Episode 145- The Power of Long-Term Life Coaching With A Relationship Coach
For this episode, I collaborated with my dear client, friend, and host of Your Favorite You, Melissa Parsons, to do a deep-dive into the power of life coaching with a relationship coach over the long term. You can visit her website here: Melissa Parsons.
Melissa is a doctor and certified life coach, who is currently completing an additional trauma-informed coaching certification. She’s also celebrating the kickoff of her second year in podcasting with the release of this episode, which will also air on her platform – so fun!
We began working together when Melissa was approaching the empty-nest phase and knew her highest intention was for that nest to feel really good with her husband, Jon. As you’ll learn, Melissa’s experience has been a beautiful evolution – not without messy parts – but her marriage is that much stronger from doing the work with a relationship coach.
We explore the power and impact of having a touchstone, a champion, and someone who regularly holds space for you. We examine how a relationship coach asks the questions that shift your perspective, and invite you to think differently than you have about your relationships before.
I can’t wait for you to hear this conversation. Melissa is such a special person that I’ve had the joy and honor to get to know as a client, colleague, and human. It’s such a meaningful thing to get to reflect to her all the transformations she’s made over the years.
A relationship coach for an already-great relationship?
From the time we met and started coaching, Melissa was first a pediatrician and now she’s a coach, celebrating the second year of her podcast. I’ve gotten to see her whole trajectory and all the incredible things she’s done in her life, relationship, and career.
Very recently Melissa went on one of those epic lifetime trips to Europe and posted beautiful pictures of her adventures with just the two of them giving off this radiance and love and joy.
What was so amazing about watching that unfold was that I, as her coach, remembered when in 2018 she said, “I’m going to have an empty nest in a few years, and I want that nest to feel good when it’s just the two of us.”
I wanted to know more about how coaching has helped her, but also how coaching has challenged her, and how she’s used the power of long-term coaching to create her favorite version of her marriage.
“The highest intention for my relationship was that we would have fun together, and we would want to spend time together, and it wouldn’t be this horrible thing that the boys were leaving.
Jon’s and my relationship now is worlds different than it was five years ago, and we had a good relationship. Neither of us was considering leaving, but we knew that what we had, we could make better.
We knew that we had been kind of having the same arguments over and over and we didn’t know how to get out of the cycle.
On this trip, of course, we didn’t get along perfectly the whole time. But the simplest thing that you taught me was that I get to choose to pause, take a breath, and decide how to show up in those moments.”
How life coaching helps deepen our emotional maturity
Melissa also said something I thought was so vital to the conversation around long-term coaching.
“The level of emotional maturity in the Parsons household has gone up exponentially.”
So of course, I had to ask how she defines emotional maturity.
“The ability to know what emotion is… to know where my feelings come from. Sometimes it’s my thoughts, sometimes it’s my past, sometimes it’s my body. To know that although other people don’t cause my feelings and I don’t cause their feelings, we do influence one another.
The ability to stop in the middle of an ego activation and say, ‘Oh, this isn’t where I wanted to go. Can I get a do-over?’ The ability to give forgiveness is a huge part of emotional maturity.”
There’s a related piece to this that I’ve started calling emotional literacy, and emotional literacy seems so simple but is really complex because it comes down to one thing: can you name your feelings?
Many of us can’t.
So, we’re either in relationships with those people, or we are those people. But in relationship coaching, especially over the long-term, you learn the basics of emotional literacy so you can build a strong foundation for emotional maturity – which benefits any relationship you ever have.
Why no one really needs life coaching, yet it’s so beneficial to get coached
What happens over time with the long term of having your mind managed and questioning everything is that when relationship stressors happen, your problem solving is calmer and clearer. That becomes your baseline. It’s how you live all the time.
You know how to handle your triggers because you’re done the neurobiological work of resetting those patterns over time.
You can figure out anything that a coach teaches you on your own. It’ll probably take longer and there won’t be the support or the accountability, but you could do it.
Coaching gives you a totally different experience of learning those tools.
Every week in coaching, whether it’s all 52 weeks in a year or hundreds of weeks if you coach for a few years, you’re working to change your baseline and your automatic response.
The crazy blowout fight that once would have ruined the weekend (if not the whole week) becomes a minor annoyance, which means your nervous system is in a regulated state more often. Which means you’re more present to enjoy and participate in your relationships… which is exactly the point.
Get the tools to build a stronger relationship
If you want to stop being frustrated with others’ behavior and how you respond to it, and start showing up as the person you want to be, I want to invite you to enroll in The Marriage MBA.
The Marriage MBA — the Mindset Breakthrough Activator — is the 6-month group coaching and mentoring program that teaches you the relationship skills you weren’t taught in school.
What you’ll learn inside draws upon cognitive behavioral psychology — how your thoughts and feelings impact your actions and outcomes — to equip you with the kind of mindset that activates breakthroughs in ANY area of your marriage that feels less than 5-star.
You have so much more power and influence in your marriage than you realize. In The Marriage MBA, you’ll build the skills and tools to and deepen the level of connection in your marriage, then use them over and over for the years to come.
If you’re ready to figure out how to have a stronger relationship for yourself and your honey, this program will help you.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: