Welcome to the Design Your Dream Life podcast where it’s all about designing your life on your terms and now your host, Natalie Bacon.

Welcome to the podcast. I hope you are doing well. I am recording this at a time where I normally don’t record my podcasts. So it feels like we’re getting to chat at a completely new and different time. I don’t know if you always listen at a certain time, maybe Wednesday morning or something like that, but when ever I record this at a new time or day, it always seems so different.

So here we are. And I’m a little under the weather. I’m recovering from a cold, just part of it, right? Heading into fall a little bit. And we both, Steve and I have just had mild cold. So if my voice sounds a little bit cracky, that is why, but I have big news. If you didn’t see already on Instagram, Steve and I got engaged. So many of you have reached out and sent your congratulations and sent me messages and emails.

Um, so many of you in Grow You. I just want to say, thank you. I read all of them. I appreciate them. I feel so loved and grateful, and this time has really been just so full of love. And if you haven’t seen our picture of it or heard the story, you can go on over to Instagram @NatalieRBacon and how appropriate that today’s topic is, how life coaching has changed my life.

I had planned on doing this topic before we got engaged. So I just think that is meant to be, and I want to talk with you about the breakthroughs that I’ve had in my life from applying these life coaching tools. So when I talk about life coaching, I’m specifically talking about bringing awareness to current belief systems so that you can decide intentionally what kind of life you want to live.

Just like with my clients. I never tell them what to do. Like I don’t specifically say you should do this. I help them see their minds so that they can make the best decision for themselves, right? If they’re not seeing something clearly, if they don’t have the awareness of it, that’s my role as the life coaches, to help them bring awareness to the stories that they’re creating about their lives and help them make the best decision for them. Regardless of my opinion, my opinion has nothing to do with it.

So when it’s applied to me, I get to be the decider and how this has worked for me in the last few years is that I kind of break it up into two different categories of how life coaching has really helped me. It’s helped me manage my emotions, do what I call end the unnecessary suffering that I was creating.

So just feel better most of the time, right? And of course, I still feel negative emotion, but it’s clean pain instead of dirty pain. I don’t have as much tension and resistance in my relationships. It really just as a more enjoyable way to live it’s on the one side. And then the other way that life coaching has really helped me is that I am able to create my future from my future and achieve results that at one time I would have never even thought to dream about, and I continuously do this, but I do it from a place of loving what is so that I’m not urgently trying to get somewhere over there, which is also really important.

I’m going to go through the specific stories in my life where life coaching has made the biggest differences, because I want these examples to help you to help you understand what life coaching is all about and to help you see what’s possible with life coaching in your life.

But before I do that, I want to make a note about the difference between changing your circumstances and really applying the life coaching tools and changing your results. So your circumstances are what’s happening in the world. Your circumstances are the facts. So it’s a circumstance that I live in Chicago. It’s a circumstance that COVID-19 happened and that, you know, Chicago is still partially shut down, right?

These are circumstances. It’s a circumstance now that I work from home as a life coach now circumstances were once results. So I created the result of becoming a life coach. And then it became my circumstance. Same is true with money at once created the result of having $206,000 of student loan debt. And then when I still had that debt, it then became a circumstance.

So a lot of times with life coaching, it can be a little bit confusing as to whether you are changing your results or circumstances. And the difference is really, really important because changing your circumstances happens when you change something outside of you in the world. So I want to give you the example that I hear a lot, which is your job is so stressful, right? Your job is your circumstance.

So you decide to change your job to relieve the stress. Normally when you change a circumstance, it’s to feel better and it’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you know, that that’s what you’re doing. But 9.9 times out of 10, what happens is we don’t realize that that’s what we’re doing. We think that it’s the job that’s causing the stress and not our thoughts. So then we take the stress with us. And as long as you know, that you’re the one creating your stress and that you are aware that stress isn’t coming from the job, you can still decide to leave the job.

The point is not to stay in a job that you don’t like. The point is just to have the awareness that that’s what you’re doing. So when you change your circumstance to feel better, you can kind of become addicted to it. You can become what I call a circumstance changer. And I used to do this a little bit more with changing where I lived a lot, I would just change where I lived and I didn’t have the awareness that I was doing it to kind of feel better.

And you can really get addicted to doing this for lack of a better word, where you want to just constantly change your environment and change the people in it so that you feel better. That is not using life coaching tools. You might be making quicker decisions, but you are not living in breakthrough. You’re not creating new results.

You create new results. When you do the hard work of changing your thoughts and feelings, and it won’t feel good immediately. Like when you change a circumstance, typically it feels good immediately because you have different thoughts immediately. And so you say, Oh, I’m not at that job anymore. This feels so much better, right? I’m so relieved.

And what happens is that you will feel that relief at first, but then you still have your same brain. And without life coaching tools, you won’t have the awareness that your thoughts create your feelings. And then you’ll recreate that stress in your life. In some other capacity, whether it’s, if you’re staying at home or you’re working in another job, contrast that with when you change your results and you actually change your thoughts and feelings to get there, you basically have a complete identity shift and change who you are.

It is really challenging work, but this is where you get a new result in your life when you do it right? Changing results happens when you believe in new thoughts and feelings, and then you take new actions and it often requires a lot of massive action and a lot of failures. So let’s say you want to stop dating men who habitually treat you poorly and start dating men who treat you the way you want to be treated.

It’s not just going to be about breaking up with your current partner or getting a divorce. It’s actually going to be a lot more challenging than that because you’re going to have to see what thoughts and feelings you have that are creating these relationships. And you’re going to have to transform as a person, to someone who no longer struggles with men. It sounds great. You’re like, yeah, I don’t want to be in relationships anymore with men who aren’t a good fit for me, but it’s so much harder to do it in practice.

So that’s where you’re really changing your results because who you are now is creating the results. Now you’re never creating someone else’s action. So if someone in a relationsh