The only way through a person’s inner thoughts and feelings is through their journal. This is what the President of Frame of Mind Coaching, Kim Ades believes in. Kim is a business coach that helps highly driven people reach their goals. One of the best ways to understand people’s motivations is through their minds, and one way through that is by journaling. Join your host Melanie Parish as she sits down with coach and fellow podcaster Kim Ades. Learn how Kim is using podcasting for her business and how she uses a unique coaching style for her clients. 

—

Listen to the podcast here

Accessing The Mind For A Deeper Coaching Experience With Kim Ades

I have been thinking about my own leadership, privilege and how the place that you choose to live can impact the life that you have. I have been traveling for the first time in some time because of the pandemic. I have been noticing that the choices people make in where to live inform how they live. The same is true for me, of course. Choosing to live where I live, in Canada, changes the experience that I have and what’s available to me. It makes me curious about all the other choices I make. 

If you think about the choices that you have made, how has that taken you down a path? I remember years ago, we were buying our house in Ontario, Canada. We put an offer in on another house that was much more urban than the one we ended up buying. I always go back to that moment in time. I think, “We were at a crossroads.” One life would have given us a very urban environment with a lot of walking, neighborhood and neighbors right next to us. 

The other put us on a country road with 2 acres. Both were beautiful houses. The costs were very similar. Somehow, these two houses had us live a different life. The one we chose made us live a country life instead of a city life. What crossroads are you at now? What choices do you want to make? How can they make your life richer, interesting and fulfilling going forward? This is the introduction for the interview. 

I’m here with Kim Ades. She’s the President and Founder of Frame of Mind Coaching and JournalEngine Software. She is recognized as an expert in the area of thought mastery and mental toughness. She uses her unique philosophy and quirky coaching style to help leaders identify their personal blind spots and shift their thinking in order to yield extraordinary results. She’s an author, speaker, entrepreneur, coach and mom of five. Her claim to fame is teaching her powerful Frame of Mind Coaching process to leaders, entrepreneurs and influencers worldwide. Kim has been featured in a variety of online publications, including Forbes and Inc., and has spoken for organizations including Microsoft and SHRM. In addition to being interviewed on many top-ranking podcasts, Kim coaches leaders live on the Frame of Mind Coaching Podcast. 

—

Kim, it’s awesome to have you here. I’m so excited about getting to talk to you. 

I am so happy to be here. I’m so happy to meet a fellow Canadian. 

At the moment, I’m living my dual citizenship in a cool way. It feels like talking to home right now to get to talk to you. 

If it increases your sense of freedom and movement, then all the power to you. Enjoy. 

I want to dive right in. I want to know about what you are up to in your work, your own leadership and how you are experimenting right now. 

I run a coaching company called Frame of Mind Coaching. We coach. We call it the highly driven population. People who have massive goals they want to reach, who want to milk all that life has to offer, who want to leave their mark and have an impact on the world, and who are frustrated because they aren’t quite where they think they should be, something is holding them back and getting in their way. They don’t understand what’s taking so long, what’s slowing them down and why other people aren’t working as quickly or as fast as they want them to, so they have this sense of frustration. 

What am I working on personally? I run my own podcast. It’s called the Frame of Mind Coaching Podcast. I have been running a podcast since 2013 but only in 2021, I changed my model where I coach people live and in-person right on the podcast. I invite leaders from all over the world to come on and share a challenge. I coach them right there on the spot. That’s my newest, latest and greatest adventure. We are always on an adventure but that’s the one that’s prominent now. 

I’m curious, anytime you want to have a change happen, you try something new. What were you hoping that this new format would bring to your business? 

Mind Coaching: People do podcasting because they want to increase their exposure, spread their message, and give people a sample or a taste of who they are and what they are about.

Why people do a podcast? They do it because they want to increase their exposure, spread their message and give people a sample or a taste of who they are and what they are about. I found that with my podcast, before this change, I wasn’t accomplishing that at all. I was a great interviewer, had amazing conversations, learned a bunch but I wasn’t giving anybody a real flavor for me, brand, messaging, approach and the unique way that we coach. I wasn’t personally delivering value. I was delivering value by my guests, which is wonderful and great but I wasn’t doing that value exchange. 

It’s easy to launch a podcast, do interviews, and then become invisible. I have been playing with my format this 2021 as well for this same reason. It’s interesting. You lose your voice when you are a podcast host. 

You lose your voice unless you are one of these personality people who can do a podcast without even a guest. Some people have that. I liked the guest format. I like having a conversation and something to work with. I love coaching. It comes to me with great ease. My thought was, “Who’s going to want to get coached on a podcast? No one is going to sign up for this.” I was completely wrong on that one. There are lots of people who are willing to show up, share their challenges, open to coaching and help me deliver amazing value. What I find is almost all of them who come on the show have a universal challenge. 

