Attuned Leadership for Women Podcast

Episode 029

How Executive Coaching Accelerates Women’s Success and Satisfaction

Curious about how you can accelerate reaching your career goals, break through barriers, and achieve personal fulfillment? Then you won’t want to miss this episode of Attuned Leadership for Women!

In this episode, Dr. Crystal Frazee, PT shares real-life coaching success stories, an overview of the revolutionary four-step Attuned Leadership coaching method, and insights on how executive coaching can turbocharge your approach to leadership and resilience.

Discover how coaching can give you a competitive edge and ensure you don’t get burnt out!

 

Quotes from the Episode 

“You don’t want to waste years of your life not looking in the mirror and seeing the incredible asset you are to your team, organization, and community, or as the whole and complete human you are even without your title and your role.”

Dr. Crystal Frazee

“You no longer bend yourself to make room for other people’s needs when it compromises your self-integrity, or brings you out of alignment, because you know what it means to be in alignment with yourself.”

Dr. Crystal Frazee 

​​”Imagine how profoundly your life could change if you started showing up with these qualities not just in your leadership role, but also for yourself in those everyday moments that you may currently overlook.”

Dr. Crystal Frazee 

Highlights:

00:00:00 – Introduction to Executive Coaching
00:01:03 – Dr. Crystal Frazee’s Background and Expertise
00:02:10 – The Urgency of Gender Equity in Leadership
00:03:03 – The Gap Between Knowledge and Implementation
00:04:18 – The Necessity of Coaching for Leadership
00:05:01 – The Loneliness of Women Leaders
00:07:03 – The Athlete Analogy for Coaching
00:09:01 – Case Study: Susie’s Career Advancement
00:13:17 – When Executive Coaching is Pivotal
00:19:15 – Finding the Right Coach
00:20:18 – Attuned Leadership Coaching Methodology
00:26:01 – The Four Steps of Attuned Leadership
00:31:09 – Addressing Common Coaching Objections: Time, Money, Energy
00:36:18 – Enrolling 3 Clients for June 2024 

Mentioned in this Episode: 

Interested in claiming one of the Attuned Leadership coaching spots? Simply email Dr. Crystal Frazee, PT at [email protected] to connect. She’ll send you a link to complete a brief application and then schedule a phone call to discuss. 

Connect with Crystal on Social Media:
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FREE Leadership Resources from Crystal:

• Free PDF Training: Stress & Overwhelm Relief Game Plan
• Free Short Audio Training: How to Run Your Day Without It Running You

Get updates about Crystal’s upcoming book:

REVIVE: The Working Woman’s Unexpected Guide to Recovering from Burnout

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Prefer to Read? Here’s the transcript!

*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate.

Introduction:

Welcome to the Attuned Leadership for Women podcast. Today, I’m sharing why and how executive coaching has such transformative power to accelerate reaching your career goals and finding personal satisfaction. I’ve been a coach for 14 years, and I’ve had my own coaches for the past six years, so I have some key insights that I’m going to share. Whether you’ve never considered coaching before, are curious but hesitant to make the leap, or are a seasoned coachee wanting to learn more, this show will give you valuable points to consider. Like always, you can trust that I’ll give you the real deal lowdown without holding back and all the nitty gritty details you may not find anywhere else. 

Main Content: 

Dr. Crystal Frazee:

Let me tell you why I’m so excited to share this episode with you. Gender equity is expected to take seven generations. That’s 250 years unless we do something differently. It’s shocking, right? 

Well, the episodes I’ve published so far, so that’s episodes 001-028, are all packed with specific strategies to help you navigate the most common challenges you face as a woman leader, including things like gender bias and stereotypes, but also how you can mitigate burnout, have more agency over your impact, elevate communication so you know how to speak up and make your voice heard. I’ve worked really hard to name the most common phenomena working women like you face so that you can realize you’re not alone in those experiences and have access to some tangible strategies to overcome them. 

But let’s be honest, often knowledge isn’t enough to implement the strategies that I’ve shared. For example, we all know we need probably a little more sleep to get that 8 to 9 hours that women need. That we need to increase fiber to regulate our hormones. That it’s important to create boundaries to protect our time and energy so we don’t burn out. We know we need 10,000 steps a day and some form of weight training to keep our bones and metabolism strong. You, in fact, could probably write a book right now without learning anything else about all the things you already know that are supposed to help you have healthy emotional, mental, and physical well-being. 

The truth that we really need to acknowledge is that knowing things and doing them are incredibly different realities. They require different skills and different capabilities, and so often, a level of support. So I’m going to go ahead here in the first five minutes of the show and cut right to the takeaway of this episode. To overcome barriers to change, find your own blind spots, and have accountability to reach your goals, you need a coach. It’s just unrealistic to expect that you should be able to manage everything on your own in every domain of your career and personal life. And I feel really strongly about that because I’ve been there and I tried to do that. And I’ve worked with so many women who also were trying to do that. 

As I was thinking back, almost all the women leaders I’ve coached in the past decade report feeling really alone. they use the phrase alone at the top. They don’t feel that anyone gets the breadth and depth of responsibility they carry, not only for their organizations and communities, but also that mental and emotional load they hold for their immediate and extended families. Since many of us haven’t witnessed women role models exemplifying and embodying a healthy work-life balance, The reality is we, you and me and our peers, we’re pioneering it right now within our circles. And most of us have relied on hyper-independence to get where we are, which we should celebrate that strength and tenacity. Heck yeah, it’s gotten us here. But in my experience, that’s not going to get us where we want to go next. There’s a threshold where we can’t go beyond a certain point without a higher level of support. 

So let’s take a moment here. I want you to take a belly breath, soften in your throat and your face, allow a breath to come into your body, soften your belly. And just let this truth sink into your body. Most likely, you’ve been pushing forward all alone. Your strength is unquestionable. But is that truly what you want? Is that how you want to experience this journey? And how could having a thought partner, a trusted confidant, and a mentor help you move through roadblocks faster and with less tension and frustration? What does your body say in response to these questions? And if you’re really honest with yourself, has your body been giving you signals calling for a different strategy than what you’ve been using? 

Let’s shift gears to think of an athlete competing in their sport like track or swimming. And let’s say she’s highly ambitious and wants to qualify for the Olympics. Is she going to try to figure it out all by herself? No, not for a second. She’d end up injured and out of the running. Not just that, but how would she figure out on her own how to break out of the plateau with her speed, endurance, agility, and get that competitive edge that puts her ahead? Well, she’d have a coach, right? She’d have a trainer. Somebody with a plan. Someone specifically qualified to fill that role. Women’s professional success is the same. It’s just not normalized to be that way. 

As we move into higher leadership roles with more responsibility, our focus becomes leading others, getting buy-in for our vision, steering change management, navigating periods of high stress, dealing with many challenging personalities, and modeling exquisite self-care and work practices so our teams and organizations can be sustainable through all of this. On top of all that, when we hit a roadblock like systemic barriers and biases that impact our career progression or relationship with stakeholders, we need a trusted advisor to help us develop strategies to respond that shorten the timeframe of that challenge and help us break through the plateau just like our pre-Olympic athlete. 

Let me tell you about a former coaching client of mine that we’re going to call Susie. She was hardworking, dedicated, and fiercely focused on career advancement. She always put in more hours, was more deliberate in her communication and relationship building than others in her industry. And she told herself this story that her hard work would get her noticed. She took on extra projects. She always said yes to requests. But instead of becoming the dependable go-to person that could solve any problem and was ready to be promoted, she was passed over. She appeared kind of bogged down and super busy and needed in the role she was in. Well, furious about that, she hired me to coach her to navigate the leadership transition as somebody her junior skipped over her and became her director. Can you imagine how that felt? 

