Do you ever feel stuck, like you're trying to navigate a roadblock in your life or career without a compass? Well, I've been there too. I once hit a wall in my coaching business, a moment that led me to ask for help and discover the positive impact of reaching out.
In this episode, I share inspiring stories of my clients who reached out for help and ultimately found confidence, peace, and success in their careers and relationships.
Plus, if you're ready to make 2024 your favorite year, as an exciting new offering, I'm extending an invitation to you to join me on a journey of self-discovery and self-love. I can't wait to connect with you!
Click HERE to get the full show notes.
Do you ever feel stuck, like you're trying to navigate a roadblock in your life or career without a compass? Well, I've been there too. I once hit a wall in my coaching business, a moment that led me to ask for help and discover the positive impact of reaching out.
In this episode, I share inspiring stories of my clients who reached out for help and ultimately found confidence, peace, and success in their careers and relationships.
Plus, if you're ready to make 2024 your favorite year, as an exciting new offering, I'm extending an invitation to you to join me on a journey of self-discovery and self-love. I can't wait to connect with you!
Click HERE to get the full show notes.
Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the, Your Favorite You podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains, create the life you've been dreaming of with intention.
My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend. If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.
Hello and welcome back to the podcast.
I decided that today is such a beautiful day out that I was going to walk and talk and record a rough draft of the podcast. I don't know about you, but I tend to get my best ideas when I am walking out in nature. So, I thought let's do two things at once and I was walking along for 10 minutes giving you guys all my best stuff, and it didn't record. So, this is the second rough draft, cleaned up for all of you.
I was inspired to tackle this podcast topic after I got one of my own emails, as one does. It was an email about asking for help. If you are on my email list, you got this email a couple weeks ago. If you're not on my email list, what are you doing? Please stop whatever you're doing right now and get yourself on the list.
You can go to my website, melissaparsonscoaching.com, scroll down to the bottom of the homepage and fill out your info where it says join the mailing list and you will start getting my emails. Any who, in the email I am talking about asking for help with anything you struggle with. If you're anything like me which I know a lot of you are, we have been raised to think that we shouldn't need help.
We shouldn't need to ask for it. In the email, I share a Brené Brown quote which says somehow, we've come to equate success with not needing anyone. Many of us are willing to extend a helping hand, but we're very reluctant to reach out for help when we need it ourselves. It's as if we've divided the world into those who offer help and those who need help. The truth is that we are both.
I love that quote because I am definitely both. I am someone who offers help on a daily basis and who needs help on a daily basis.
So soon after I got my own email, I ran into a roadblock in my business. So just to give you a little background on what is happening at Melissa Parsons Coaching up until this point in my coaching business, all of my clients that I've helped over the past three and a half years have come to me through organic marketing, meaning that they have come through my social media posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram.
They've come from my website, from listening to this podcast. Basically, in the words of my inimitable business coach, Stacey Boehman, all of my clients thus far have come from me, meeting people, telling them that I'm a life coach and offering to help them. So that's how I've gotten my business to this point. I should also say that a large percentage of my business has come from me taking care of the moms whose children I took care of in my former pediatric practice.
So, I was their child or their children's pediatrician and most of the moms in my former practice were sad to see me go, while at the same time marveling at my badassery of having a second big dream for my life at age 48 and actually following it. So, although their preference might have been that I stayed in practice until all of their children aged out, several of them saw the opportunity to work with me as their life coach and they took that opportunity.
That really is one of my biggest flexes that I have now been able to, and have been honored to, take care of both their children and of them, the moms. I am certain that the ripple effect of mom working with me is going to have a much more momentous impact on the trajectory of the children's lives than it did when I was taking care of them all in the office. That is a very long way of saying that.
Now that my business is growing and I'm wanting to do more group coaching, I'm needing to increase the number of people who know about me, who know about my coaching and who know about coaching in general and how I style my own coaching. Also, I'm dipping my toe into paid advertising, so you might see me come up on an ad in your Instagram or your Facebook feed here in the next couple of months. I knew I needed help to do social media advertising well without wasting a lot of time and money.
