729: The Roughest Coaching Session of My Life (How to Spot Toxic Coaching)

I'm about to share with you the roughest coaching session I have ever had in my entire life. It's a lesson on toxic coaching, on being gaslighted, and on the devotion some of us have to put ourselves through. Whatever it takes if there is even a glimmer of truth. These are your do's and don'ts of coaching. I hope you enjoy my story. Flow Dreaming Still Kinda Woo Woo is just what it sounds like. An escape into the world of woo. Also a ride into you and how to feel happier, wiser and more self aware in every way. It's your ultimate journey into personal growth and inner power. Will explore ideas like how your energy self influences the kinds of opportunities you encounter, or how your personal growth can drive your business growth, or even how that feeling of being stuck is really always coming from something else. We just have to figure out what. That's right. We're a dash of woo woo, a sprinkle of self care, a heap of problem solving and pattern busting, and a giant cup of encouragement. We're going to relight so much passion, purpose, self love and confidence in you that you practically stagger. I'm Summer McStravik, your host and welcome to Flow Dreaming. Still Kinda Woo Woo. I just had the roughest coaching session of my life. It was so rough I almost can't talk about it. I chose to have a session with a person I've followed since 2007. 7. I'm curious about their mind, their outlook, their business acumen, and frankly, the uncompromising life they lead. It was also a birthday gift to myself and I totally got ripped a new one. I get on the phone, they're 18 minutes late because they forgot they'd set the appointment with me the day before after forgetting the previous appointment we had two days before that. But that's okay. I'm flexible. They ask me very point blank questions, cringy questions which I answer because I want to show up hard and real and all in. We start with how much money do you make? They ask. So I answer. I don't really want to answer this question. I wonder why. It's one of the first questions. It's never one of the first questions I ask people and I almost never ask it at all. Does your husband work too? Tell me about your family. They continue. I tell and what are you here for? I don't really know. I just wanted to talk with someone about our common space in the coaching world and common things in our personal lives too. Because I like you. I think. I think You've done good stuff, built things your own way, carved a niche where it's hard to carve to answer them. I share something about my son, some struggles we've had and off to the race as we go. We're not 20 minutes in and I'm told I need to parent first and I'm working my job only to please my own ego. Money is not important. This coach stresses only being present with my kids is important. Well yes and no. I think I'm feeling confused further they tell me I should stay at home and be a full time mom. All this BS about building my company and spreading flow dreaming is all for me to appease my own needs above my family's. It's wickedly selfish or at best seriously misguided. And apparently I'm that way because my mom was that way. Well I tell her about my mom, the rough kind of up and down childhood. No matter how many times I say mom did her best, yeah it was kind of messed up at times but she was there for me when I needed her and we're close. Well it's not an acceptable answer. Your mom wasn't present for you. Now your kids feel abandoned by you. They say again to me, don't you see how everything is all about you? They continue your interests, your needs. I don't buy any of your I spend my whole day helping other people bs. They say you work because you don't want to be with your kids. Well that is just not something you say to a mom, especially one you met only 20 minutes ago. I'm now wondering about our commonalities. I'm questioning my own judgment, my trust in myself for booking this. Well yeah, I answer, I don't want to be glued to my kids sides 247 they go to school. I mean what should I be doing when they're at school? I'm also just not built for the alternatives of either being fully financially dependent on a partner or being a struggling and purposely unemployed single parent who's scraping by. And that's the irony. The career I built has let me work from home and raised my kids these last 15 years. I was able to juggle my schedule as I please and watch my kids sports games, go to dentist appointments, birthday parties and and I also have non working friends who are very happy as professional moms and frankly they're great at it and they have the financial security to be able to do that. But me, I like my work. I also have kids to launch into their adult lives. I don't think they're mutually exclusive? I do a reality check and ask you think I should stop working? That's what you have a husband for, they answer. And you've totally disempowered him. This is verbatim, everybody, but I honestly think running my own business has been good for my family. I say, oh, you just think that because you're autistic, the coach continues, and because you're on the