Through coaching, she learned why maintaining boundaries and saying no was challenging for her, and how to start taking steps that changed how her team and senior leadership perceived her. She was showing she knew how to build teams, delegate workload instead of trying to prove she could do it all herself, communicate how her work was contributing not just to the team goals, but to the bigger organizational goals. And she held her boundaries so she could use her time and energy on only high value activities. Well, within the next six months, I’m happy to say Susie was promoted to an upper leadership role. She worked hard for a year in that role. And we touched base here and there just in a friendly way. But she reached out to me after that one year point in this role to help her navigate a very tricky relationship with somebody on her company’s board. There was one specific person that was really critical, kind of aggressive, and seemed to make it an effort to make Susie uncomfortable. They were the only two women at the top, and she really felt targeted. So we worked together in a coaching relationship for the next six months, except our priorities were different this time. She transformed her approach in this relationship with this one individual 

We bolstered things for her, like her ability to practice empathy and perspective taking. I guided her to answer questions like, what was the board member telling herself? What might she be afraid of? What was she feeling insecure about, personally and professionally? What have we learned motivates her? And where are there values that you share that we can leverage? And those answers were already there. It was just asking the right questions and then learning the skills to use that information to build safety in that relationship. 

Then we worked on stress resilience, solution-focused communication strategies, and really gave her conflict resolution superpower skills. And that prepared her to be grounded and ready. No matter what this board member said or did, she could keep her poise and sense of agency, despite the fact that she was really in an unpredictable environment. And ultimately, these changes allowed her to enjoy this new role that she had been in, and to excel in it. You could just tell this weight was lifted. She went from dreading board meetings and these interactions and replaying every word to feeling strong in her skin and unflappable. And what I love to see is how those skills translated not just from this one relationship at work, but outward through her life. Susie was different. 

We had coached together twice on two different levels in her career, and she absorbed and applied what she learned. And it was amazing to witness. Susie’s story is unique because it really did span two seasons of her career. But I chose this story because it highlights the value of leadership in these two distinctly different work dynamics, being an emerging leader and being in senior leadership. 

There’s four more instances that I want to share, where I specifically feel coaching plays a pivotal role in career advancement and fulfillment. The first is when you’re working in a male-dominant environment, let’s say it’s finance or engineering, although there are many, and you feel like you’re facing gender bias. Women face systemic barriers that truly impact their opportunities, but often the approach needs to be bespoke to that individual woman in that individual organization with that team in order to overcome them. Typically, it involves shifting communication, leadership identity, building presence, and really developing relationships with key stakeholders to really shift that experience. 

The second instance when executive coaching is critically valuable is when a woman professionally is feeling overwhelmed and overworked. Being on the brink or in burnout with managing all of your work and personal life demands is such a hard position to be in, but the McKinsey studies showed that last year, 50% of women professionals were reporting burnout. The truth is that without a strategy to decrease the negative impacts of stress that we’re constantly under, then you’re gonna feel more and more depleted. You can learn strategies that protect your capacity, performance, and fulfillment. If you feel like you just want to run away to a deserted island or leave the building and start over or burn it all down, it is time to get coaching support. It’s time to listen to your body’s scream for changes in your life. And in this scenario, coaching can laser focus in on specific ways to bolster your physiology and mitigate the stress so you can get your feet under you sooner. And I’m going to tell you how I do that a little later in the show. 

The third situation that will save you time and effort by having a coach is when you’ve recently moved into a senior leadership role, and you’re feeling like a fish out of water. I think we all have moments where we second guess ourselves. But if you’re someone that’s highly ambitious, combined with regularly having self critical thoughts, or not feeling adequate, despite all of your incredible achievements, then coaching can help transform that doubt into strength. We want to close that gap where the way you see yourself and the way you show up is actually equal to the achievements that you’ve had. You don’t want to waste years of your life not looking in the mirror and seeing the incredible asset you are to your team, organization, and community, or as the whole and complete human you are even without your title and your role. 

The fourth favorite scenario that I love supporting women leaders through is retirement transition coaching. So many of the driven women I’ve worked with get to the end of their career. And instead of feeling joyful and excited, they feel overwhelmed, uncertainty and just a general loss of meaning and purpose. They’ve put everything into their work. Their kids if they had them are usually grown up and independent. 

One specific physician comes to mind who I coached for her last year of working. With support, she was able to rediscover what, besides her career, brought her joy and cast this incredible new vision for the next five years. That clarity meant that before she retired, she had things planned that had seriously lit her up. She developed emotional intelligence skills and body wisdom to guide her forward as her own compass so she could answer the questions, what do I need? What do I want? At any time, without hesitating, And now she’s literally traveling the country and the world since her specific goal became experiencing adventure and joy. 