With leaders in the corporate world, almost every challenge is totally ubiquitous. Somebody is going to face it sometime in their career. 

On my podcast, one person is challenged with a lack of time. She’s always rushing. She has a bazillion things to do and five kids to raise. No wonder she’s struggling for time. The other person is starting a business. He’s leading a team. He’s like, “How do I get my team to do what I want them to do? How do I get them to do what I say?” These are just two perfect examples of leadership challenges that I think are rather universal. It’s fun for me. We are getting different voices on different scenarios and challenges. At the end of the day, it resonates with everybody. 

I’m always about data collection. How are you evaluating, whether or not this new format is working for you? 

We look at how many downloads we get regularly. That’s not ultimately the sign of success for us. The sign of success is what relationships are we building with people that we would have never had a chance to build in the past and what doors are we opening from a business standpoint. For example, I will do a podcast with someone, and then that person will say, “Do you know this organization? You should be a speaker for them.” They will make a gateway introduction that will lead to a new opportunity or they will say, “Can we talk about coaching? I have some people on my team that I would love for you to coach.” Whatever that looks like. Numbers in terms of downloads are great. More important to me is the relationships that we build. Sometimes, it takes time to evaluate or establish those relationships. 

How long will you try this experiment before you decide if it’s working for you or not? 

I will tell you it’s working a million times better than the past model. I have already established that we will keep going. 

Congratulations. It’s always nice when you make a change and it works. 

It’s challenging for me. It’s fun and engaging. It’s not a dream. 

I have been a coach for many years and occasionally, I end up coaching or doing mentoring. It’s always interesting when you are coaching live in front of others because it’s not something we practice a lot as coaches. I don’t think of it as performance. Coaching live and having somebody watch, there’s definitely an edge. I can feel it in my body as I hear you talk about it. It’s interesting and sounds quite thrilling. 

It’s very funny because at first, I was a little intimidated. No question about it. I’m like, “This is such a personal thing on so many levels.” It’s personal for the client. It’s personal for me. It’s personal from a coaching standpoint. Now I’m being watched and evaluated possibly for my coaching skills. I discovered that it’s the opposite of performance. It’s about focusing on the client and doing what you normally do. Keep in mind, it is a podcast so you have to shrink everything. Usually, coaching conversation takes more time. You are working with much more data. You are establishing a relationship over time and getting to know the client. In this case, it’s a twenty-minute episode. You can call it micro coaching but still, it hits a home run. It still packs a punch, is what I wanted to say. 

I’m curious about Frame of Mind Coaching, how you define that? It’s new to me. Tell me about it. 

I have been coaching people for nearly seventeen years. Very short history, before I was coaching, I owned a software company. We used to build simulation-based assessments. The purpose of those assessments was to help companies make better hiring decisions. We tested all kinds of people, organizations and positions. Our goal was to see how can we predict top performance. One of the findings was, it didn’t matter what level a person was at, what industry they were in or any of their experience. A key indicator of top performance was their degree of emotional resilience. I will define that a little bit. Their ability to bounce back from adversity with speed, agility and leverage the adversity somehow turn it into an advantage. That’s a little bit of the backdrop. 

The second piece was, I ended up selling my part in the company. I’ve got recruited very shortly thereafter by a coaching company here in Toronto. I lasted 8.5 months for a million reasons but I was able to observe how they coach. I thought to myself, “I think they are doing it wrong. They are making a critical mistake.” Their model was based on accountability. They are working with business owners. They would help the business owner create a business plan, break that plan down into manageable components, and then they would hold the person accountable for all the things on the plan. I thought to myself, “People know how to make a plan. It’s not a planning problem. Why aren’t they doing what’s on the plan?” There is something that’s getting in the way. Something is stopping them. Something is interfering with their ability to execute. If I could find that blockage, if I could figure out what’s getting in their way and move it out of their way, then I will be a powerful coach. 

That’s what I decided to do. I started Frame of Mind Coaching. Keep in mind, my premise was that my goal was to help people build their emotional resilience. If emotional resilience was one of the key characteristics of top performance, let’s do that. From the very beginning, I thought, “How do I get into people’s heads? How do I understand how they see the world, what they think, how they process experiences, how they look at their backgrounds, how they feel about themselves and the things happening around them? How do I do that? What if I could read their journals?” When you journal, you are talking to yourself. It’s personal and private. If I could read their journals, I could have this level of insight that most people don’t get. 