spectrum, you can't see see how unpresent you've been for your family. I can't believe you followed my work all this time and learned nothing. You've learned absolutely nothing. They say this several times for emphasis. Oh, this is getting weirder and weirder. I think about how I can be hyper focused and occasionally lose track that the sun has gone down and the dog and the kids haven't been fed yet and maybe I've got some form of undiagnosed adhd. I don't know. Nobody talked about that with women in the 70s and 80s. And I may or may not be neurodiverse, but if so, my goal would be to capitalize on my uniqueness and use it in the interests of my family and clients. I mean, I'm open to the idea. I could use another superpower, but a 20 minute phone call diagnosis from a non doctor seems scary. Sketch. Hold on, I say. You don't know that about me. And besides, even if I am neurodiverse, I champion uniqueness and individuality and diversity. I celebrate it. That distinctiveness is our personal magic. Bullshit. They intone. You don't appreciate diversity or your kids would feel loved and the center of your attention and they don't. That's your problem. You can't even see your own behavior and now your ignorance and refus to see it is hurting your whole family. A few minutes of heavy heartbeats go by as I realize that the only answer I can give this coach that isn't met with aggression is sure okay. So I do okay for about 10 minutes as they tell me what I'm not seeing about myself and my family, how I'm damaging them all, and how self blind, boring and uncooperative I am. Finally, I tell the coach outright that I'm feeling defensive because I can't answer anything without being called out as being even more deficiently defensive. What I want to say is you are the one who can't listen for one gosh darn minute and maybe be wrong. Slow down. Read into what I'm saying. Stop cornering me into an answer you want to hear and shaming me for not agreeing with you. I think you're bringing your own bias into this. Friends, this is not how a coaching session should go. It is rapidly spiraling. This is so balls off the wall that it's ridiculous. Every other session sentence revolves around me being unseeing, stonewalling, controlling and unable to communicate or answer like a normal person until I'm reduced to okay because nothing else is an appropriate answer. The only answer for this coach is you're right and anything else is garbage. You're like talking to a brick wall. The coach reiterates more than once, well, as are you, my friend. It is a stalemate. My head spins with how to pull this session out of the dumpster fire. It's become. I breathe and try and stay open. As a coach myself, I've been with clients who don't really want to hear a word I say. Hearing truths is hard. I get that. So I decide to double down. I will make it through this appointment and I will hear what they say, even if I feel feel attacked. But then we go right back to how badly I've stigmatized my kids. How I don't understand neurodiversity because everything I've uttered so far is insensitive and wrong. I am very boring, have zero self awareness, should not work, am not present, and pick myself over my family again and again because I'm just not a self aware mom or person. Here we go again. Then, the bombshell. Your kids can't even tell you how bad you are because a study has shown that even kids who grew up in meth labs say their parents are great. Kids do that. They have to. They'll lose their minds otherwise because they need to feel loved at any cost. Your kids won't tell you how much you're actually neglecting them in your family. You're a fricking wall. If you were in a room full of people, you'd be the only person nobody would want to be friends with. You can't even see how you actually are. Even I don't enjoy talking to you. The coach stops and this is the moment we're silent. Then they say, you want to talk about something else because this isn't going anywhere. You're right. I answer. No, I'm good. I'm going to settle on this, roll it around in my head for a little while, let it sink into the crevices. We end the call absurdly early and I go into the kitchen where my daughter is making a salad. Hey, hon. Can I ask you a question? I say. She gives me that 20 year old daughter's side eye. Well, was I present for you as a mom? Do you feel I'm there for you? Do you feel like I have neglected you and your needs in pursuit of my own friends? Let me tell you how this girl takes after me. First she looks at me like, have you been smoking meth? Then she immediately wants to know which so called coach told me all this. She wants to leave a negative Yelp review. I don't mention that high end coaches are typically not on Yelp. Finally she answers in a huff of disgust. Yes, you are there for me. If anything, she says, you are too much in my business. Like you need to learn to let me be. Now I guess I've been present. I remind her that a good coaching client, me in this case, has to follow up on coaching advice that may or may not be accurate. Because if you have a big trigger reaction to them, then maybe there's some seriously good stuff there. And I had a real big