There’s a uniting “common denominator” within the human experience that binds us all…even in 2020.

This shared experience is so universal that literally every human on the planet can relate to it….

The junk drawer.

We’ve all got a junk drawer in our house and it’s always a freaking mess.

You know that I’m talking about… That hidden catch-all space that has your candles, car keys, sewing needles, and your cat’s flea treatment medicine all shoved in. 
Now, it’s not like the rest of your house is that trash… 

You’ve got your stuff together.  But this one drawer? Well, it’s your one place of special messy that you just wouldn’t be human if you didn’t have.

And as coaches, we are the same way.

We’ve all got a “junk drawer” inside us that we will always be working on, always organizing, and figuring out.

Many emerging coaches feel this somehow disqualifies or discredits their ability to help other people transforming lives.

To which I squeal, “Sir/Sister, Please!”  😒  Nobody does this work from a place of perfection.

You just have to learn how to not let our junk drawer spillover and mess up the rest of your coaching practice.

So to answer the question, “How do I help others while I’m still working on healing myself?”

I went LIVE in our free group yesterday with a hot A to this Q, and I wanted to share it with you too in case you missed it!

The bottom line take-away from this Live is this: Every coach is in the process of healing, it’s how you are holding space for yourself and your own process that determines if you’re able to be an effective coach or a particular topic or not.

No matter where you fall on this spectrum of allowing the “junk drawer” of your personal experiences, here are some do’s and don’t that will help you navigate this important issue.

Soul Stirring Quotes

“Every human being on Earth who has ever come before you and aspired to do what you are doing has had issues, too, and yet they persevere with the work.”

“Go easy on yourself and realize that you will always be a work in progress – it is not a disqualifier.”

“We have to figure out how we hold space to ourselves, give ourselves compassion, allow ourselves our own humanness, and do it in a professional way that is reflective of our heart’s intention.”

“Every coach is in the process of healing and growing.”

“Give yourself your own space to process what you need to.”

“Confide in people you trust, distill your problem down, and do your inner work towards the victory that you are after.”

“It’s okay to not have every single aspect of your life figured out. Give yourself permission to be human.”

“As a healer, you are a mirror. You will call to yourself clients that trigger you.”

“Your clients want to know that you are a human.”

“You are not responsible for fixing your client’s entire life. You need to operate within your zone of genius and that is what your clients are going to be coming to you for.”

“Take the pressure off and just know that you are helping your clients achieve their goals.”

Welcome to the everyday intuitive podcast. I’m your host, Heather Alice Shea intuitive life coach trainer status quo, shaker and founder of Atmana Coaching Academy. Listen in each week to break up with your comfort zone claim your self confidence and radically embrace your role as an intuitive healer mentor and sought after coach let’s get within and get after it.

Hello, intuitive. What’s up. It’s Heather. And today we are talking all about how do you the professional coach, the professional intuitive hold space for other people while you are still working on yourself. While you are still navigating the process of your own healing. You know, there isn’t a person on the face of the earth that has all of their proverbial crap together.

So I really love this question because I think it speaks to the integrity and the ethics behind. What we aspire to do as helping and healing professionals, which is be really authentic in the work and just be really kind of raw and real with our own humanness in the process. But how do we do that? How do we hold space for ourselves while.

You know, stepping forward from a place of strength to help other people in their journey. So this question was posed to me every week or so. We post in our Facebook group, the app intuitive coach collective for our members to ask. Really awesome questions that they have about navigating the waters of becoming a professional, intuitive coach.

And so this was one that caught my eye. And so I want to thank Kimra for posing it to us. And if you are not over in our big free Facebook group, the app intuitive coach collective. Well, what are you waiting for sir? Or sister scramble your little butt on over there and get in our group because we do a lot of free trainings, free challenges.

Really? It is a place where you can go to either begin your journey as an emerging, intuitive. Coach or if you’re a seasoned coach, someone who’s been practicing a while. It is a great place to find community and training to help you sharpen your skills and really move the needle on growing your business.

