[00:00:00] Kevin Stafford: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Conversations with Coaches podcast. I’m your host, Kevin, and I am already unsurprisingly delighted, that seems to be the phrase of the day, unsurprisingly delighted to meet, uh, Clea. Clea, sorry, I just went past, Clea Jones, for some reason I had to completely, you’re the only Clea I’ve ever met.
And for some reason I had like a, some out of their last name. Anyway, Kalia Jones has just got a chance to make my acquaintance. I’ve gotten a chance to make her acquaintance. I’m already, I’m already feeling the pain of having to end this conversation. As you well know, I love these kinds of conversations.
I’m confident that Kalia, a friend of Todd Sullivan, who, if you’re listening, hello there, Todd, um, kind of put us together and I’m really excited to share her with you today. So let me give you a little taste, a little, a little mini bio. of who she is and what she’s about, and then we’re just going to get into it.
Kalia is a lifelong learner and self development enthusiast on a joyful journey of transformation. I love that phrase, joyful journey. Kalia is all about infusing trauma informed techniques into her coaching magic. Her goal is to help you not just tune in and uncover, but turn on to your most unique creative expression and authentic self.
Tune in, turn on. I, I love, I love your way with words. I can’t wait to talk to you more, Kalia. Thank you for sharing some time with me today.
[00:01:17] Kaleah Jones: Thank you, Kevin, so much for having me and yes, shout out to Todd for this amazing introduction. I’m so glad to be here.
[00:01:25] Kevin Stafford: Well, let’s jump in, and I will, as I’ve already expressed to you before I hit record, I’ll do my best to keep my enthusiasm somewhat contained, because I’m already so excited to meet you, and I’ll try to let you, let you take as much of the center stage as possible, because I can already tell I’m gonna really be picking up what you’re putting down.
So, Kalia, tell me, a little bit, actually tell me in your own words, at length, as long as you’d like, how you… Got your superpowers. How you figured out? How was your superhero origin story as a coach? How’d you figure out that coaching was? Sometimes I like to put it this way the best expression of the way you wanted to impact the world How did you discover that or figure that out?
Mm hmm. I love the way
[00:02:00] Kaleah Jones: you put that I actually discovered coaching through a book, no less. So I was experiencing burnout. So I always say my business was birthed through corporate burnout. And during that process, I picked up a book called successful women think differently, um, by Valerie Burton. And it was about the, you know, habits to make you happier and healthy and be more resilient in life.
But I dug a little deeper and saw that she was a certified. Life Coach! Um, and beyond that, I saw that she actually had her own coach training school, um, under coaching and positive psychology. So I kind of went through a rabbit hole from this book with learning about coaching and learning about the International Coaching Federation and all of the different components of how you could be a thought leader.
Under that industry, which I had never heard of prior to that. So, um, that’s a little bit about how I discovered even the world of coaching as a possibility, uh, prior to that I was in corporate HR and then I was also a, an army active duty army for several years as
[00:03:07] Kevin Stafford: well. Excellent. Oh, that’s, you threw that in there at the end.
That gets me very excited. I’ve had a few, a number of veterans on the, on the podcast who really like they found their way to coaching and found a lot of similarities. With their, with their life of service earlier on in their years, depending on whether or not they served for like, you know, 20 plus, or whether or not they were just in there for two or four or however many tours.
And I’ve, I’m always been fascinated by the commonalities there, the unity of discipline and service. Um, that’s excellent. Actually, can you talk about that for a little bit? I wonder how your, your experience in the military both inspired and informed your coaching.
[00:03:41] Kaleah Jones: Yeah, I would say prior to learning that you could become a life coach and that could be like a real thing.
I reflect back that I always had components of coaching with all of my career starting with military. I joined kind of almost straight out of high school. So just always that leadership component, that discipline, that consistency, um, that goal setting aspect was always there. And then even after I climbed the ranks and became a sergeant and had my own soldiers under me, I also, you know, was a leader in a, in a coach in my own right, um, as well before I transitioned to a civilian.
So absolutely. I’ve carried coaching with me indirectly my entire adult
[00:04:21] Kevin Stafford: life. It’s funny how coaching almost happens when you discover the word. It’s like, it’s just you didn’t have the word for it and you’re like, Oh, that’s what I’ve been doing this whole time.
[00:04:33] Kaleah Jones: Yes, yes, it is so so true. Uh, and then I also, you know, had these all these extrinsic goals of climbing the corporate ladder.
Um, and, um, you know, me fulfilling my needs that way. But I, I realized as I did that externally, that I, my internal self was not being fulfilled. And so that’s when I talked about the burnout. It was that unfulfillment. It was overwhelmed. Miss, it was having this. Um, title that I thought that I wanted so desperately to have a seat at the table and to have my corner office and then to get there and to feel depleted.
