Zele Community Table: What's Your Number One Dream?

May 5th, 2008 at 06:28pm Zele Community Table 117

Zele Community Table

April 24, 2008

 

Kim Moore, Carmela Tafoya, Michael Conniff

 

Michael Conniff: How did you get started with personal coaching?

 

Kim Moore: I was a counselor at CMC [Colorado Mountain College], and the climbing professor—the outdoor education director—said: “You need to meet this woman who helps people live the life of their dreams.” I said take me there now. What a great job! It brings together academics, career, professional.

 

MC: Why is counseling not enough?

 

KM: Because you have a certain template in school—these are the classes you can take, these are the careers. That wasn’t enough. So much more that goes into it.

 

MC: Like what?

 

KM: Action and accountability.

 

Carmela Tafoya: Our counseling model today isn’t about giving a people a method and strategy for their lives. It’s just talking about the problems. Just more and more problems.

 

KM: They get to justify their problem. “Every time I start dating something new, they end up taking advantage of me.” They’re re-living it.

 

CT: They model about what you don’t want and what doesn’t feel good. It’s a psychotherapy model. You have to ignore those things and focus. I’m a proponent of psychotherapy. I mean even Freud. But more Jung. That’s fine for a particular point for particular things, but there’s so much beyond that. They need someone to look at the broad spectrum of their lives.

 

KM: People are tired of coming up with it themselves.

 

CT: They need an action plan.

 

MC: What’s your training for this?

 

KM: I was trained in counseling with a master’s degree in counselor education. It was mental health counseling. Coaching is more functional. If people really had a psychological problem, I’d ask them to get therapy.

 

CT: I think it’s borderline—I’d do that if it’s more medically or mentally determined. What coaches do is also borderline—it crosses borders when you feel more comfortable with the individual. I go to a counselor, a psychotherapist. There’s not a stigma around it.

 

KM: Tiger Woods has a coach.

 

MC: So where do you start with someone?

 

KM: I ask them: “Where are you and where do you want to be.” Where have you been that’s less relevant. It’s the idea of “so what?”

 

CT: The past is past. Leave it there.

 

MC: Isn’t there a danger in that?

 

KM: In ignoring the past? The patterns emerge anyway. Where you were is always present. An example of that is myself with Carmela.

 

MC: Your own personal coach. You’re a coach with a coach.

 

CT: My specialty is exercise, nutrition, quality of life.

 

KM: The pattern for me is lack of consistency. I always get great results in a very short time in whatever I’m striving for. Then it just goes away and I don’t notice. I forget all about that. Because I’d rather eat, drink, and be merry. It doesn’t serve me because I end up not as happy as I could be with being in my body—it affects it all. I don’t even want to have sex. I don’t walk in and out of the room the same way. That’s the weird thing.

 

CT: The biggest reason is what feels good starts to be disconnected from what they don’t want. “Wow, my clothes fit and I’m skiing like I never skied before.” Then you start deciding you can push the threshold a little bit—an extra cocktail, an extra helping—it starts to not cooperate.

 

KM: Your body revolts.

 

CT: A key factor is I don’t believe God put us on the planet to be in a relationship without help. Most people think they can do it yourself. You must have a partner.

 

MC: Why?

 

KM: It’s unconditional authentic peer support.

 

MC: How long have you been working with Carmela?

 

KM: It’s been years now. Two years. She’s always supportive.

 

CT: Standing up for people.

 

 

KM; Really unconditionally.

 

CT: You have to have so much passion about what you do that you can’t stop. Then you have to convince them about what they can have. It’s about seeing someone’s greatness. The eagle in all people at all times. When I run into somebody in the grocery store, I ask them: “What’s working.”

 

MC: What happens if they fall off the wagon?

 

CT: When you fall off the wagon all you have to do is get back on. I feel sure that we ran into each other when because Kim needed it the most: “I got this race….”

 

KM: I’m so ambitious. I want to fix everything.

