52: Coaching as a Spiritual Journey: Matt Thieleman on Growth, Values, and Adventure

00;00;07;24 - 00;00;39;15

Narrator

Hello and welcome to Cherie Lindberg's Elevated Life Academy. Stories of hope and healing. Through raw and heartfelt conversations, we uncover the powerful tools and strategies these individuals use to not only heal themselves, but also inspired those around them. Join us on this incredible journey as we discover the human spirit's remarkable capacity to heal, find hope in the darkest of moments, and ultimately live an elevated life.

00;00;39;17 - 00;00;59;27

Cherie Lindberg

Hi everyone. This is Cherie and this is another episode of Elevated Life Academy and we're in for a treat today. So Matt is here and he I'm going to let him introduce himself, and we're going to have him share his journey. He works with coaches. So if you are a coach, I mean all of us that listen to this podcast typically are healers.

00;00;59;28 - 00;01;14;18

Cherie Lindberg

You're in for a treat today. And we're going to hear all about his journey, his travels and most recently just settling down. And it sounds like in in Michigan. So thank you so much for sharing and for being here this morning. Matt.

00;01;14;20 - 00;01;40;27

Matt Thieleman

Yeah. Thanks, Sheree. My name is Matt Thieleman for Commerce, as my friends in Australia would say, I'm an executive coach, a leadership coach, a life coach. I think we coaches have a hard time coming up with what word to put in front of coach. About half the time I spend with other coaches coaching and teaching them, and about half the time I spend with founders, entrepreneurs, folks who are crazy enough to think that they can make a change in the world.

00;01;41;00 - 00;02;12;11

Matt Thieleman

My work, I would call it very values based. For me, it's a spiritual journey and I think coaching is arguably the best job in the world because I'm forced to confront my own limitations, my own beliefs, my own old patterning. And you as a trauma therapist, understand this, right? Like all of the stuff that I brought over the last 40 years I get to look at on a regular basis as I'm supporting people in their own growth and so it's it's a joy for me to be able to talk about this work.

00;02;12;13 - 00;02;28;16

Cherie Lindberg

I love that I have been following you. Like I said before, we got on your your journey. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, what got you interested in wanting to travel and a trailer for I don't was it was it a full year that you did that?

00;02;28;19 - 00;02;52;26

Matt Thieleman

Not quite a year. About four months continuously in about six, 6 or 7. Sort of on and off. Yeah. I'm happy to talk about that. It wasn't actually my idea. So this is part of when I I'll try to frame everything and how I, how I see things. And so one of my, one of my core beliefs is that as a coach, my job is to live the life of a coach and that means that it my job is to create the life that I want.

00;02;52;29 - 00;03;11;05

Matt Thieleman

And part of that is doing stuff that I don't know that I want or that feels impossible. And so several years ago, when I was dating my now wife, actually, I think when you were engaged, I'm almost ten years older than her. And we were in the conversation about having kids and I said, hey, what do you need to be ready to have kids?

00;03;11;05 - 00;03;37;22

Matt Thieleman

Because I was ready when I was ready to, you know, get started. And she said, I need to see and do everything. And I said, and she thought I was going to react with like, you're crazy. No way. Whatever. I said, great, where are we going? And that led to a one and a half, two year conversation about what would it be like to really explore for the two of us as a married couple before we brought kids into the world?

00;03;37;22 - 00;03;56;01

Matt Thieleman

And that culminated in us buying a camper van. We named her Babs. So we we documented as we were getting ready for the trip, we had plans to document during the trip a lot more than we did, but I had no idea how. How difficult it would be to stay online and stay connected. You know, while we were in motion.

00;03;56;01 - 00;04;13;06

Matt Thieleman

So we bought Babs. We got her ready for about four months and then got rid of basically everything we owned except for a five by ten storage unit, and at the time lived in Colorado. We knew we were moving back here to Michigan, where we just landed and bought our first home to have kids and start a family.

00;04;13;09 - 00;04;40;28

Matt Thieleman

And so we took about four months moving across the Western US in Canada and exploring everything we could. She quit her job. I continued to work remotely as a coach, and we really just tried to to explore as much as possible during the holidays. We landed back, stayed with our in-laws for a while, which was its own wild adventure that we didn't really expect, and then spent another six weeks down in the southern US, Tennessee, in Florida during the crazy cold.

00;04;40;28 - 00;05;00;18

Matt Thieleman

You're in Wisconsin. You know what winters are like. So we spent February and March down in there around the pools and getting in the sun before coming back up and settling. And it was really interesting as we think about talk about this as a journey is as soon as we left, Chris and my wife, she said, okay, we're going to go see everything.