Setting things up so that I can reach my ideal audience, so that I'm not wasting money advertising to men when I only work with women, which is another thought up for debate in my brain, but that's a topic of another podcast. I knew I did not know what I was doing, so I joined the amazing Claire Pelletreau 's course, which is called Absolute FB Ads for those of you who are coaches and are interested in advertising, and I have done all of the modules and followed along, and everything was going along swimmingly until about two weeks ago when I got stuck.
It was not about the Facebook ads portion of it, or else I would have just asked for help in the Absolute FB Ads group, but it was more on the back end of my website, specifically the automations that I needed to set up so that when people clicked on the ad, they would get what I was promising them in the ad, which is a PDF that is clickable with my top three podcast episodes.
Normally my amazing VA, Jenny, would handle this, but she's on maternity leave with her second beautiful baby boy. Another of my big honors is that I am the only person that Jenny kept on her roster of clients while she's on mat leave. She thought that she could give me about two hours of time per week, which I said was perfect, and I also told her that if she got into this and found out that it was too much, she must let me know and it would be no problem.
I reached out to her this past weekend when I was getting frustrated, and she said she would take a look at it this week. I had just gotten to the point this weekend where I wanted it done and up and running and I didn't want to wait any longer. I was kind of like my grandma Peg if you know my grandma Peg when she got to be in her bonnet there was no stopping her.
So, I channeled my inner grandma Peg, and I went on up work, put my job description in and within a couple hours I had hired a very nice gentleman, a scene. Within about 45 minutes. He had everything I needed done on my website side. In addition, he helped me set up Google Analytics, which I didn't know that I needed. He taught me about Bitly really shit I didn't know that I needed and certainly didn't know anything about.
Of course, before I worked with him, I had the thought I should be able to figure this out myself. I have an advanced degree. How can this be so hard? What is my problem? Why can't I figure out where all of this is on my site and where it's supposed to go? You probably know how mean our brains can get when we can't quite figure something out.
Within moments he had it figured out, helped me make it look nice and all the things. As I was praising him saying, gosh a scene, this is amazing. How do you know how to do all this? He laughed at me and said, well, I have been doing this for the past 10 years. And then I was like oh, of course, I would never expect a scene to be able to walk into an exam room and console brand new parents about all of the normal things that their newborn is doing, that their newborn is doing, that they're worried about.
I would never expect a scene to be able to go into a room with a toddler and reduce her dislocated elbow. I would also never expect him to calculate the dose of liquid amoxicillin for an 8.8 kilo child. So why do I expect myself to know these things that I have no business knowing Now? Of course? I've said it before, and I will say it again. I want to know how to do this myself.
So, instead of giving him my website login and access to my Facebook ads manager, I asked him if he would be willing to walk me through how to do this on my own, so that I will know in the future how to do it and I can actually do it on my own. He was totally fine with that, and I think, honestly, just having the knowledge that I could do it on my own if I want to in the future is really all that I needed.
Most likely, the next time I get stuck, I will immediately be a messaging a seam asking for help. That way, I can stay in my zone of genius, which right now is coaching people one on one, coaching people in groups, delivering these podcasts to you every week, writing my emails and social media posts, and he can stay in his zone of genius. I can let go of the idea that I should be able to do everything on my own and without any help.
Of course, my goal with my clients is that, eventually, everything that I teach them and all the things we do together, they will be able to do on their own if they want to, and they will always be welcome to be my client in the future.
So, say they decide that they want to go out. After they've worked with me for six months or a year, they decided that they want to go out into the world without me and try this on their own. I encourage them, I say that's amazing, do it. And then I ask okay, how will you know when you want or need help again? And then we come up with some ideas and a plan of how they will know. I sent them off saying you got this, and if for some reason in the future you don't got this, come back, we can work together again.
It may not be the same format. I may no longer be doing it one-on-one. I may have moved away from group. It might be more of a program. Who the fuck knows? I too wish I had a crystal ball to know exactly what my future holds, just like you guys wish you did too.
As long as Melissa Parsons Coaching exists and the people whom I've worked with want my help and I know I can help them, they will always be welcome. So, if you're one of my people and you're hearing this and you are not sure that you can believe me, you can believe me. I've had many clients now that have gone out and very successfully done life after having me as their coach and they are off and they are doing amazingly.
