[00:00:00] Kevin Stafford: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another fine episode of the Conversations with Coaches podcast. I’m your host, Kevin. We’re recording this right now with Robin Eidelson, coming very close to the end of 2023, just before the holidays. You’re probably, you’re likely listening to this, your year has gotten its legs under it.
Maybe you’ve already succeeded or, set aside some of your resolutions. So happy 2024. Robin is, I’m just, I’ve got a smile on my face already. We’ve been chatting. I thought we were chatting for just two minutes before I hit record. It turned out to be 12. I’m so glad she’s decided to come back on the pod.
Let me reintroduce her to you before we just Pick our conversation back up because it’s just delightful. Robin is an executive and leadership coach and is on a mission to help women in management roles lead more boldly by finding their confidence and owning their voice to have the impact they dream of having.
She’s a certified coach who brings her coaching training, her MBA from UC Berkeley, and years of work experience to every single call. Robin, it’s just so good to see you. I’m just very happy to see you, to talk to you. I’m just happy to be exposed to you. We jumped such, we, both feet forward into a great conversation.
Like we just, like we’d been talking five minutes before I hit record or before we jumped into the Zoom room. So anyway, I am beside myself to have you back on the show. Thanks for sharing some time with me. Yeah,
[00:01:13] Robyn Eidelson: I can’t help but notice the huge smile on my face because I’ve been looking forward to this for so long, and I do also really enjoy the conversation.
So thank you again for having me
[00:01:22] Kevin Stafford: back. Oh, truly my pleasure and I’m also so glad that it’s yours. I just, I love, I know I get very, I tend to get very like schmoopy and sort of saccharine and but I don’t mind because I just, I love these conversations so much and I know that it comes out so naturally.
So rather than put a little little bucket or a little hat. On my, on that light. I just like to let it be silly and let it shine because it’s just, we talk about such good stuff and it’s so exciting and it’s so hopeful and it’s so practical at the same time that I feel like it’s that, that perfect blend of why I love coaching so much.
It’s it gives you things to hope for and gives you tools to start building. It’s great. It’s great. So yeah, let’s talk about the things you’ve been building and the wins you’ve had and the things that you’re excited for and hopeful for in the year past or passing almost past and the year to come.
[00:02:07] Robyn Eidelson: OkAy. I love this topic. It’s always a joy adventure. It’s alluding to what we were already talking about before you hit record, which is how important it is to take a pause and reflect and build in that space for your brain and your body to catch up to everything. It has maybe even subconsciously taken in and needs to reorganize and just set time or energy aside for love this question. There’s been a lot of great learnings for me this year, most of which have actually just been my own self coaching or coaching that I’ve received from others and gone through a lot of great mindset shifts for myself. And as I reflect on this year, I’d say the most important has been really reorienting my own metrics for success.
And I think this is actually so important for everyone, regardless of your role, whether it’s work related or not, but really taking the time to ask what do I actually care about, what are my goals, but really what’s important to me, shutting out anything else that isn’t you. So shutting out your parents voice, shutting out that college professor, shutting out your boss, whoever, even though they are important to you, they’re not you.
And really reorienting around your own voice and what’s important to you in terms of success. So for me, that has been actually really restructuring how I think about success for my own business, for example instead of it being just solely focused on, let’s say, number of clients or dollars revenue, which are important.
Don’t get me wrong. Those are great and very important, but they weren’t really helping me show up or energize or orient myself in a way that was. It’s truly authentically me. And I kept noticing throughout the year, and it didn’t really hit me until about October, but it was there the whole time that I was really low energy about my business.
There was a lot of struggle, a lot of feeling of this is draining is this meant for me? And these are all very you can feel my, I can feel myself sinking into my chair and leeching out. And it was happening so subconsciously. And then at some point I said, Whoa, you know what?
Those goals aren’t serving me. I have to reorient myself towards something that will help me lift and get out of my chair and get into it. And the other things will come. So I’ve actually gone through a huge exercise where I ended up saying, what’s most important to me is just the concept of generative.