00;05;00;18 - 00;05;27;09

Matt Thieleman

It's going to be great, but I'm actually ready to have kids. And so the really fascinating thing, and this is such a lesson for me, is it's often about becoming the person who can do the thing. And once that happens, we release the need. We actually don't always need what we think we need. Like it was an incredible trip and and grew, but it was more for her about can we prove to ourselves that we can create a life of adventure and travel and exploration, even with kids, or even with all these things seemingly in the way, oh.

00;05;27;09 - 00;05;39;17

Cherie Lindberg

That is wonderful. I love hearing that. And I just wrote that down that, you know, doing the things that feel impossible. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because I'm sure you work with that every single day with people. When you're coaching.

00;05;39;19 - 00;05;59;05

Matt Thieleman

Yeah, totally. I, I often say that our job as coaches is to support people in creating the impossible, because if everything was possible, they'd already have it very likely. And this could be the fastest thing we think about is usually like money or something like taking this big trip. But it could be having an improved relationship with family or friends.

00;05;59;05 - 00;06;30;16

Matt Thieleman

It could be standing up for ourselves. It could be being in a particular kind of shape or fitness. And what's interesting about, you know, us as humans is we have so much more capabilities and we often believe that we do, and we can look at someone else and say, well, they can do it, but I can't. And the beautiful thing about being a coach is we can support people in reframing the these thought patterns or reorienting their nervous system to allow them to receive so much more than they think they can.

00;06;30;16 - 00;06;50;27

Matt Thieleman

And so that's some of the joy is, is, you know, before we left on the trip in the van, it was impossible for us to leave. We didn't have all of the stuff necessary, meaning a lot of logistical stuff. We didn't have the knowledge we needed of a van or of the trip, you know, creating an agenda, an itinerary.

00;06;51;03 - 00;07;04;10

Matt Thieleman

We didn't have the confidence or the self-awareness or the ability to be calm under pressure. All of that stuff came as we were on the trip. And so by the end, it was possible. We're now those people. But before then, we didn't have any of those skills.

00;07;04;12 - 00;07;09;07

Cherie Lindberg

Yeah, because you put yourself into the situation and allowed for the learning to happen.

00;07;09;10 - 00;07;14;18

Matt Thieleman

And that's the only way to do it. Right? I would love for it to be otherwise, but that's how it seems to go, right.

00;07;14;21 - 00;07;18;23

Cherie Lindberg

Can you share a little bit like how did you become a coach? What is your journey? Matt.

00;07;19;00 - 00;07;39;01

Matt Thieleman

In college I studied psychology and sociology. I really didn't have a plan with. At some point, I thought I might be a practicing anthropologist, but realized I didn't want to live in developing countries. I wanted to stay here. And then after college, I went into marketing because I thought it was the the sort of quickest way to get money, power, influence so that I could cause change.

00;07;39;03 - 00;08;14;27

Matt Thieleman

That back in the day was how I, how I thought that like my best chance for creating change in the world and in my marketing days, I started to notice that my interest went not toward the next marketing campaign or strategy. It went toward reading Harvard Business Review leadership articles, psychology articles, and I was more and more kind of having those conversations about culture and humans instead of saying, like, yeah, I could write you another blog post, but it seems like your company culture is kind of screwed up and no one really likes your product and you're not happy at work.

00;08;14;27 - 00;08;31;26

Matt Thieleman

So it seems like could be more effective to talk about that. That led me to to teaching mindfulness in corporate settings for a couple of years, mostly as a side hustle. I didn't really think about this becoming a full time business for a while, and at some point I had the opportunity to speak. Someone asked me to coach them.

00;08;31;26 - 00;08;58;13

Matt Thieleman

I said yes, I literally Google, how do you onboard a coaching client? What are good coaching questions? And realized once I got in a one on one session with someone, really, this is what I'm here for and realized if I can support someone in and developing this new kind of presence, this new way of being in the world, it's going to have way more effects on their team, on the world in general, than if I go and spend 30 minutes or an hour talking to 20 folks about meditation, and then they leave and nothing changes.

00;08;58;13 - 00;09;13;17

Cherie Lindberg

So curiously, what do you do when you work with someone who on one hand says they want to change and on another you keep seeing that the same pattern they keep running up against the same pattern.

00;09;13;20 - 00;09;31;16

Matt Thieleman

Yeah. To be fair, that is everyone, including me. There's lots of different strategies. Generally, my interest is being whatever energy the person needs to support that growth. So sometimes it might be reflecting back to them, hey, I noticed that you keep saying this and we keep coming back to the same place. Like how is that going for you?

00;09;31;16 - 00;09;54;18

Matt Thieleman

What's that like? Some folks need just love in that moment, right? Some folks are so hard in themselves, and they grow up in such an environment that they're naturally just going to beat themselves up. They need someone to just continue to show up and say, hey, I still believe in you, I got you, I see you. Some folks are motivated by the opposite, which is like, hey, you're not showing up.