So it’s an awesome place to be. Here is your official invitation into that group. And you can find us through the show notes, or you can just go on Facebook and search. Man intuitive coach collective, and we will pop up. We will let you in and guess what? You get a special and free little mini course called the intuitive coach toolkit.

When you do, which walks you through the six stages of intuitive development, it helps you. really begin to start honing and owning who you are as a professional coach. How to talk to people about who you are, what you do, who you do it for and why. And then we also wrap it up with three awesome, intuitive coach tools that you can begin using with your clients today.

Not tomorrow, not yesterday, but today with your clients in session. So it’s all around a kick in the pants and we would love to have you. Okay. So let’s get started on our topic today. , you know, I’m recording this in October of 2020, and , there is so much division going on in our world right now. So I spent a lot of time thinking about what are forces that unify us and sort of the answer to this one.

It speaks to this question of how do we hold space for others while we’re still working on ourselves. And there are. Several, I think common denominators of the human experience that bind us all together, regardless of age, race, creed, religion, culture, where we live in the world, whatever right? You like chocolate ice cream.

I like vanilla. It doesn’t matter what our differences are. There are, I think several unifying, common denominator experiences as a human being that bring us all together. And as I was contemplating this topic, this one occurred to. I think every human being on the planet can relate to the concept of the junk.

we’ve all got that one drawer in our house that is always a freaking mess. Right. If you’re like me, I’ve got like four of them in my kitchen and I know, you know what I’m talking about. Right? It’s that catch all drawer that has your candles and your car keys and your sewing needles and all your Sharpie pens and like a squeegee ball, maybe some Christmas ornaments in there.

I’ve even got my cat’s flea medicine treatment in there, literally naming things that are in my junk drawer. I know it’s really fricking weird, but it’s just our catchall drawer of stuff. We just don’t know where to put it, or we just need somewhere to throw it, you know? So this drawer is constantly, constantly, constantly a mess, right?

And it’s not like the rest of your house is that way. Right. You, you know, you, you’ve got your stuff together. You keep your house together, but this one drawer, it’s a place where all of your special, messy gets to be there gets, and it’s okay that you got this drunk drawer and that it is a mess after all, we wouldn’t call it.

Junk drawer for nothing, right? So you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t have this drawer, everybody’s got one. And I think as professional helpers and healers as coaches, we are the same way on the inside. We all have a junk drawer inside of us that we’re always going to be working on. We’re always going to be trying to organize it.

We’re always going to be trying. To figure this little compartment inside of us out. Right. And I really love this analogy because I don’t think there’s a person on earth who has ever taken up the mantle of being an individual who wants to help inspire others into their potential. There’s never been a person who has sat in that position who didn’t have a drunk drawer.

So I want you to just put a needle in that point, you know, let’s stick a pin. and think about that for a minute that every human being on earth has ever come before you who’s ever aspired to do what you’re doing has had issues too, right? Not issues in the past, right? No issues, right. Then things going on in their life that are hurting them that are, you know, that are on their hard in mind, things they haven’t figured out yet.

And yet they persevere with the. and this is an important point because many emerging coaches feel that because they have a junk drawer this somehow disqualifies or discredits them and their ability to help other people transform their lives. And nothing could be further from the truth. As we say, down here in the south child, please, nobody does this work from a place of perfection.

Okay. So our first tip here is for you to go easy on yourself and realize that you will always be a work in progress. And it is not a disqualifier from you saying yes, to being the coach that you know, in your heart and soul, you are called to. , but what we do have to do, what we do have to do as healing professionals is we cannot let our junk drawer spill over.

And mess up the rest of our house as it were, right. We can’t let the stuff that’s going on inside of us affect our clients. In other words, we have to figure out how do we hold space for ourselves? Give ourselves that compassion that we deserve. Allow ourselves our own humanness, our own process, but do it in a professional.

Ethical way that is really reflective of our heart’s intention, which is to show up big for our clients. Right? So the bottom line really of this is that every coach is in the process of healing. It isn’t the fact that you’re in the process of healing, that you’re in the process of growing. That’s the issue.