Now those four examples that I shared of types of leadership coaching I do within attuned leadership aren’t exclusive. Women come to executive coaching for various reasons. But the through line is that they want a safe space to share their challenges, free of judgment, explore their ideas and discover solutions that feel simple and deliver results. 

Let’s pause again and take a moment and ask yourself, What is the main challenge you’re facing that you could use a coach to support you through? What would your life look like if that specific challenge was no longer affecting you? What would be different both in your body and in the experience of your daily life? How important is reaching that solution to you right now? And what’s the value you place on feeling the result of that solution, whether it’s a shift in your physical, mental, or emotional well being, but probably all three. 

Maybe you’re asking yourself how you go about finding the right coach for your situation or what sets different coaches apart. Having worked with a few different coaches of my own over the past six years, I can say it’s not their credential or any specific training that they’ve done. What differentiates executive coaches is their worldview and the shared values. You want to resonate with them on the most important topics in order to feel safe to follow their guidance. You want to know they get you. You want their story to inspire you. Ultimately, though, you’ll know you’ve found a good fit coach when they describe their methodology for the journey they’re going to guide you through, and it lights you up. You think, oh my gosh, that sounds like what I need. Or even, ah, that’s what I’ve been missing all this time. and you feel it in your body. You feel elevated, lifted, energized when you connect with that person and hear what they have to say. 

Given that, I want to take a moment to share what sets Attuned Leadership apart. I’ve never talked about my methodology on the podcast, so I want to briefly give you the highlights of it. There’s four parts that together act as scaffolding that address the specific challenges working women face, where each builds on the next to accelerate success, satisfaction and sustainability. These four steps guide you to your goal, whether you’re an executive or an emerging leader. The four steps are anchor, acknowledge, align, and amplify. 

Starting with the first step, anchor, I want to just give you a little description and some examples. I have a medical background in case you haven’t heard. I’m also a medical board certified health and wellness coach in addition to being a leadership coach. And I’ve learned personally through myself, but also in everything I’ve learned academically, how crucial this first step is for women. And often this is a significant piece that’s missing from other women’s leadership approaches. Imagine your leadership presence and well-being as a beautiful multi-story house. Before constructing the upper levels, you gotta first focus on the foundation, ensuring that it’s strong and stable and capable of supporting this entire structure, no matter what storms or stressors pass through. The anchor phase of my coaching is like pouring a solid concrete foundation, where the focus is on repairing your physiology from long periods of high stress and ignoring your body’s needs. And in my opinion, all women need this because we all face bias and stereotypes culturally and systemically and for women of color, they especially need these tools. We do things like repair sleep so that it’s actually rejuvenating, meaning you wake up and you feel good in the morning. We learn to manage stress so you aren’t carrying any of it forward at the end of the day. It’s been cleared. Imagine that. The stress from the day is resolved and it doesn’t stay with you overnight. And cultivate body awareness skills so you make more strategic decisions, hold more sustainable boundaries, and catapult your organization past its goals. These essential elements provide the stability and resilience you need to enhance your leadership presence and make confident, well-informed decisions, not just from the neck up, not just intellectually, not just using business strategies and tactics, but with your whole body. 

 

The second step is acknowledge. All of us carry stories of who we are, our strengths, our opportunities for improvement, that we’re pretty conscious of. But in this step, we go deeper than that. And we look at how your sense of self and identity has been shaped by your family of origin and early life experiences, and the culture. 

For example, I grew up in a household with two parents and a sister, surrounded by aunts and uncles, and more cousins than I could count in rural Alabama. There were a lot of us, and we were together almost all the time. But although there was physical closeness, I didn’t always feel emotionally close or necessarily safe being vulnerable in that environment. Most of my family, having survived trauma themselves, were jokesters and spent an uncomfortable amount of energy poking fun of each other, including me. I was also one of the smallest, you know, petite in frame and shortest in height. And I received countless comments on my body, my size and shape from a really early age from men and women and cousins my age and from every direction. And that sense of loneliness and a general feeling of no one gets me. set me up for the couple of decades of hyper independence and hyper vigilance that I relied on following that time. 