I want anything and everything I do to be generative. That is the word that just, it was like a written in neon and big letters above and Stood out to me. It’s like what really matters to me is that I’m being helpful. So generating something that is useful or helping someone achieve a goal. What’s helpful or what’s important to me is that it is helping me learn something.
So I’m generating new knowledge or generating a new skill. What’s really important to me is that it’s generating energy. I’m excited about it. I want to do it. I feel myself leaning in. I can’t wait to get into it. What’s important to me, right? And I kept catching myself using generative as a theme and notice My metrics for success here, I are still in line with business building, but instead of being bogged down by, why don’t I have more clients or why don’t I have this many? Or why don’t I have this much dollars in revenue? I’m leaning into it and showing up differently. And it was amazing. And within days of just making this change, I’ve noticed people like commenting on it, pointing it out.
And that kind of changes. Really valuable feedback because you’re on the track of something important to you. So I’m going to pause because that was just a huge download, but honestly, it’s still rocking my boat even
[00:05:37] Kevin Stafford: months later. No, I love that. And I love how quick it’s, I think this is true often, not always, but very often that when you make those kinds of changes or when you have those kinds of realizations, it shows up pretty much immediately.
People will pick up on it to the point where they will communicate it to you, or you’ll get, different things will start happening, you’ll see a different look on their face they’ll point it out, they’ll call it out, it’s it’s really a lot of times you think about these kinds of big changes, and you’re like, oh, it takes time to really let everything settle in, but like, When you’ve essentially been building to a realization like that, that finally gets unlocked with a word or a phrase or the right person says the right thing at the right moment or you read the right book or see the right face at the right time and it just unlocks for you.
It feels like it all started at that moment that you’ve got that key that unlocked that door but really you’ve been working towards that for a while and the moment you have that door unlocked it just it shows up so quick. And so profoundly, you’re like, oh, why didn’t how come I didn’t realize this before is a common phrase that I’ll say to myself.
It’s like, why didn’t I realize this sooner? It’s oh, no, I was in the process of realizing it for a while. It just took, that journey to arrive at that point. And now everybody sees it and they’re like, oh, okay. That’s fantastic. And I really do like that you settled on that word generative too.
Not just because it’s very much in the consciousness around other technological developments, but that idea, that’s a word that I haven’t used very often to describe a feeling that I’m very familiar with. And that. that desire to identify the net positives or the net negatives.
It’s or whether an experience or a relationship or a goal or something about what I’m doing or saying or thinking is subtractive or additive. And I like generative better than those. I look as generative. Both is more specific, but also opens up I think more doorways because you’re thinking about what is ultimately generating something positive momentum feedback movement and not positive in a it is good and negative is bad sense, but as in moving you forward, like sometimes you need a little friction to get the fire started, so to speak.
And so you can start to see everything through that lens and all of a sudden, instead of shoveling, dirt into a pit, trying to fill up that revenue bucket that you’re trying to fill up. Now you’re building something, you’re generating revenue. It’s really it’s a change of word that unlocks a change of life and a change of the way you go about your business.
It’s just, I love it. Clearly I’m like I’m picking up what you’re putting down.
[00:07:56] Robyn Eidelson: Thank you. And I couldn’t agree more. That’s actually just, I was. Thinking to myself, that’s the power of coaching, right? Every client I’ve ever had has talked about like the nothing we talked about today. Was nothing I haven’t heard elsewhere, but what I needed was to hear it this way and unlock that and see it differently and it finally clicked right.
It’s like when clients come to me is okay, I’m a first time manager and I don’t know anything about people management and I’m like we could talk about the basic tenants of a 30, 60, 90 day plan. We could talk about prioritization, but you can also read anything you want online about that.
What I think is more important is you take the time to understand what are your holdups around it? What are your thoughts? What is your mindset? What is, giving you energy about it? What’s taking away energy about it? What feels right? What doesn’t? And generating, again, you need that word, the right version of that for you so that you actually want to go use it and you actually want to go and be the people manager you’re meant to be, right?