The issue is how are you holding space for yourself and your own process? That is what determines your ability to be an effective coach on a particular topic or not. So I’m gonna say that again. Okay. It’s not the fact that you have work to do. It’s how you’re holding space for the work that you have to do.

That is what we’re after here, cuz you’re always gonna have work to do so let’s jump into our four don’ts and our five dues on how to. Rock holding space for ourselves and doing our own work as we step up and help others heal. The first don’t is I strongly advise you to not try to coach people through issues that you yourself are still feeling very.

Ungrounded or extremely uneasy. And the reason why is this? You’re sort of setting yourself up to fail from the beginning because you cannot hold proper space for a person around an issue that you are fundamentally unable to hold space for yourself on. Right. So it’s really, really hard for you to sit from a.

In a space of clarity in a space of creativity, in a space of non-judgment and non-attachment and compassion about an issue that’s triggering the hell out of you. Right? So this doesn’t mean you can’t be a coach. It doesn’t mean you can’t have a practice. It just means you need to understand your limitations with respect to that one issue or topic.

So, you know, the name of the game here is just. Honesty with yourself and integrity around. Not saying that you’re capable of doing things that you maybe aren’t capable of doing, right. So it’s just really knowing your limits. And I think it’s a very, it’s a radical act of self-compassion. For you to not expect yourself to be able to do it all all the time with everyone.

Right? In other words, give yourself your own space to process what you need to, you don’t have to be, you know, the end all be all for your clients. It is okay to say, yeah, you know what? That’s just not my zone of genius right now, you know? So just give yourself the space that you need around topics that you yourself are still healing, and don’t go there with your clients.

If you’re not able. The second is don’t I used to, but now I’m your clients or your audience. What do I mean by I used to, but now I’m that I’m putting that in quotes. What I mean is don’t cover up or pretend to have overcome things that you haven’t actually worked. Nothing in the world will make you feel like an imposter or a fraud faster than acting like one shots fired.

Right? Like, damn, that’s a pretty tough love statement, but it’s the truth. You are infinitely able to do this work. You know, coaching isn’t rocket science, right? These are skills that you can embody and learn. And a lot of people in the industry right now suffer from, you know, imposter syndrome or feeling like a fraud, and there’s really no need to.

Right. It’s just a matter of practicing these skills saying yes to your calling. But if you are putting yourself out there as you are, you know, some type of subject matter expert or, you know, got your shit together on. That you really don’t, nothing is going to make you feel like an imposter faster. Okay.

So I see this a lot in the market. I will see these fabulous Instagram posts or Facebook posts about people talking about how they’ve created the dream life for themselves. They used to feel, you know, they used to fight with their partner. Every single night, but now they never fight with their partner.

It’s like, eh, that’s probably you last night, babe. You know, they’re telling this dramatic story and they’re trying to paint it. Like this was things that used to happen a year ago or two or three or four or five years ago. And I’m like, no, I can tell that was your week, last week, right? Again, there’s no issue with having issues.

There’s no problem with it. It is. When you paint a picture, that’s not entirely honest. And here’s the thing with this. Everybody sees through it. And the only person that’s really fallen forward is you except for, you’re not because on the back end, we know when we’re not being in integrity. With our messaging and with where we really are in our lives.

Okay. So, you know, this is a bit of tough love, but don’t fall into that. If you’re gonna write it, I’m used to, but now I’m post make it be about something that you have actually overcome. Okay. So this really leads me into the third one, which is, do not process your stuff. Out loud, all over on social media.

I see this all the time too. You know, I’m all for transparency. I’m all for being authentic, but you know, something, I don’t walk into business meetings wearing like a tank top with like my yoga pants. Why? Cuz it’s inappropriate for that context. And it’s the same with social media. If you’re gonna be a professional helper, if you’re gonna be a professional coach show up like a profess.

Okay. So the trick to this is confide in people you trust. If you’ve got something you need to vent on, if you’ve got something coming up for you, that’s fine. Confide in people you trust, distill your problem down and do your inner work towards the victory that you are after. And then. From a place of grounded authenticity, having learned what you truly needed to learn, not just intellectually, not just like, oh, I think I figured it out.