 

CT: That’s coming from Kim as a coach. When I look at what she’s seen and done with people, you only expect she’d raise the bar. She’s saying that to people. Why not say: “I could do all of what five people are doing.”

 

KM: It’s all action-focused, forcefulness. I’ve changed a lot since then. There are so many different ways to go about being fulfilled. I grew up in a home with very competitive athletes. My sister is a professional windsurfer, my brother is on the U.S. Sailing team, an Olympic athlete. I didn’t perform at that level. So that’s all I knew. How to go about it all the way. 

MC: The way you did when you turned 40.

 

CT: When Kim and I started she wasn’t in the midst of that achievement. When I saw her last summer she was in the midst of it. When a client has a goal I’ll set the strategy. I have a client 40-years-old, and medication caused her lungs to shut down. She’s 4’9” and 59 pounds. She said: “I need to gain 20 pounds to get on the transplant list.” I said honestly I’ve never helped a woman gain weight. It’s about action and accountability.

 

CT: To me, that’s what a coach does, like a teacher checking on your homework. The coaching model works because we were all trained to be students. That simplicity applied to people’s lives. They kick into: “I’ve got an assignment.” How many years have you had an assignment?

 

MC: What if they don’t do their homework?

 

CT: They get a sad face, then the next level of assignment. I use the smiley and sad face on eating diaries.

 

KM: I’ve gotten plenty of those sad faces. I don’t know that I was really taught than any food is bad.

 

MC: Do you do the sad face when you’re coaching?

 

KM: I find another way to go about. It’s about defining their Number One Dream, removing obstacles, typically if you’re in doubt, and creating strategies around them. People have multiple Number One Dreams.

 

MC: Do you have one?

 

KM: To be peaceful. I’m agitated, aggressive, forceful. Just to kind of chill. To be in flow. Today is my first try with a new thing. Something happened on a walk. It became clear I should do a meditative summer versus a competitive summer. Everyone’s asking me to do competitive things and I have no compunction to do any of it. In the past, whether I wanted to do it or not I did it. I windsurfed ten years and I hated it. I hated it because I sucked at it.

 

MC: What’s your Number One Dream?

 

CT: To impact the health of children in this country with a method that has them so excited they come to it like magnets.

 

KM: I need to interject. I was trained so well that I can only create a dream that comes from my soul’s purpose. The Number One Dream comes from your soul’s purpose.

 

CT: I’m trained with the physicality to have specific measurable results around what Kim coaches around.

 

KM: We could work together.

 

MC: How would you coach someone to be peaceful?

 

KM: You have to define what that is for you. If my ultimate result is to lose 20 pounds forever. I could achieve that by becoming more peaceful. Always

 

MC: Isn’t it always about losing weight for women? Isn’t that the wrong dream?

 

KM: It’s the biggest complaint of women between the age of 35 and up. That was the wrong dream. You lose 20 pounds and nothing has changed.

 

CT: Here again we’re talking about the model that losing weight is the way to go about it. I say to clients: “If you do one thing, stop thinking about losing weight.” Talk about fitting into clothes instead. “I’m wearing that in three months even if it doesn’t zip now.” Lose weight and you don’t know how you’re going to feel. You’re connected to how your reach it. No matter what you’re moving in a high vibrational direction. Science says it’s really moving in the right direction. We’re all quantum energy. Stop focusing on what you don’t want and focus on what makes you feel good.

 

MC: I can tell you’ve been reading your Deepak Choprah.

 

CT: You’ve got to get more specific when you’re happy. Describe your physical state, your relationships, your career. “I have more energy.” That’s what it looks like. The right kind of sleep. And always: “Why does it matter?”

 

MC: Why does it matter?

 

KM: I can just imagine what it would be like to have that sense of peace or flow on a daily basis. How it would affect my relationships, my relationship with myself.

Entry Filed under: Health, Fitness, Aspen, Colorado, Business, People, Family, Pitkin County, Hiking, Outdoors, Women, Aspen Club & Spa, United Post