trigger reaction to hearing that. I'm a total fake up. They totally gaslit you, Mom. My daughter sighs. Ah, this generation has such a refreshing perspective. I explained to her a bit about the meth lab, that according to the coach, she'd say that because as a child she's been conditioned for parental love at any cost and she can't tell me otherwise because of fear of loss and so forth. My daughter again rolls her eyes and says, they told you that you can't be right no matter what. Backed up by supposed science. And they told you that I have no agency whatsoever. So my feelings, my actual feelings mean nothing. Your feelings mean nothing? That's gaslit. That's the definition of gaslit. Well, my 20 year old prodigy, thank you. Did feel very much like gaslighting. Do you think they're projecting? I asked carefully. They're just mad that you've done better than them. How long did you talk? 40 minutes. And they told you that I don't think you're there for me and I can't think for myself. Uh huh, yeah. She rolls her eyes again. You are so gaslit. Did you actually pay them? I did. And as I reflect, I realize more and more that when you talk to a coach or a therapist, that yes, they can say hard truths. They want you to peel back things you can't see for yourself. That's why you've come to them, to help you discover a path forward into healing, wholeness and success. And we also all need a Reality check every so often. But a good coach, I mean, heck, even a good friend also needs to listen to you feel into you. I was so shaken up after this that I checked in with not just my daughter, but both my son and husband too. After the call, I asked, are you unhappy with our lives? Do you feel I'm not there when you need me? Do you understand why I work hard for you? Do you feel that I've stigmatized you with labels? We actually had a nice long talk that ended with big hugs. Yeah, we aired some grievances, but both kids also asked me precisely for this coach's name so they could again down yelp them because they were so angry on my behalf, which is not at all what I was expecting. My kids ended up protecting me, and here I was worried that I'd been negligent in protecting them. So, coach, thank you for the fascinating call. My kids and I actually grew closer and it opened a good exchange and some more love. And yes, I know right now this so called coach would be rolling their eyes right at the second saying, but see, it's all about you coming out ahead. All for you. You're right. Coach is wrong. You're even blabbing about it here in a podcast, for God's sakes. But that is precisely what gaslighting is. Someone telling you that you can't come out ahead. Everything you do defend yourself, don't defend yourself is proof of how crummy you are. There is no way to win. There is no way to even be. And as they say, I see I just got rolled and I paid good money for it. And for a moment, I was considering believing this person's blanket assessment of me. And that fast assessment made me feel like a crappy loser mom who should quit her job because I'm selfish, rejecting my own diversity, unfun to even talk to, and neglecting my family since all I think about is my own navel all day long. Thank God I have two amazing kids to fact check me. So sorry, toxic coaching. I'm out. All right, we're not stopping here. This was an interesting and kind of mind blowing story. This is a real story. This happened to me recently. I tried to be a good client, to open myself to things that I didn't necessarily want to hear. But when the needle moved to huh, I hadn't seen myself that way before to downright abusive behavior, this is when I decided to extract some, I hope, very useful truths out of this for you. Because you guys, a coaching session should never, in a million years even approach what you just heard, it's still shocking to me. Here's what I took away from this that I want you to go into any of your next sessions with a coach, your therapist, anybody that you're working with who's gonna take you to the next level. There's a difference between blunt words and tough love versus gaslighting and abuse, and it's important to recognize the fine but very discernible line. Tough love comes from concern, empathy, and knowing that someone really needs to see or hear something. It does not involve backing someone into a corner and poking them with a verbal stick of insults until they whimper in agreement with you. If seeing the difference between gaslighting, abuse and blunt tough love isn't second nature to you, then the next time you walk away from a supposedly healthy situation feeling really upset, misunderstood and confused, well, just smell for gas next when being coached, even if you don't like what you're hearing, still stop and do a check in. In my case, I checked with my whole family and repeated almost the whole conversation. I asked, do you agree with their assessment? Do you feel this way? Is there something I can do better? What I was looking for was a to see if there was even a kernel of truth in what I've just been told, and b if there wasn't, what was the other real reason for this experience? Because there's always something to be gleaned from