I was really looking for some ways to really help myself. But in the means of that, I found coach coaching found, we found each other.
[00:05:18] Kevin Stafford: I really, I do. I’ve come to, especially over the last few years, um, in talking with everybody and in conversation with myself, come to understand the nature of burnout. And in my head, the image that pops into my head now when I think about burnout is a literal, like, burnt out tree.
Like, you see, like, a tree stump or whatever that’s recently gone through a forest fire, and, like, the outer parts are still there, but the fire just burned it all up to where, like, it could no longer support its own weight, let alone anything else’s. And it’s just, you know, it’s completely, literally burned.
Where it’s like the inside is just, it’s just seared and hollow. And there’s, it’s, it’s funny because that passion that burns inside of us is so important for the lives we want to live and the impact we want to have. But in the wrong scenarios and the wrong structures and circumstances, that fire inside you that is such a positive and such an intrinsic part of who you are can literally hollow you out.
And it’s just, I feel like the more awareness that’s on that, the better, because it’s not just about following your passions and burning with it. It’s about finding the right ways to burn so that you don’t consume yourself.
[00:06:22] Kaleah Jones: Such a great analogy. It is absolutely so true. I, I really had to, um, do some soul searching to realize that my passion and my purpose, it could be fueled by other things and it didn’t have to necessarily be me, um, being tied to that specific identity.
[00:06:40] Kevin Stafford: That’s such a good point to finding finding those alternate sources of fuel don’t have to just burn myself up I can I can burn other things that are maybe better suited to a longer lasting fire Absolutely The analogies just like just emerge out of it It’s like you start thinking about burning and the way things burn it out Like I’m thinking about my times camping and how depending on the kind of fire I want to build I use different kinds of fuel, different kinds of kindling to start the fire, bigger logs to keep it burning longer.
You know, different kinds of trees will burn longer, burn differently, burn hotter. You know, it’s just, it’s a matter of understanding what you can burn for the kind of fire you want and the people that you want to warm to. That’s another big part of it too. It’s like most of every coach I’ve talked to pretty much without fail burns because they not just want to burn for themselves.
They want to warm and nourish. a community around them. They want to be a light that people can gather around and then teach them to have their own light. It’s just such, it’s such a beautiful little like simple analogy too, but that’s all. There’s a lot that goes into burning safely in a way that people can find nourishment and life and light from.
[00:07:49] Kaleah Jones: Yes, you are killing it with the
[00:07:51] Kevin Stafford: analogy. Okay, let’s bring it out of the world of analogy for at least for a little while. I’m sure we’ll get back there and let’s get back into like boots on the ground. Let’s talk about your coaching practice today. I kind of want, I’m curious. We know how you arrived here.
I’m curious what you’ve built so far and what you’re in the process of building around your, your coaching approach. I like to ask this kind of as a two parter, cause I feel like it sort of gets that more or less the, the important parts of a coaching practice. Who do you coach primarily and how do you coach them, which is basically like your methodology, but also different frameworks, the who can be however you choose to define it.
Whether it’s, you know, at a particular. type of career, a particular type of trade or craft, a particular stage in a person’s personal or professional and or professional development. So yeah, who do you coach and how do you coach them today?
[00:08:45] Kaleah Jones: Yeah, great question. So most of my marketing and messaging is going to be geared toward women career professionals who are kind of transitioning into the entrepreneurial space.
I work with a lot of newbie life coaches. Um, but I will say Transition in all aspects, really, even though that’s kind of what I market to, I find that women who are in transitional periods in their lives, whether that be transitioning to motherhood or from active military military to a veteran or.
Single contributor roles to leadership roles are from being married to divorce. It’s really just the identity shift in itself and that support that you need through that identity shift. I do offer a robust of different, um, products under my, our services rather under my umbrella, one to one coaching, group coaching.
I’m also a trainer. So I train other life coaches to become coaches. I also trained them in. Um, Neuro Linguistic Programming, NLP, which is, um, for those who are not familiar, um, it stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming, Neuro meaning, um, your mind, Linguistic meaning language, and Programming meaning like the patterns, like the way you speak.
So it’s basically a user manual for our mind. I like to say it’s, it’s the, uh. The class about how to use your mind that we didn’t get in school growing up. Yeah. In order to have the best human existence possible. So it really provides practical techniques to improve communication and personal development and goal setting and really understanding how thoughts and language and behavior really interconnects.
So a robust of ways to work with me, but definitely women and healing the sisterhood wound is at the forefront of my purpose.