That’s the power of coaching is us. Instead of taking that moment to say, I need to unlock something. I don’t know what it is and I can’t do it alone. I need someone to guide me through that. And I know I’m willing to do the work and get there, but I just. Can’t do it by myself.
[00:09:11] Kevin Stafford: A coach is almost like a conductor in that way.
You were, when you first started when you launched into your discovery of generative, you started talking about like the different voices in your life and how they might not be really helping you or serving you at all in it, I immediately thought of how does the difference between just noise and music?
It can just be a matter of having the right voices in the right places, singing the right songs, maybe y’all singing the same song or singing a, at a lower register to create a harmony and how it’s like there’s, there can be a relatively small difference between a cacophonous noise that is drowning out your thoughts and your feelings and a joyful noise.
AKA singing, AKA song, that is uniting you with the people around you and creating something more beautiful than any of you could have created by yourself. And it’s that simple. That’s like a duh, oh, I like music and I don’t like loud noises. It’s real simple, but it can unlock something for you where you’re just like, oh, I gotta get the right voices in my life so that we can start making some music.
Yeah. And
[00:10:05] Robyn Eidelson: also, I love your analogy. I’ve got to pick up the baton. I’ve been sitting in the back row waiting for someone to guide the orchestra. Ooh, wait a minute. That’s me. Or I’ve got to be the one to tell the trumpets to quiet down because I, I’m a band of kid. So I get it.
Like trumpets are always the loudest and all the lesson from the conductor is always like trumpets play a little quieter. So Whatever that is, but you have to know what you need out of that role and own that. , in order to create music out
[00:10:36] Kevin Stafford: of the noise. I love it. And it’s, you hit the right metaphor.
The more I think about that analogy, the more I really like it. ’cause now I’m thinking about you have your first chairs who are responsible for leading your section, and then you’ve got like second and third chairs and other people who are just like, they are just delighted to be in that supportive role.
And they just like to they just want, they just need their sheet music. And practice, and they just love contributing to that larger whole and there’s all and obviously the analogy breaks down as you realize that as human beings were so dynamic that we can move, we can sit in most chairs and most times depending on where our life is going and what we want to build out of it and it’s all about having that coach who’s there to help you to ask the right questions about yourself.
Because it, like you said it’s just, we live in such an amazing age where it’s like, you can, within reason, you can figure out a decent amount about almost anything, just with some time online. You have, not just access to the information, but access to the people too, where you just like, schedule a quick call with somebody, or just lock into a podcast or a show, or something of any kind, or some documentary, and there’s just so many ways to get the information you need, but so little help in, Organizing it in such a way that it’s actually useful to you.
It’s just because you have all of this deep personalized data information, that’s all very smart and very detailed, is amazing. I had no idea how to like. There are 15 different ways to tie a tie. That’s fantastic. And you can show me all of them. And I’m like that’s really interesting.
But it was like, but I don’t necessarily have taste. I don’t necessarily have a fashion sense from learning how to do that. And that’s where somebody can come in and tell you and tailor all of this massive fabric to fit you the way that you want to be fitted to help you look the way you want to look, feel the way you want to feel and move in the world the way you want to move in the world.
It’s really, it’s. It’s so much, it’s almost overwhelming, but it’s also really cool and specific, where it’s very centering, where it’s oh, I just need a little help from my friends, need a little guidance is all I need to find my path through this.
[00:12:26] Robyn Eidelson: Yeah, exactly. And some people are good at self coaching and asking those important questions, but some, most of us.
Are so in it and feel it right like maybe our brain has gone too far off the deep end and now all we have is intense emotion or maybe our brain is trying to keep up with the emotion and can’t quite process it, whatever that is that we can’t use all the tools available to us. In the moment. So what you need is someone who’s going to just hold that space for you be very nonjudgmental and gently and carefully get you there and let your brain let go or your heart let go or whatever that is so that they can work together rather than run circles around each other.