I've also had several that have gone on to do this work on their own and then they've decided they wanted more support for whatever was coming up in their life and they've worked with me again. That's also beautiful and no problem. In addition, I've had a couple clients that I've worked with and, although they may no longer feel like they need coaching, it's something that they want, so they've been my client for a really long time and that's beautiful too.
Now I'm going to transition and I'm going to give you some examples of some of the things that I am so grateful that I asked for help within my own life, and then I'm going to give you some examples from my clients.
The first thing that comes to mind is that I’m going to go back to medicine, which surprised me. I didn't know that I was going to go there, but when I was on my walk today, this is what came up. There were so many times when I was in the office or in the urgent care and I wasn't sure about something.
I had zero problem asking one of my partners or one of my colleagues hey, would you come take a look at this? In pediatrics, this usually involved a rash of some sort. So, would you come and take a look at this kiddos rash and let me know what you think? All of my Pete's colleagues right now are nodding their heads and thinking, yep, it's always those damn rashes. Or I would have asked one of my colleagues I'm not sure what to do with this baby. These are my options. What would you do first? I also never had any problem calling the specialists and asking them for their level of expertise.
Something's wrong with your kidneys. We definitely need a nephrologist. We do not want Melissa Parsons managing this on her own. Or, you know, calling the hematologist when the blood work comes back looking a little wonky. Or calling the pediatric gastroenterologist when your friend's baby is way too green for how old he is.
You know who you are. I'm glad I asked for help and I'm so glad I did. In my relationship with my hubby, like I said before, we had a good marriage before coaching, but we were both yearning for a better relationship.
I think if Jon were on the podcast right now and he's popular I should probably have him back on. But if he were here, he would say that he too was yearning for more connection, less fighting, and I'm so grateful that I asked for help and that he participated. I'm so glad I asked for help.
I can't imagine what our lives would be like now that we're empty nesters and we're no longer constantly distracted by the boys. Our relationship has gotten so much better. We laugh way more than we fight. We found things that we really enjoy doing together. It used to be that one of the only things we routinely did together was go out to dinner.
We usually sat at the bar and ate and drank and then went home. Now we love hiking together, we love kayaking, and we love so many more things.
My relationship with my boys has gotten so much better since I've realized that I never really had any control over them in the first place, nor did they really need me to control them. They had it all along. I was just buying into the idea that I needed to control them in order to feel peace in my life.
Thank goodness I asked for help with those boys. I'm so grateful that I asked for help. In my business, I've avoided so many of the common mistakes and pitfalls that I've seen other entrepreneurs make along the way.
Thank goodness, I asked for help in dealing with my own trauma, mostly perpetuated by my grade school gym teacher. If you went to St Mary's you know who I'm talking about and then, by being a medical student and a resident, recognizing that what they were bringing up about me was really never about me. It was more about them Shifting gears again and then thinking about my clients.
If one client hadn't asked for help, she might still be practicing orthopedics where she was not valued and where she was actually gaslit into believing that she is the problem, instead of thriving in leadership roles at her new employer and having boundaries protecting her time in and out of the operating room and clinic and within her administrative roles.
Another client might believe that she has to be the peacemaker in her family business because she was always the peacemaker growing up. She never questioned that role before she worked with me. It was never her job as a little kid to create peace in her family of origin, and it's not her job now to twist herself into a pretzel to create peace amongst her family members in the family business.
She can choose to have that role if she wants it, but it doesn't have to be hers anymore. Another client might never have had the self-concept and the self-confidence before asking for my help. It was kind of buried under shame that was never hers to hold.
Once she saw that she was able to let herself, confident part, step forward so that she could meet her person, her partner, and move to a different city in her state and step into her role as an attending physician with confidence instead of self-doubt.
When I think of another of my clients, before she reached out to me, she might have tried to mold her son into something that he wasn't. She might have tried to keep protecting him when he really didn't need her protection. He really just needed permission to be his unique self. She also thought that she needed to understand his every thought process.