[00:10:42] Kevin Stafford: Hmm. I like that. I like the way you put that. I, it’s so funny how we’re, how we, we don’t get that instruction manual. We don’t get the user manual. We get all, we get all this other stuff.
Like we figured, like we learn how to like balance a checkbook, although maybe not so much anymore, but like, you know, I’m old. So I remember learning how to balance a checkbook or like these quote unquote life skills where it’s like the most important lessons I ever learned were whenever somebody took the time to teach me how to learn.
Or to teach me something about myself that was obvious to them and probably obvious to everyone around me, but I was completely oblivious to like, like in a different, in a very different way. But for example, the way that once you find the word and the concept of coaching, you begin to explore it, you go down the rabbit hole and you realize that that’s the word you didn’t have or like the framework or the identity that you didn’t have a name for.
But now that you have a name for it, you have a language for it. You can begin to populate it with. You’re who you are who you want to become. I feel like that navigating those kinds of transitions We’re at least I was gonna say we’re usually I don’t know about usually I think Systemically, we’re left alone a lot to navigate those transitions or we’re like or we’re given a book if we’re lucky or We’re given some sort of you know You know, advice, some like sort of boilerplate advice, or you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps sort of frontier mentality encouragement.
But then we’re left on our own, and I feel like the kind of coaching that you provide is just it. I, I can’t emphasize enough how important I think that it is and feel that it is because so many really, really special people just get lost because they didn’t have anybody to help them navigate those transitions.
[00:12:23] Kaleah Jones: So true. And, and that is really the how my, my whole practice was birthed because I went through so many pivotal transitions in my life where I wish I had coaching or mentorship or somebody to help me navigate to hold myself accountable or to explore what this even means. For oneself as you are trying to recreate, re identify, reinvent yourself.
Um, which is something that happens naturally, but we don’t talk about the, the shifts that happen internally when you’re doing
[00:12:54] Kevin Stafford: this. There’s a an analogy on the negative side of this. It just popped into my head that it popped into my head because I was thinking about how coaches are bridge builders and they’re so great at it.
You think about people who have to like navigate a gap and they crossed it in some dangerous way, whether it’s some rickety rope bridge or they had to swim across a raging river or whatever. Again, as I promised, I got back into the analogies. Um, but anyway, they found their way across. And there’s a couple of, there’s like three different main paths to go after you find your way across.
You either just continue on, on your own. You pull the ladder up behind you, which is the analogy that popped into my head, which I find, I won’t, I won’t engage my negative passion on that, but it makes, it makes me almost genuinely angry when people pull ladders or ropes up behind them. But then there are the people who turn back and they look to improve the path that they walked.
Not to make not because it needs to be easier necessarily, but they just don’t want to lose as many people to the risks that they had to venture through the rapids, the rickety rope bridges of the world where it’s like, I figured a way across. I think this could really help people. I’m going to build something a little bit stronger and I’m going to and I’m not going to build it for people.
I’m going to build it with them. I’m going to find them. I’m going to talk to them. I’m going to figure out where they’re starting from. I’m going to figure out where they want to go, and how it kind of mirrors my own journey. And we’re going to figure out how to build that bridge. We’re going to figure out how to get you across.
And then we’re going to figure out how you’re going to help the next batch of people get across. Or the batch of people who are, not even next, just whoever’s around you. We’re going to help, we’re going to help you help them get them across. And it’s just, I get very, I get a little, I get a little verklempt thinking about it.
I get a little passionate thinking about it. Because of how, how basically human it is. And yet, and how much more intention we need on it, because it’s it’s very easy to slip into unconscious ladder climbing or just trying to make sure that you’re okay and you know, coping and then you have your burnouts and yeah, there’s so much to it that I just I love the attention that people like you like you specifically are helping to put on it and with intention and with passion and with effort.
[00:14:56] Kaleah Jones: Oh, yeah. Even everything you just summed up right there. I’m like, you are really speaking like all of my core values cycle breaking, you know, I we are cycle breakers. We are here to leave our lineage in the next generation better than what we came. We are here to transmit trauma so that we can continue to have cause a ripple effect of healing in the world.
So I love all that you said about the bridge. And yes, we are here to close that gap. Thank you.
[00:15:27] Kevin Stafford: Mm hmm. And it’s, it’s again, it’s, it’s simple stuff as this one. That’s one of the things I love the most about coaching is that you’re not like you’re not learning like calculus. It’s pretty, it’s, it’s hard. And there’s a lot to it.
There can be some complex, some complexity here and there, especially as you begin to like meet the world and run into the world’s problems and how to navigate them. It can get pretty tricky, but the concepts and the intention and the passion and the purpose behind it, it’s very simple and in that simplicity, there’s clarity and then a clarity.