any experience, as life tends to give you what you need. And finally, as a coach and intuitive, I need to be vigilant about not telling people who I think they are and then forcing them to agree with me. Sometimes I see a lot about someone, a whole lot, inside and through them, but my job is to tempt that person to want to discover more about themselves. Discoveries and revelations should feel euphoric, joyful, or even at times like a dam breaking. As a rush of healing and new information comes rushing in, my personal need to be right about someone should never enter the picture. It's not about my needs, it's about theirs. So, my friends, I hope you will go into your next session or encounter or you know, I think a lot of you are also probably thinking about relationships. I have worked with a lot of people who have partnerships like this. No matter what they say, they are wrong. If they defend themselves, they're being defensive. If they don't defend themselves, then there's something wrong with them. They're boring, dumb, uncommunicative. There's just no right way to respond. This is you. Then look around Think about what gaslighting means. We all think we'll never be gaslit because we're smart, right? We can smell a lie, we can feel when someone's not being cool. We all think that until it actually happens. And if it happens subtly the first time, you may not even notice. But then it will happen again. Be a little less subtle. But see, you let it go the first time you didn't recognize it. So you're still not recognizing it as it gets a little bigger, a little, a little worse. And before you know it, you're in a full blown situation where someone else has overtaken your life, your heart, your thoughts, your needs, your desires. I consider myself fortunate that this example the universe blessed me with. Yes, I'm talking about this particular session. I feel blessed that it was so clear and obvious that I moved through those phases almost instantly. Self doubt, confusion, doubling down, pulling back, and finally saying, no, this is so big, I can't not see this. And frankly, it's really helped me since then as I work with different people and we talk about, well, who said that to you? How did that make you feel? Are you able to speak your truth? Can you have a boundary that they respect, that they appreciate, that they honor, that they admire you for having. No. Tell you what, I've had that feeling too recently. Let me tell you a little story about the roughest coaching session of my life. So with that, friends, I'm going to leave you today. I hope you enjoyed that little slice of my life. Sometimes, you know, on this podcast I just straight up teach and share ideas and ways of seeing the world, working with energy flow and manifesting. Sometimes I'm interviewing people and sometimes I'm sharing these, well, stories. If you don't, if you don't know it already. This originally came from one of my newsletters, which is also a blog. And you can get these straight to your inbox. All you have to do is go to my website, flow dreaming.com. you can just register there. I give you some free Flow Dreams once you do and then you'll start getting these from me and we have a pretty lively dialogue on the website where the blog is. I think this one alone has 40 or 50 comments. Most people shocked and horrified, understandably. But I invite you to come and explore. It's a pretty cool site. I've got tons and tons of resources for you and as always, I do invite you into my group, my Mastermind, where I promise you will never experience something like you just heard. If anything, the universe gave me a pretty thick reminder how to get through to people that works versus how not to. We have a gentle and a loving, but also simultaneously very powerful space here. And of course I invite you in, reach out and I'll see you next time for another episode of Flow Dreaming. Maybe you remember one brilliant thing. My summertime Manifesting Challenge. Well, I wanted a way to keep that energy going all year round. That's how I ended up creating the Flow Dreaming Mastermind. This is different than any other program I've offered. For one thing, it is packed with teachings. Not only do you get immediate access to 36 courses and all the accompanying Flow Dreams and worksheets, but you and I will get to Flow Dream together each month. Live Each month I plan a special event, a Flow Dreaming session coinciding with the full moon or other potent day and we gather to create huge manifesting energy. Think of it like a series of special events and you're invited to every single one as a Flow Dream Mastermind member. Flowy if you will. And best of all, it's affordable. Costs as much as taking a family of four to Applebees each month. No kidding. You'll get to connect with like minded souls around the world for Flow Dreaming parties. Joyful energy cleansing Flow Dreaming. Some woo woo rituals that show a little of my witchy side and just a heck of a good time. Because the lighter and brighter you are, the lighter and brighter your life is. Check out the Flow dreaming mastermind@flowdreaming.com because our next special event and party is just around the corner.