Kate Wolfenden is a founder, adventurer and social impact powerhouse, she was also an Untamed Coaching client. In this episode Ed shares part one of her serialised Untamed Coaching story. Hear how her journey towards reaching her potential, unfolded.

Audio Transcript:

Kate Wolfeden’s Untamed Coaching Adventure

Kate Wolfenden is a founder, adventurer and social impact powerhouse! She was also an Untamed Coaching client who went on quite the journey with me.

Her journey is one littered with doubt, false assumptions and fear. It’s also one of bravery and conviction. 

Kate wanted to share this journey with you, in the hope of inspiring action, or at the very least, introspection.

Here is part one of her serialised Untamed Coaching story. 

1. GETTING TO KNOW JIM by Kate Wolfenden

It’s a funny one isn’t it. I mean, I had known for years that it would be a good idea to ‘get a coach’. I’d seen transformations around me with my peers, and even gone so far as to congratulate and compliment them on their progress. But then some-how I still managed to de-prioritise it from my own life.   

I’m too busy. It’s too expensive. I’m a well read and productive woman. What can they tell me I don’t already know? And anyway it’s less about what they are going to tell me, It’s about my own internal resistance and until I get a handle on that I can get what I need from a book.

But then came another fork in the road. One I didn’t see coming, but I could have done. In fact, I’d been subconsciously paving my way to it for the last five years. 

It wasn’t necessarily a bad road, per se.  It was just, in retrospect, a very predictable one - and having worked with Jim for 3 months now, I can safely say wasn’t the best road for me. 

If only I’d had the awareness. I was thinking. I wonder if it would have gone differently. Would I have taken the same path? Would I have ended up here? Where is ‘here’ anyway? And while I’m at it, where do I even want to go next?

Classic mid-career questions, right? So easy to sweep under the table and convince myself that just because I thought about this kind of thing - a lot - that I was asking the right questions.

Then along came Jim. 

I’d like to say I did myself proud and methodically interviewed a series of coaches, compared offerings, prices, and all the stuff I said I was going to do when I first responded to his message on Linked In. But I didn’t. True to form, I was ‘too busy’ doing other things – not prioritising me and my life. 

It didn’t really make sense to be honest. He was a digital nomad championing the life of the untamed entrepreneur. I had literally just quit being an entrepreneur, definitely did not want to go back and I’d tried to be a digital nomad a couple of years back, but these days I was stuck between a rock and a hard place of craving a little cottage and a settled life in the country, at the same time as wanting to jack it all in and go live in a tent in the wild. 

Why on earth would I want to work with Jim? 

Well. Sometimes things just don’t make sense on the surface, do they? Especially with me, I can read myself into finely tuned, overly informed sense of conviction on almost anything. But with Jim? It just felt right. 

He’s a very warm person. And kind too. And I think I needed a little bit of kindness at that point. I think I had it in my head, that a coach would have me dropping to the floor mid session to do 30 press ups, go to bed with a copy of Ferris’ 4 hour working week and wake up 3 hours later with O’Keefe’s First 100 days. 

Jim wasn’t like that. In fact, perhaps to begin with - a little frustratingly so. I mean, I came to the table with all these expectations. 

I have this problem, this problem and this problem – sooooo, these are the ones we are going to work on, right? Oh and while you’re at it, I’ve read the guide book. And I’m just not really sure it’s all that relevant to me. So can we not do that please?

Hahaha. I’m actually laughing at myself reading this. Jim was pretty patient. He was patient when I moved the diary around. And he was patient when I asked things like:

Why are we focusing on this and not this? Is there a purpose to this? I think we are going round in circles. Can you teach me some tools please? I don’t want to talk about what is wrong I just want to fix it. 

Then one day he wasn’t patient any-more. He wasn’t rude, but when I tried to move a meeting for the 3rd time, he explained how he worked with his clients. He explained how much commitment he puts into them and how he expected that in return. 

This stopped me in my tracks a little bit. I realised I was doing what I always did. De-prioriotising me. But when it was just me, I could get away with it. This time I was also deprioritising Jim and Jim doesn’t let you get away with that, that easily. 

I think it was our second, or maybe third, call when Jim asked me to ‘trust him’. That we were in a process and we need to unpack things so we could repack them in order later. Up until this point, I think I just got frustrated. I’d take something out of the box, briefly explain it and then put it back in. Jim being the incessantly curious puppy that he is, would get excited, reach in the box and pick all up the things around it. Woah. What are these for?, he’d ask. 

Erm. Leave those things alone, please.  I’m clearly not here to talk about those. We can deal with this little thing over here and I think we’ve done quite enough of that already, thank you very much. Let’s pack these all back and pretend that never happened. 

But Jim is like a dog with a bone. He knows what he is looking for and before I knew it, I was having a little cry about something I didn’t even realise upset me. 

This was probably a watershed moment for us. Moving from the surface things that I thought I’d started working with Jim to talk about – like career path and life goals. To the really deep things that motivate me or hold me back. The stories I’d been telling myself since I was child that really aren’t working for me anymore and the amount of noise they were all making in my head. 

It’s. really. Sticky. Stuff.

Keep your ears pricked for Part Two in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, ask yourself what assumptions you may be holding on to?

What is getting in the way of you making the transformations you desire?!

So we often, our stories are the only things holding us back!