And I believe those of us women who are type A ambitious go getters have a reason that we’ve gotten to a certain level of success with this “I can do this myself mentality.” But at a certain level, that becomes a roadblock. That’s when we hit burnout. That’s when we’re not really reaching our goals. So this second step, acknowledge, is about being curious about the patterns that we default to, appreciating the reasons why they’re there, being self-compassionate for those reasons why we developed these ideas, and crafting new stories about who we are, when we are in our wisdom self, and when we are in our strong self, and what we’re capable of moving forward. We add on to the body wisdom skills you’ve learned in the anchor phase, and you start to embody a new sense of yourself at home and at work. This second step acknowledge is healing, liberating. And for myself and every one of my clients, it’s truly powerful. And it sets the stage beautifully for step three. 

So just to recap, real quick, we talked about anchor, which is basically nervous system regulation and building stress resilience. It’s repairing your physiology, because your brain will always say I’m fine, even though your body is telling you it’s not. Acknowledge is the second step, and it’s being able to answer the question, how did things get like this? And then releasing what’s no longer serving you. And next is align. 

Align. This step gives you the tools to always know how to answer the question, what choice should I make? What do I do? This is where you get crystal clear on your values, goals, and overall vision. This third story of your house, let’s call it, is where you solidify your leadership identity. That’s how you know without question what you stand for, how to show up in easy collaborative moments and in times of tension and with people that challenge you as your best self. You don’t set boundaries from your thinking mind, but from your body. You no longer bend yourself to make room for other people’s needs when it compromises your self integrity, or brings you out of alignment, because you know what it means to be in alignment with yourself. You solve the quandary of work-life balance because you’re clear on what your personal needs are, even though they’re evolving. You know your professional focus and you have blinders on where everything else falls to the outside. And you’re really connected to your passions because you’ve re-invited them back into your life. And you skillfully negotiate through all of these three things throughout the day, personal, professional and passions, because we’re not neglecting any part of who you are. This is the phase in case you’re wondering where people around you are asking, what’s she been doing? Is that a new fitness program? Are you taking a new supplement? Hmm, something is noticeable. And there’s a real shift. 

Lastly, the final phase is Amplify. Clients work with me to help them reach professional goals, but the skills that they learn serve them in every area of their lives. And before we wrap up our coaching, we make sure that we’ve hit every area where they need, including all their personal relationships and personal activities. This is where clients realize areas of their lives they haven’t applied body wisdom or the communication they need to have healthy boundaries so they can flourish. Now that work challenges have eased, they may realize they need to have a tough conversation with a loved one about an imbalance in their relationship. Maybe there’s a committee they’re on that’s no longer working for them that they need to step out of. 

One client, for example, realized they hosted every family Christmas gathering for a decade, and it was something that she really didn’t look forward to, and it drained her, but she always felt obligated since she had the biggest house. She realized the emotional load she’d carried in parenting, in co-parenting, and it was no longer tolerable, and she understood that she hadn’t been as loving to her body as she wished she’d been. And with a newly discovered time, energy and capacity from our work together, she had those conversations, navigated shifts in her relationship dynamics, started doing Pilates regularly and signed up for a retreat. So the focus of this last phase is to bring attunement into all of you. to every aspect of your life. So it comes full circle. And this is how I make sure that you can continue the momentum on your own once we conclude. And so those are the four steps of how the six month coaching journey helps women build professional success along with personal satisfaction and sustainability. 

Having heard this, what difference could this level of personal support and accountability make in your life? 

Briefly, I just want to say that I do have three coaching slots opening up. And if you’re interested in Attune Leadership Coaching with me and want the details, email me at [email protected]. So we can schedule a short conversation to talk about your goals. We’ll get started in June. And by mid December, you’ll be in a completely different place personally and professionally, you’ll have all the skills from these four steps. 