Let me go. Right. I used to, but now I’m post. No, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about you are now living this truth from a place of embodied wisdom. You have changed your thoughts, your beliefs, your emotions, and your actions around this. Then you can go on social media and talk about it. Why?

Because you have something to offer people. you have actual wisdom to offer you have a perspective, right? That you’re holding from this place of, you know, really walking your talk and being, you know, a person who’s embodying the work. Right. And the second thing with this too, is like, I just think we owe our audience and our.

Better than that, you know, I, by no means do I pretend to not have, you know, this stuff in my life that I’ve got going on, I’ve got issues, but I don’t think it’s your job to hold space for me. Right. Like I am here to be of service and it’s just not, you know, it’s just not appropriate. I think for me to be doing that, that’s something for me to do in my own personal life with friends, family members, mentors, you know, and the coaches that I lean on to help me express the truth of who I.

Choose to be in this world. And it’s the same for you as a coach. The fourth is don’t rush your own healing process. You know, it’s okay to not have every single aspect of your life figured out. In other words, give yourself permission to be human. Don’t expect to have all the answers, you know, because you don’t, and there’s nothing wrong with saying, Hey, you know, I’m still working on that.

Right. I’m still working on that. So the ability to do this is really predicated on staying within your zone of genius as a coach. And so, you know, for example, for me, I am a life coach training and business development mentor for emerging intuitive coaches. That’s what I do. I stay in my lane. I could talk about a thousand other things I can be up here talking about limiting beliefs and, you know, emotional empower.

I could do so many things, right. I’m actually. You know, an expert, a subject matter expert on dozens of topics within, you know, the coaching industry. But those aren’t my zones of genius. My true, true, true zone of genius is intuitive development. And it’s helping aspiring coaches take up the mantle of becoming a healer and giving them the world class training.

They need to be able to do that. Right. So I talk about that stuff and it’s so liberating because I have the freedom in these other areas to not feel that pressure. so again, it’s really an act of self-compassion here that we’re going for. So now I wanna go over the. The first do is I want you to learn how to bracket and what do I mean by bracket?

I mean, that bracketing, it’s a coaching skill that we learn when we are starting our practices. And you don’t hear a lot of people talk about bracketing mainly because coaching, it’s not a term that comes from the psychotherapy world, but very, very, very few coaches really talk about it. And so I wanna bring this up here because it’s a very powerful skill for you to learn.

So what is bracket. Bracketing is the ability to be sitting in a session with a client and notice your own stuff, come up and then literally bracket it, push it to the side. So that, that session and that time, and that sacred space remains your clients. okay. And it’s a very hard thing to do because as a healer, you are a mirror.

You will call to yourself clients that trigger you. You will call to yourself clients that, you know, once upon a time, you were also struggling with this and it can be very triggering. So as a coach, you have to learn the skill of tabling your own crap and the middle of a session so that you can continue holding space for your client.

I am going to do a podcast episode on the skill of bracketing in and of itself, just because it’s pretty massive. And I can’t really go into it, you know, entirely on this podcast or else I D but it’s really just about not letting your own stuff get into the session or get in the way of your own client’s processing.

Okay. So learn how to bracket, learn how to sit in session. Be triggered or, you know, have all of these ideas from your past flood in your mind. And now your story and your life’s past is now top of my, no, that’s not the place you’re here to attend to your client to actively listen. Um, you know, to be in their world, not get sucked back into your own.

Okay. The second is understand your soft spots and understanding your soft spots helps you bracket really well. So what do I mean by soft spots? Again, just where are you raw? Where are you ungrounded? Where do you feel a little uneasy, bring awareness to that, understand that, you know, that could be a topic or an area where you are triggered.

And so if you can bring some presence to that, it will really help you bracket in a better. The third one is it is okay to share honestly, about your experiences and struggles. I think your clients really do wanna know that you’re human. They wanna know that you have a junk drawer, but what you can’t do is start processing with them.

Okay. So it’s okay to share, but you share from the place of I’m sharing this information with you to help you, right. It connects to your client’s story. It connects to their struggle. It’s still about them, even though you’re sharing your. The fourth is maintain your self care and meditative practices.