00;09;54;22 - 00;10;11;28

Matt Thieleman

And by the way, you're paying me money, a lot of money and a lot of cases. And you say you want this. And by the way, like you're sort of wasting both of our time if you're going to show up and not do anything. And all of that to say, all of that's on the table, what I intend to do is to continue to remind them that they're the one that wants it.

00;10;12;01 - 00;10;32;28

Matt Thieleman

Right. And it's really easy for us. This is why I support coaches. It's really easy for us. It's really easy for me, I'll say, to have my own agenda. That is, I really want you to change. I really want you to have this thing. I really want you to start feeling this way because it's hard for me to experience you feeling that way, or I want you to keep paying me money, because if you don't get the thing, you're going to stop paying me.

00;10;33;00 - 00;10;53;04

Matt Thieleman

I would like to eat. I really like to be able to pay my bills. So like, do this or like my ego might be hurt, right? I think I'm a good coach, but if my client doesn't change, then that might test me. And so my job really is to make sure that I am grounded, open, and really focused on them rather than bringing my own self into this space.

00;10;53;06 - 00;10;53;26

Matt Thieleman

Yeah.

00;10;53;28 - 00;11;03;02

Cherie Lindberg

Well, what I hear you talking about when you are sharing that is attunement. Like I'm hearing you talk about how you attune and shift based on who's sitting in front of you.

00;11;03;04 - 00;11;24;16

Matt Thieleman

I think that's that's what are our biggest jobs. And that's why I say it's really beautiful, because I have a natural way of showing up. I also have a learned way of showing up. And those are, say, two flavors of energy that I can attune to. And they only work on a select sort of population of people. And so I really have to learn to expand how I can show up.

00;11;24;16 - 00;11;50;13

Matt Thieleman

And that's a really fun part about coaching is like, oh, again, back to impossible. Like, no, I could never show up joking with someone as they're, you know, in the deepest, darkest part of their life that's inappropriate. Well, maybe that's needed. Or I could never. A lot of coaches, in my experience, have a hard time with this. Like, I could never test someone's nose in service to them because if I push back, that's not good because everyone used to push my boundaries when I was okay.

00;11;50;13 - 00;12;01;13

Matt Thieleman

Well, actually, that might be what they need. And so I get to grow as a human if I if I gain the capacity to to test people in their boundaries from a loving place rather than from a powerful place.

00;12;01;17 - 00;12;22;15

Cherie Lindberg

Beautiful. Can you share one of your experiences of a challenge, and then also share one of an experience where you just watched somebody absolutely blossom and you were really excited? I mean, I know I get excited anytime anyone blossoms, but can you share a story that maybe is coming to mind on each side of that?

00;12;22;17 - 00;12;44;20

Matt Thieleman

Yeah, I share, I recently had a client who paused our work after only a couple of months, and generally folks work at me for 612 months longer. But I have I have a client. We've been we're going on six years, I think, and it was kind of a shock to me. And the challenge that this person faced was they came for a particular reason to our work, which is like, what's my next purpose?

00;12;44;20 - 00;13;04;25

Matt Thieleman

What's, you know, what do I want to live into in this, in this sort of bigger way? And then life showed up. And so a couple of the next sessions became, how do I get through this very short term acute situation that is in my current job. And they had an idea that that's not what the coaching should be for.

00;13;04;28 - 00;13;23;25

Matt Thieleman

That it was sort of a waste of time that, you know, it was not this original thing. And I as a coach, I see anything is the coaching spaces for anything in your life because the same you are showing up everywhere in life. And so if we can work on this particular thing and have you create empowerment here, then I know that's going to have ripple effects everywhere.

00;13;23;28 - 00;13;50;12

Matt Thieleman

And at this moment, the client and I weren't able to kind of reframe that for them. So they decided to pause. And the challenge for me as a coach is I don't know what's right for them. I don't know if intending to hold them in the coaching was going to be better for them long term. I don't know if really loving them and supporting them and pausing is the sort of better thing long term.

00;13;50;12 - 00;14;09;16

Matt Thieleman

I can't say right now because none of us can tell the future. And so one of the really challenging things, I think for any coach, especially for me because I really want my clients to be happy and have success, is to like, really sit in that uncertainty and trust that they know what they're they have wisdom, that I have wisdom and something positive will continue.

00;14;09;16 - 00;14;35;01

Matt Thieleman

And that, you know, I don't suck. So that's an example of a challenge. An example of successes is one of my absolute favorite things is like, for example, my client, who I've been working with for now, six years, we've had a number of breakthroughs together and have watched some terrible tragedies in their life. And that the most amazing thing is to see for me, it's about when someone starts to shift the way they relate to themselves.