Once we worked together to see just how impossible that was, she gave up on trying to understand everything about him and decided to just love him instead, without any expectations. Who here listening doesn't want to be loved by someone without any expectations? Doesn't that sound yummy and delicious? How lucky is this little boy that it's his mom who's choosing to do this. When I think of another of my clients, she probably would have still been employed in the hospital-based practice Instead of just having opened her own direct primary care practice in her hometown.
She's now her own boss. She's practicing medicine in a way that was probably always meant to be practiced. She has found her way back to that and I'm so proud of her. I can't wait to see what she does.
When I think of another one of my clients, she might have been subconsciously competing with the person she loves the most on this earth, her hubby and she didn't even recognize that she was doing it. It was an old childhood way that she had developed because she thought that the way to feel love from her family was to always win at things. Of course, she carried that into her marriage and her poor hubby didn't even know that they were competing.
She might be still trying to win instead of loving him and allowing him to love her. Oh, my goodness. When I think of another one of my clients, she might be thinking that the complication that her patient had through really no one's fault in the medical arena. She might be still thinking that that complication was her fault and something that she should have somehow known, without knowing and realizing that there was no way for her to possibly predict what was going to happen.
When I think of another of my clients, she might still be thinking that she's not lovable. Instead, she's now married and pregnant with a little girl that I am convinced she's going to name Melissa. You know who you are. Don't disappoint me.
When I think of another of my clients, she might be telling herself that she is wrong for changing practices multiple times in her short career, instead of realizing that she was valuing herself the whole time and that she wasn't willing to settle for anything less than how she wanted to practice and with whom she wanted to practice. She had the mistaken idea that quote unquote good doctors join a practice and stay in that practice their entire careers.
She thought it meant something about her that she had been in several practices. Nope, all it meant about her was that she was not willing to settle. When I think about another of my clients, she would have had so much less connection with her kids. She would have inadvertently been pushing them away instead of building a safe connection with them. When I think of another of my clients who just told me last week that her home, which used to be a place of lots of conflict and of her losing her cool with her kids.
Her home is now a safe haven for all of them. Thank goodness she asked for help because she knew that wasn't what she wanted.
You guys might be hearing these and thinking these are such huge life changes, but I have also helped many clients with the little day to day things. So, sending that email without rereading it a hundred times to get the words just right. Stopping saying I'm sorry when you've done absolutely nothing to apologize for being guilty of not liking to play make believe with their kids. Who fucking likes that, not me.
Looking for the little glimmers of goodness that are already in their lives. Prioritizing rest and relaxation and fun. Scheduling that on your calendar first.
Scheduling the things that you actually want to do first before putting the things on that you must do. If any of this sounds like you, these are just a few of the examples that I thought of today off the top of my head. There are so many more examples of huge shifts and tiny changes that my clients have been able to make because they asked for help.
So, if you want help, if you've been afraid to ask for help, if you're making it mean something about you that you can't figure out your life on your own? Guess what? Nobody else can either. You're not alone. I encourage you to book a consult. We can work together one-on-one. You can join my group that starts in January. We can figure it all together out on the call which type of help will serve you best, and then we'll go from there.
All right, folks, that's it for this week. See y'all next week.
Hey, everybody, don't go quite yet. I want to let you know all the ways that you can work with me.
If you've been listening to this podcast, maybe especially the episodes where I interviewed my clients and you are thinking like the older woman in the diner in the classic Meg Ryan Billy Crystal film when Harry met Sally, where Sally, proving a point to Harry, is faking an orgasm while at the diner.
Sally finishes and takes a bite of her food and the older woman in the next booth says I'll have what she's having. This is your sign from the universe to schedule a consult with me.
I'm currently enrolling clients who want to work with me in a group setting. The group will start on January 10th, and we will meet every Wednesday at 1pm until July 3rd, 2024.
I'm very excited about the women who have already made the commitment to themselves and the investment in themselves to join the group and would love to have you be part of it. I also have a few spots available for one-on-one coaching with me, if that is a way that you want to work with me.
The way to contact me is to go to my website, melissaparsonscoachingcom, and either go to the group page and click Book Now or go to the work with me page and click Book Now.
That way, you can schedule a consult. I look forward to hearing from you. Let's make 2024 your favorite year ever. As you become Your Favorite You.