This is so important. We cannot do this work. If we’re not taking care of ourselves, we can’t do this work unless we’re tending to our own junk drawer. So if you will make it a habit of doing that daily, you’re gonna find that really a lot of this stuff just becomes way easier because you are in touch with the fact that you are doing your own work.

And the fifth is take the pressure off. You are not responsible. For fixing your client’s entire life. You’re not, you know, I know you want to, oh my goodness. I know you want to, if you could wave a magic wand, you’d make it all go away. That’s why you became a coach in the first place is you want to help people improve their lives, but that’s not within your power.

and it really isn’t your place. So as a coach, you’re gonna have your zone of genius. You’re gonna have what you’re good at. You’re gonna have your coaching packages and your framework that you create that helps absolutely radically transform your clients’ lives. And you need to operate within that zone of genius.

Okay. Because that’s what your clients are gonna be coming to. You. So it’s really important to just take that pressure off and understand that you are there to help them get results in a very specific area of their life. Right. And it’s not that you can’t help ’em in other areas, but in order to get to really move that needle and get those results, you have to remain.

Focused. Okay. So it’s very, very easy to be pulled out of that zone of genius. Let’s say you’re a career coach, right? You help people level up their skills and make more money. And your four sessions in and your client comes in and they say, oh, you know, my partner just left me and wants a divorce. It can be really tempting to say, okay, let’s do relationship coaching might not be your zone.

A genius. Right, but you’re gonna wanna, oh, let me help you with that too. Now I’m not saying you can’t pivot and start integrating that into the sessions, but you can’t do all things all the time. It’s just not possible. You have to modify that coaching agreement or that arrangement. Right. So. Understand that there’s only so much you can do.

So take that pressure off and just know that you are helping your client achieve their goals, as you care about them as you love them. And as you care about and love your self. So to sum all of this. You got a junk drawer. It’s great. It’s how you hold it. That makes all of the difference. So I want you to ask yourself very, very quickly go through the don’ts list.

Are you doing any of these don’ts and you can find them in the show notes. Are you doing any of these? Don’ts if you are, please cut it out, girl, please stop. Come on. And if you aren’t doing the. Then you can, um, ask yourself how you can start implementing those today. So I had mentioned our Facebook group earlier.

I also invite you there again, to jump in on more of these street tested strategies that we roll out. Every single week to help you claim your greatness as a world class coach, I spend a lot of time in there myself. So if you want to be able to ask me questions, interact with me or catch our lives, that is where you will find me until next time together, we rise.

okay. Let’s wrap up with three quick things. So my intention for this podcast is to be of impactful service to you. And one of the ways that I can tell how well I’m doing that is by reading honest reviews of the pod. So the reviews really allow me to see the topics and the ideas that are resonating with you.

The most. So I would be forever honored and grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes for the show. And I get super excited every time a review comes in, because it helps me stay in my purpose. And in my intention of supporting the coaches and entrepreneurs out there doing the heavy lifting of helping other people heal and expand and grow.

So if it feels aligned, go to Heatheraliceshea.com/podcast, and show me some love by leaving me. Built review and to express my gratitude each week, I read the names of everyone who leaves a review as a thank you to you for helping this podcast thrive. And speaking of showing love, did you know that I make 100% free tip sheets for almost every episode on this podcast?

Why? Yes I do. So you can go to Heatheraliceshea.com/podcast, tip sheets, and enter in your name and best email address. And I will send you over a page link where you can download them all into your little heart discontent. And the third and final thing is that I get. Emails each week asking how to begin the process of becoming an intuitive coach or from existing coaches and therapists who would like to begin applying intuition in their sessions.

So if you are interested or you feel called and would just like to explore, uh, the services that we offer over Atmana coaching academy, then just head over to my website@heatheraliceshea.com and check out our different offerings for coaches and creatives, who would like to explore intuitive development, business development.

Or both. So that is it for this episode. My lovely, remember, you are more powerful than you can possibly imagine. So step into your greatness and stay after it.