I decided to ask them to journal with me in a private online journal daily. I would give them a journaling question or a prompt. They would journal. I would start digging, asking questions, start probing, understanding how this person is wired and start connecting the dots that I was seeing in front of me. When we’ve got to our calls, I was ready because I had this flood of information in front of me. I started to understand how this person was showing up and what exactly was getting in their way. I could do it fairly quickly because of the intense experience we were having through the constant communication in their journals. Many years later, I still use the same approach and methodology. We have built our own software to do that. I have a team of coaches and certified people in what we call the Frame of Mind Coaching Methodology. That’s the short story. 

That’s very interesting. I often am grappling with the same question in my practice. I use all terms to try to discover what the voices are in someone’s head. What’s the inner dialogue that’s going on? The shared journaling is interesting. 

It’s super powerful for so many reasons. When I first started coaching, I thought it’s going to help me. It’s a tool that will enable me to deliver effective coaching. I had no idea. 

What do you do if somebody doesn’t journal? 

Even if they only journal a little bit, that’s informative. If they sign up for a program where they know journaling is part of the process and they don’t, that’s also informative. You signed up for this. You paid a lot of money to be part of this process and you are not playing along. Let’s look at that. 

I find that interesting. I know I go out of my way to try to not assign work to clients. I don’t like it. I agree with you about holding people accountable for a plan. They are either going to do the plan or not do the plan. That’s not the barrier or the bottleneck. I think this journaling piece is interesting and fun. 

It’s powerful. It does so much more than we ever anticipate from a coaching standpoint. When someone is journaling regularly, they are making progress. When they journal with a coach, the progress is multiplied. The other element that I didn’t even think about when I first started this was that if you journal with me every single day, what do you think happens between us? 

Trust and intimacy develop quickly. 

We can go deep quickly. What happens is because your level of trust is high, my level of impact is high. We can travel further together faster. 

How long do your clients stay with you? 

We asked them to commit to an initial ten-week period. After that, anything is possible. We say, “Let’s do the first ten weeks. Let’s deliver some astounding results. If you need to continue, we are here for you. If you need to take a break, we are still here for you.” If you want to stop, very often, what happens is that people continue in our maintenance program or they take a break and come back. Often, they say, “Can you coach my daughter? Can you coach my son? Can you coach my co-worker over here?” That’s what we see over and over again. 

Where can people find you? 

Mind Coaching: When you journal, you’re talking to yourself. It’s personal and private. If you could read someone’s journal, you could have this level of insight that most people don’t get.

That place to find me is FrameOfMindCoaching.com. There’s a link to the podcast there as well. There are all information about our services or testimonials. There’s a Blog page. It’s a rich website. There are lots of stuff there. 

It has been fun to dive in with you and know about a new way of coaching. Coaching is so near and dear to my heart and career. Coaching is starting to be old. As they evolve and change, I get so excited about what’s possible. We start to use technology and things to make coaching more powerful and faster. I love both of those. It sounds like you are doing a great job with that. 

I love it. At this point, it’s part of who I am. It’s an extension of me so it’s easy. 

Thank you so much. I appreciate you being here. 

Thank you for having me as your guest. I appreciate the opportunity. 

—

I have been here with Kim Ades. I’m loving how she is using technology to transform a stable and fairly well-established profession. Coaching has been pretty stable for some time. She’s innovatively using technology to increase the connection with people and their coach. That trust has them get more powerful results. I love how results-oriented it is, how she’s able to experiment and measure success in the way that she looks to teach people about her method. It has been great being here with Kim. Go experiment. 

Important links:

• Frame of Mind Coaching 
• JournalEngine Software 
• Frame of Mind Coaching Podcast 
• Frame of Mind Coaching Methodology 
• Blog – The Frame of Mind Coaching 

About Kim Ades

Kim Ades (pronounced add-iss) is the President and Founder of Frame of Mind Coaching™ and JournalEngine™ Software. Recognized as an expert in the area of thought mastery and mental toughness, Kim uses her unique philosophy and quirky coaching style to help leaders identify their personal blind spots and shift their thinking in order to yield extraordinary results.

Author, speaker, entrepreneur, coach, and mom of five, Kim’s claim to fame is teaching her powerful Frame of Mind Coaching™ process to leaders, entrepreneurs and influencers worldwide. Kim has been featured in a variety of online publications including Forbes and Inc. and has spoken for organizations including Microsoft and SHRM. In addition to being interviewed on many top-ranking podcasts, Kim coaches leaders live on The Frame of Mind Coaching™ Podcast.

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

• Here’s How »

Join The Experimental Leader community today:

• melanieparish.com
• YouTube