I want to touch base real quick on the top three objections that women feel when they’re considering coaching. And just like what you’re probably thinking right now, their time, energy, and money. Now, there’s no doubt that to get the results you want, you have to spend time in coaching sessions and applying the skills you’ve learned in your life. If you don’t show up, you’re not going to learn anything. If you don’t try to apply it, it’s not going to stick. So absolutely. And in the long run, you will 100% save time because you’re going to improve your efficiency and decision making and capacity I like to say, when you cut away the things you thought you should be doing, you realize how much time there is available. And as long as we don’t let those patterns creep back in, then you get to spend that time how you deem important. If time management is a struggle or work-life balance, coaching will drastically improve them. So time isn’t really a legitimate argument when you think about who you want to be in one, three, or even five years. Do you want to still be where you are facing the same challenges or freed and well beyond them? 

Number two was energy. That’s a big hesitation for a lot of women. Maybe you already feel overscheduled. And when you get home, you just want to crash. You can’t add anything else. You’re just pooped. It feels like there’s never enough time to fully recharge your batteries are low. You doubt if you have the energy to put into the coaching relationship to get the results you want. I’ve been doing this a while, so I’m not going to cherry coat it. There is this bare minimum you have to put in, but attuned leadership coaching is not a cookie cutter program where you’re going to be getting content sent to you and expected to read X, Y, and Z. You actually only get what you need when you need it, and I provide the accountability to make sure that you apply it. That’s why we share an app, you have asynchronous access to me whenever you need it to talk through any challenge. Coaching is a supportive and a structured environment to work through any roadblocks while you’re building resilience, including building up your energy reserves. And that’s why it’s so important that we start with the anchor phase. 

Money, money, money is the third hesitation that women have, whether they’ve never invested in themselves like this or ask their organizations to invest in their leadership development. I understand how putting money into something that feels intangible can feel scary. You ask yourself, will it work? That’s what’s silently replaying in your head. Sounds great, but will it work for me? I can say honestly, that as long as you can schedule two hours a month in your schedule to meet with me, show up open minded to learn and curious how responding to your body signals differently can change your life. and you integrate what I’m teaching you into your actual days. So you’re not just waiting from coaching session to coaching sessions and otherwise you’re not even thinking about it. But you know there’s going to be two to five minutes sprinkled throughout your day where you’re doing those specific things. You’re going to get a massive return on investment when we’re talking about financials. Because think of the monetary value of career advancement. What is the next jump in your career? What’s the shift in benefits and salary? What’s the monetary value of improved performance and elevated leadership skills? What’s the value of no longer questioning yourself in high stress situations, but knowing you’ve got it. And if you have doubts that you have a strictly confidential relationship with someone that supports you 100% that’s either been in your shoes or helped other women in similar moments. 

Imagine knowing at the end of the six months that in any moment of doubt, you can refer to your body and trust its response in your next step so that you can just trust that you show up as your strongest, most discerning, wisest, creative, and influential self in those moments that are most important. Imagine how profoundly your life could change if you started showing up with these qualities not just in your leadership role, but also for yourself in those everyday moments that you may currently overlook. By investing in yourself through Attuned Leadership coaching, you can build the alignment and resilience needed to maintain balance in your physical, emotional and spiritual well-being so that when you’re not at work and you’re at home, you can enjoy it. Together, let’s create the shifts where you flourish in your personal and professional world, and you feel truly empowered, fulfilled, and at ease in your life. 

Again, if you’re interested in reading a little bit more about the one-on-one coaching, go to www.crystalfrazee.com/coaching 

I want to say thank you so much for listening to the show. Serving your leadership needs is very important to me. If there’s a topic you’d love for me to cover, reach out by emailing me or connect on LinkedIn. If you still haven’t taken a moment to rate and review the podcast, I know I say it every time, but I’m always shocked. I go check and I’m like, nobody did it. Please take a moment to do that because it’s the most powerful way that new listeners find my show because of the algorithm. It’s one tiny thing you can do that makes a huge difference in the hours I spend producing every show. You could also take a second to think of one friend right now who would benefit from the Attuned Leadership for Women podcast and forward them the Apple podcast link or my website link and share that with them. 

Most of all, though, I want to encourage you to sit with the questions I asked in the show. What phase of the Attuned Leadership coaching method resonated most with you as being a lever that can get you to the next place in your goals? Is there a small shift you need to implement right now that you can do on your own? Having heard me talk you through these four steps that lead to this transformed experience. Some way you can respond to your body’s calling in this moment. 

Thank you again until the next show, which releases in two weeks. Be well and stay attuned.