So I think that’s the important thing is like not to get mad at ourselves if we can’t figure it out on our own, because there’s probably a lot there that is getting in the way. And Like any person you look up to or a teacher, but like you need to find that right resource coaching is great because at the end of the day, they’re still going to make it about you.
And I, I have nothing against mentorship and teaching and advising. They’re all important. I advise, I consult all of that. And I think at the end of the day, what’s powerful about coaching is that. I want every, Kevin problem to have a Kevin solution to it that’s going to be really fit like a glove because then you’ll actually want to go and use it.
[00:13:50] Kevin Stafford: Oh that’s, you keep saying things that are sparking interesting analogies in my head because you fit like a glove. And I was like, Oh yeah, have you ever worn a glove that was like two sizes too big or even way too small? And then tried to like work like a work glove or if the glove is not the right size, you’re going to, you’re going to start making mistakes, maybe dangerous mistakes with the tools you’re trying to wield.
Cause like you ever I’m thinking about wearing like a glove that’s way too big and I’m trying to like. Turn a screwdriver or like hammer in a nail and I’m like I can barely tell what I’m doing because I’m not the things that I’m wearing are interfering with the tools I need to use to accomplish the task I want to accomplish and so something as simple as Stopping what I’m doing and going and finding a glove that fits well can change everything about the quality of the work that I’m doing and maybe prevent me from, hammering my thumb into a block of wood on accident, so to speak.
And it’s like something as simple as that. And that’s exactly like what a coach can come in and do where you can experience that, that immediate positive difference in what you’re doing. It’s Oh, I never even realized I was wearing, shoes that were two sizes, too small in gloves that were two sizes, too big.
I never realized that I was trying to fit myself, my round peg into the square hole in this company that I want to work for, or this role I want to have. And that slight shift that again, the coach is going to come in and see that immediately. But you doing the work in the midst of it, you’re going to have a hard time kind of understanding, or even maybe you don’t have the time to shift your perspective and look at that yourself and that little extra view and that little, like little nudge, a little guidance where it’s you might try the size twelves.
On the shoes and here, try these like medium sized gloves. Just let’s see how those work. And then a world of accomplishment unlocks for you. And you’re like, awesome. Let’s keep going. Let’s talk about what you’re building. Let’s talk about where you’re building and keep going. It’s just, it’s such a beautiful little thing.
And it’s sad. The effects are immediate. Like you’re unlocking of the word generative and long term and resilient. Because you just keep benefiting from these small changes that continue and this growth that continues and this guidance that continues.
[00:15:47] Robyn Eidelson: Exactly. Yeah, because, I don’t want anyone to walk away.
And then not know what to do with it and then walk away and come back to me a month later and say nothing changed the whole point is that you have built a tool that is going to serve you and you can adapt the tool and you can make it a little bit different if you need to. But at the end of the day, the screwdriver is going to help you screw in most screws that you need to.
And you know how to use it. So yeah, overall, I feel like 2023 has been huge amounts of learning and it’s made me really excited in this new mindset for what I hold in 2024. A lot of great ideas about how I can better serve clients. Most to do around like just changing my offerings.
So making them a little bit more experiential and a little bit more about. Connectivity. So the two things I’m most excited about is more experiential learning. So for anyone’s here local in San Diego. I’m actually going to take my background in sailing and offer coaching on the water. So you can join me in a boat and we’ll get out there for a couple hours and help you uncover your habits and patterns and what your defaults are and get out there, but also just learn something about yourself in a different setting and use it as a way to really uncover what you actually need in terms of growth.
As a people leader and then I’m also going to start offering a lot more group offerings because I think that there’s such power in. Generating through conversation, but not feeling like you are alone in your own struggle. And so the amount of generating that could happen from not only coaching, but coaching in the space of others and allowing their experiences to add a little flavor to yours and yours to add to theirs.
That’s all things I’m building in 2024, which I’m very excited about.
