Episode 258: What Waiting 10 Years to Start Coaching Taught Me About Fear with Candy Motzek

By Sarah Walton | December 10, 2024

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Do you understand your own relationship to fear? Have there been moments in your life where you knew there was something you wanted to do, and you kept not doing it because it just seemed too big?

Today's guest, Candy Motzek, waited 10 years before she decided to pursue her dream of being a coach, and she knew she was going to be a great coach. She calls coaching a calling, but she had to overcome fear and really deeply understand her own relationship to fear before she could begin this journey.

Candy is an author, podcast host, and business coach for life coaches. She helps smart people start successful coaching businesses. She helps her clients get unstuck and feel more confidence and clarity so they can play bigger, sign clients and create more meaningful success. She is a “recovering” corporate executive and engineer who combines practical strategy and mindset in her calming unique approach.

Calling to become a coach

Candy says back in her old corporate days, people would wander over to her office and they’d close the door and they’d down to talk. She says that was coaching before she knew the official way to coach.

“There's something really magical, for me anyway, in that one-on-one conversation with people, like there is a connection and I see them … the essence of them and who they really are,” says Candy. “And there's something super powerful in that.”

For Candy, coaches call their clients out to living that bigger life, which requires them to be courageous and face things they might be scared to do in service of who they are becoming. It’s one of the reasons she says it’s important for coaches to have a coach.

“You just don't have that perspective on yourself that somebody else can have, and they can see those patterns that you have where you're not living to the thing that you said you wanted to do,” says Candy. “You get your results faster when you have somebody that holds you as fully accountable.”

Fear of failure and success

It took Candy 10 years to pursue coach training. It was never convenient. It was expensive. How would she find the time? These were some of things Candy told herself.

“I had all the great excuses, but really it was my ego and just my fear saying, “Oh, don't rock the boat. Don't do anything too crazy,” says Candy. “There’s this tension that happens.”

But Candy says it’s not an all or nothing thing. You can just start.

“We can just take the training and we can just say, ‘You know what, I'm going to have three clients. I can do three clients.’ Right?” says Candy. “Or I could use these skills in another way in my life.”

Candy says a cruise is what convinced her to take the training. She was headed to Cape Horn; tens of thousands of people have perished there. More than 800 ships have crashed there. She’d prepared for cold, and rough weather.

As they rounded the cape, it was sunny. Candy was wearing a T-shirt and holding her espresso. It was beautiful. The experience transformed her relationship with fear.

“I had been telling myself this story about how scary it was going to be,” says Candy, who returned from her trip and signed up for the coaching training she’d put off for 10 years.

AI and coaches

Candy says AI and coaching are an interesting mix. There are people quitting because they think AI will take their jobs, and others are using it as a tool. It’s a choice. You can choose how to use AI and get curious about how it could make your business better.

“There's an ethical situation here that is unprecedented and nobody knows what to do. We'll just say that. But I can stand in my own integrity, my own ethics, and say it's a tool,” says Candy.

She says she uses AI often to help pull together for an idea, sketching out an email for ideas of podcast episodes. But AI can’t come close to the connection you get working side by side with someone.

“AI can think a heck of a lot faster and more intelligently than I can, but they can't feel with the same heart that I feel,” says Candy. “Use AI where it's appropriate and then know that you cannot at this point replace that human connection of hearing that individual and seeing them.”

How to get started coaching

Coaching is a skill, so the first thing you want to do is get a little bit of training. Coach as many people as you can, get that skill, practice that skill, and then you start to feel like a coach.

Candy says for her clients new to coaching she recommends coaching. Do not build the website. Do not start an email list. Create a program and deliver it. You watch people transform, and you learn from that, and you make a little bit of money. So now you're ready for the next step.