That’s how the community begins to bind. And that’s where you start to get your real power. Absolutely.
[00:16:05] Kaleah Jones: Yes.
[00:16:06] Kevin Stafford: It’s like, I’m just like throwing, like, I’m just like, I’m getting excited and I’m starting, I’m getting up on the pulpit and being like, and that’s how we get our power.
[00:16:14] Kaleah Jones: Amen. You over here.
It resonates so deeply because that is how I feel. Um, and yeah, this is a part of my super power is to be of service in this way.
[00:16:30] Kevin Stafford: Absolutely. I think I think the well, I think I’m actually certain that the only reason I am speaking your language right now, and even though we just met is because this is one of the again, another one of the things I find so inspiring about the coaching the coaching community is that.
As unique as everyone’s journey is and as specialized and refined and sharpened as everyone’s coaching approaches, there are certain common values, just like steel core values that every, every good coach shares. Then that again, that’s that desire to serve that I’ve gone on a journey. I’ve learned some lessons.
I think I can, I can help. I’ve had, in fact, I know I can help. I just need to figure out how, and then you’re just going to, and then that dedication. To service. It’s just, like I said, the unsurprising delight every time I discover that in another human being and another coach, it just, it, it warms my heart, but it also like starts my fire a little bit.
It’s my fire stoked a little bit. So I’m just now I’m just praising you, but I’m just, I’m just saying, thank you for sharing this bit of your journey with me and also just thank you for being who you are and doing the work that you do, I just, I can’t, I can’t say it enough, how important I think it is and how glad I am to see people like you doing it.
Thank
[00:17:46] Kaleah Jones: you so much. I greatly receive that. And I like you love to be amongst like minded people and coaches. Um, and even just entrepreneurs in general that had that purpose driven service minded mentality. It’s a beautiful thing
[00:18:03] Kevin Stafford: to witness. Yeah. And to be a part of in any and every way possible. Yeah. So before I let you go, which again is, it’s, it’s a, it’s a reluctant thing, but I’m going to do it.
But before I do it, where can, this is another little two parter, where can people learn more about you if they want to just learn more about your, your personal journey, who you are, what you do, your coaching, just learn more. And if it’s a different place, where can people best connect with you? If they want to start a conversation, start a relationship, sign up for X, Y, and Z, like where, like, how can people learn more?
Where can people meet you? Yes. So
[00:18:36] Kaleah Jones: I’m pretty active on, um, social media. So if you can find me on Instagram at Kalia underscore Nicole, um, Kalia, K A L E A H underscore Nicole, then I am there. And then I’m also at Kalia Nicole on LinkedIn. And Nicole on Facebook, but I’m mostly active on Instagram. So definitely find me there.
You can also check out my website at Kalia Nicole. com, but if you’re on Instagram and you click the link, all of it’s a landing page and all of my offers are right there for you to see and connect. And you definitely can connect with me for like coffee chats for free. I always love connecting people, regardless if you’re interested in coaching or not.
[00:19:17] Kevin Stafford: Yeah, it’s just, it’s one of the, one of the things, and this happens a little bit on Instagram, but one of the things I’ve, I’ve really come to love about LinkedIn is the ability to just have little conversations, just meet people, like to kind of check people out and have it be within reason. I mean, the bar is pretty low for like genuineness on social media, but I’ve, I’ve been finding that with some care and some intention, you can make some really meaningful connections.
In this way, yeah, I, I continue to be grateful and I’m very diligently grateful for it because otherwise I’ll get overwhelmed with, you know, doom scrolling and, and all the other stuff that might sometimes try to creep in there. But, Kalia, thank you again. It’s been great. All the links to like your Instagram profile, your Facebook, your website, LinkedIn, all that stuff will be in the show notes.
Is there anything you want to add before I, before I reluctantly let you, let you get back to work?
[00:20:08] Kaleah Jones: No, this has been an honor and a pleasure. I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I love talking about, um, things that light me up. So I appreciate you taking
[00:20:16] Kevin Stafford: the time. To the audience, if you’ve been even remotely as lit up as I’ve been by this conversation, you know what to do next.
Find the show notes, find Kalia online, wherever you find people like Kalia, and if you don’t find people like Kalia, please do. Do so right now. Do so yesterday. Do so five minutes ago. Do so right now. Thank you for joining us for this conversation. I love that you’re out there listening. I love to be able to…
Be a part of this community in any and every way possible. I hope you feel the same. I know Kalia feels the same. And here on Conversations with Coaches, we will get to talk to you again very, very soon.
