you? Not as someone's savior, not as someone's mother, not as someone's partner, not as someone's employer.

Who are you for you? Who are you when you're alone with your thoughts? Who, who is that person? And when we get to midlife, what I'm calling midlife in air quotes, and we have tried to be everything for everyone around us, and we realize we're not capable of doing that anymore, we're starting to finally feel some friction between showing up one way in one part of our life and being a completely different person in the other part of our life.

So much so that we've been doing it for years, we don't even know who we are anymore. That's when people tell us we're having a midlife crisis, because we start asking these big questions that we've never even asked before. We've got a great life, so why would we ever want more? We have an incredible life.

Why would we ever wanna rock the boat? Why do we feel like [00:26:00] something's missing, though? Why do we feel like there's gotta be something more out there for us? And in my opinion, that something more that's out there, that is figuring out who you are in this season of life. What do you want in this season of life?

Not who you were in your 20s and 30s when you made these big life decisions that put you on the trajectory to where you are right now. I mean, think about it. I- we are in graduation season at the time this episode drops. I love seeing the announcements from my friends who have kids who are graduating, but I also think the pressure on these kids is even way more than we had before.

Not only are they committing to a school, but almost every announcement also includes what they're studying. I don't know about you, but I went to, I, I went to school thinking I was gonna be a poli sci major, 'cause I knew I was gonna go to law school. Poly [00:27:00] sci kind of felt to me like how you would go through school, like that would be a good education.

Turns out you can study pretty much whatever you want. You just need a degree to get into law school. So I, I changed from poly sci, 'cause I hated the classes, to design and planning studies the College of Architecture and Urban Planning. I spent most of my college in studios building buildings, creating small models of cities.

I loved it. If I would've had to have declared a major and stuck with it in high school, I would've been wildly disappointed with my choice. We're almost putting more pressure on the kids today. You're 18, figure out what you wanna do for the next decades, decades of your life, because what you study, where you study, that is gonna impact so much.

And I'm not saying [00:28:00] we have to have it all figured out, but think about it. The decisions that you made in your 20s and sometimes in your early 30s, you know, who to marry, where to go to school, what to study, what city to live in, what job to take when you get out. All of it is related to where we end up and where we find ourselves in midlife.

And for some of us, the decisions that we were trusting our 18, 20, 22-year-old self with making, those served us really well for the first half of our life. But they, they just don't fit anymore, and that's fine. We can do something different.

That's what this whole idea of midlife crisis is. It's not a crisis. It's a point where you can decide to choose yourself.

That's what I think this whole idea of personal development, why this works. [00:29:00] Because when you come to me for coaching, I'm not asking you to choose whether you want to do something so that you can do better at work or so you can be a better person in your life. I'm not asking you to do that, because it's the same thing.

It's the same thing. If you tell me that integrity and honesty are high core values for you in your marriage, In your home life, I'm guessing integrity and honesty are also important core values for you in your work life.

You probably don't wanna work with clients who are constantly trying to push the envelope on what's legal and what's not legal. You probably don't wanna work with clients who will do anything to make a buck, regardless of how they have to sacrifice their team members or people below them.

Your values are your values. I'm guessing you don't have a different set of values based on where you [00:30:00] find yourself, who's surrounding you, where you are. And if you do, that's part of where this disconnect comes from. This, this is where that stressed out and the burnout come from. Because you are trying to be two different people in two different situations.

Personal leadership development is to bring those together, to give you the tools and the methods and the framework to show up and be exactly who you are in your whole life with no division, with no compartmentalization, with no showing up and performing one way for one circumstance and being somebody completely different when you go home.

What do you think? Does this make sense? I- it makes abundantly good sense to me. Like, I cannot believe it has taken me six years to finally put the [00:31:00] words to it. But was out on a walk probably, probably a month ago, just really thinking about... And it, it just, it hit me. It hit me so clear. And I think it's because I was working with a client at the time who was making a big decision in her life, and she understood that that decision was going to impact every other part of her life.

But as coaches, we are trained to kinda stay in our lane, work through the problem that you have in one area of your life without this idea that it's gonna spill over into everything else that you do. I mean, think of it. When you want to lose weight and you go get a new trainer and maybe you hire a nutritionist, when you spend a lot of time on one area of your life, when you're so focused on getting in better shape 'cause you wanna be healthier, you wanna eat better The focus that you put on that [00:32:00] part of your life almost guarantees that a number of other areas in your life are going to get less focus.

It's just how it works. We're gonna go into that much deeper in another episode because I'm looking at the time, we don't have time to go into that today. I don't wanna make this too long.

Suffice it to say, if I, if I were to wrap it up with a little bow, the good news for you is I have finally cracked this code. The good news for you is the women who I coach, I don't require them to only try and fix, fix in air quotes, something related to their life. And I also don't ask them to only fix, again in air quotes, something that relates to only what they're doing at work, because I firmly believe we are not different people just because we're in different places. [00:33:00] We're the same people. And we would feel a lot less burned out and stressed out and overwhelmed if we allowed ourselves to show up in alignment and live as authentically as the one person we really are.

Might take us some time to actually peel back some of the layers to understand who we are, what we want, what our dream life looks like. That's okay. We can do the work. I have scientifically backed results, proven methods to do that. I can get you from questioning where you are to profound clarity, no question in my mind.

I can do that. But I'm also not gonna make you choose. I'm not gonna make you choose whether you wanna focus on work or focus on life, because that is an unrealistic division. We're not gonna do that anymore.

If you're ready to do this work, if you're ready to invest in a coach who [00:34:00] gets it, I do have a couple of one-on-one spots that just opened up. I'll put a clickable link in the show notes. We can do a quick conversation, see if it we're a good fit to work together.

You might have also heard at the top of the episode, the Best Life Mastermind is launching in September. This is exactly why I'm launching a mastermind The marrying of our masculine and feminine lives together. Personal leadership development. More information on that coming very soon. There's a clickable link in the show notes if you wanna get your name on the wait list. I would recommend that because if there are at least 10 women, it, it's gonna be capped at 10 women, and if 10 women are on the wait list and they're gonna get access before the public, if they say, "I'm in," and they fill out an application, I'm not even gonna go public with it.

We'll just fill it from the wait list. So if you're interested in learning more, no commitment, [00:35:00] no spam, just you're interested in learning more, get your name on the wait list. Thank you so much for being here today. Have a great week. Take good care. I'll see you right back here next week when The School of Midlife is back in session.

 Thank you so much for listening to the School of Midlife podcast. It means so much to have you here each week. If you enjoyed this episode, could you do me the biggest favor and help us spread the word to other midlife women? There are a couple of easy ways for you to do that first. And most importantly, if you're not already following the show, would you please subscribe? That helps you because you'll never miss an episode. And it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. Second, if you'd be so kind to leave us a five-star rating, that would be absolutely incredible. And finally, I personally read each and every one of your reviews.