[00:17:33] Kevin Stafford: That’s all. Those are both awesome. Number one. I love like group coaching. I’m always, I always feel like that’s the sweet spot for like coaches are on the rise or they’re like, they’re figuring out how to have the most impact while also like getting sleep, and and I think you identify that so beautifully where it’s sometimes the burden of the one on one can be a little too much for some people, or it might be too much for them at a certain stage where it’s like the spotlights on them and it makes them, it shifts who they feel like they can be and what they feel like they can share what they feel like they can do.
But in that group, you almost, again, you harmonize. Because you’re all there for similar reasons that are nevertheless unique to you. And so you have these things to share. And so as a coach, you get to just come in there and start, get things going with questions or exercises or just the right little primer, the right little spark.
And then you just tend the fire and let everybody else spark off of each other. And again, that rising tide, raising all boats to go back to the water. That’s just, it’s such a. It’s so I’m just in love with group coaching like that six to eight people right around in there curated guided by a coach or two.
It’s just I find it to be just exponentially impactful. And you also just get the experience you get to tap into that whole like. This is this feels contagious like you can almost feel it like you see the people in your life who are picking up on it and they’re like you, you will never necessarily know the three or four degrees of Kevin Bacon away from you, the people that you’ve influenced that you’ve helped because you help somebody else find their way.
Who had then helped somebody else find their way whose light shown on somebody else’s face and made their day and that’s why I got fall so much in love with coaching and group. I feel like you’re coaching. It’s that’s that’s the sweet stuff for me. That’s like the secret sauce for me.
I love that. You’re moving into that. It’s great. Oh, it’s going
[00:19:07] Robyn Eidelson: to be amazing. I already know. I can feel it deep down how it’s just going to be so generative to use that word
[00:19:14] Kevin Stafford: yet. Again, the word of 2023 and the word of 2024, that’s carried forward. I need to get you out of here. It’s I could do this with you all day, but before I let you go.
So you’ve clearly got a lot of cool stuff coming. You’re clearly an awesome person who likes to talk about, all sorts of interesting things and get into the analogies and get down to brass tacks and you’ve got the frameworks and you’ve got strategies and you’ve got the details and you’ve got the guidance.
You’ve got it all. So if anybody wants it all, where can they find you? Where can they best connect with you? Where can they schedule a call, start a relationship, just follow, picking up what you’re putting down on social media, anywhere, everywhere, all at once. Where, what can people do next? Yeah
[00:19:51] Robyn Eidelson: definitely go to my website.
www. RobinEidelsonCoaching. com or email me RobinEidelsonCoaching at gmail. com. I love a good conversation. I’m always down to help and whether we coach together or not, I just want to make sure that people can lead boldly, use their voice, be great people, leaders, ace every people management test they ever face and just feel good about showing up and doing great work.
So if you want to chat. Reach out, I would love to talk
[00:20:20] Kevin Stafford: to you. I know I derive so much pleasure from our chats, we’ve only chatted we’ve chatted via this podcasting twice. I’d always get it always sticks with me. I find myself thinking about stuff that you said days later. I still remember that about the first episode, and I can already tell I’m gonna be, like, having the echoes of this conversation, of the little bit of music that we got to make here for a few minutes today.
It’s echoing out into my holidays, so I’m glad you’ll be with me. to celebrate the new year and bring gratitude into the into the next one to come so thank you for today and for this selfishly like this was a little gift for me but also just thanks for being you doing what you do i think it’s great
[00:20:54] Robyn Eidelson: likewise absolutely and wishing you happy holidays and to everyone out there a wonderful
[00:20:59] Kevin Stafford: start to your new year Absolutely.
And here on the podcast, Conversations with the Coaches, thank you so much for spending a year. It’s been two years. It’s been longer than two years, I think. Thank you so much for sharing time with us. I hope you get just a fraction of what I get out of this because if you do, then your life is so much better and brighter.
So thank you so much for sharing your time with us and we’ll talk to you again here very soon. Thank you.