00;14;35;03 - 00;14;53;20

Matt Thieleman

And so if someone, for example, is really anxious and has a story that like, I don't belong here. No one wants to be around me. Just have them show up and then like, make a new friend and after the fact reflected me and say, like I didn't beat myself up, I chose to start this conversation even though I was nervous.

00;14;53;22 - 00;15;18;04

Matt Thieleman

And guess what? This person responded back and it was amazing. And I. And then to be able to watch that for the next, you know, two, three, four months as they, they might not even see it themselves. Yeah, right. And notice like they're like, oh, I'm not quite beating myself up so much or I'm celebrating this now, this thing that I used to, to not celebrate at all that I'm doing in life, that's the most fun for me.

00;15;18;05 - 00;15;36;26

Matt Thieleman

So of course, all the qualitative, tangible stuff comes alongside that. Better relationships, more money, more success in business or whatever it is. And for me, that that qualitative shift of feeling more safe inside my own body in mind, or my clients feeling more safe inside their body mind is the huge thing.

00;15;37;02 - 00;15;52;19

Cherie Lindberg

I bet I'm hearing you say, but not come out and say, but helping people really get aligned with their their values and who they want to be and helping them evolve and step into whatever that is for them. That's what I'm hearing.

00;15;52;21 - 00;16;12;25

Matt Thieleman

And I think it's a really courageous act to do that. Before you and I popped on, we were talking about your tattoo, right? And this idea of like turning 50 and having my outside match my inside. Yes. The we we largely have been taught to not do that. Yeah, right. I have no idea about your background. I could imagine your parents were like, tattoos are bad somehow seeing.

00;16;12;26 - 00;16;49;10

Matt Thieleman

Oh yeah. Right. And so we had to unlearn all of that. And so it's a tremendously courageous act. And so, you know, a lot of people might think that coaching is this kind of fluffy thing. Like I go and I establish my values and then it's all this internal game. No, it's, it's a, it's a war sometimes. Because to take that I want to live this value, say, you know, integrity and then learn to say like actually saying no to this person who I really love, who I'm afraid is going to no longer be my friend if I say no to them when they want to go out or they oversteps and boundary, they say

00;16;49;10 - 00;17;11;24

Matt Thieleman

something crappy about me. They, you know, imply that I am not pretty handsome. Whatever it is to be able to say like, hey, that's not cool is a courageous act because it threatens the things we value. Yeah. And and so, yeah, thank you for pointing out this value based sort of approach. And I want to say that, like the act of bringing that into life is challenging.

00;17;11;26 - 00;17;34;29

Cherie Lindberg

Yes it is, it is. And I really like how you, you worded it there because I hope people are really listening and that they can take that in because, I mean, this podcast is called Elevated Life Academy. And what we're hoping to do is to bring healers and coaches and everyone together to share ideas about how do you live an elevated life.

00;17;34;29 - 00;17;50;09

Cherie Lindberg

And I, I want people to know, like you talked about creating change in the world. I want people to know it's possible, right? There's so many people out there that don't think it's possible, or they give up or they don't have the right support. And so I really love hearing what you're what you're saying, that.

00;17;50;11 - 00;18;09;29

Matt Thieleman

Thank you that it's I'm a person who naturally has had big wild, imaginative sort of visions for life when one of my impossible goals is for every founder in the world to have a coach. And I'm learning the older I get that part of those visions were actually a trauma response. I didn't want to be present in my body.

00;18;09;29 - 00;18;31;21

Matt Thieleman

And so I imagined an amazing future. And so a lot of my work over the last couple of years has been to hold both. How can I hold on to me while imagining that future and what it allows for? And this is going back to imagining that change is possible, is I can create more tangible, tactical steps in the now moment, rather than getting lost only in the vision.

00;18;31;21 - 00;18;53;25

Matt Thieleman

I know so many visionaries were like, I want to see this huge thing and then have no idea what to start. And so for me, I'm I'm learning more and more that that change happens through this moment by moment choice, through this one conversation, through another conversation. And again, those are often courageous acts because they don't seem big enough in the moments, you know, the little voice.

00;18;53;25 - 00;19;02;00

Matt Thieleman

And so I was like, what? What difference is this going to make? Because just one little thing, it's no big deal. But if we constantly choose into that, that's how change is made.

00;19;02;02 - 00;19;14;17

Cherie Lindberg

Yeah. Beautiful. Can you talk a little bit about your idea, the post-it notes and what you put on LinkedIn? Because I, I really follow that and I like that. Just wondering where that idea came from.

00;19;14;19 - 00;19;35;20

Matt Thieleman

Yeah, yeah. So years ago I worked with a therapist and he was like this, like, master of quotes. He like Arvest at the top of mind. So he had it. He had a set of like mini post-it notes. And during session he would just write a quote and give it to me. And so I ended up, you know, with dozens of these little post-it notes by the end of our work together.

00;19;35;20 - 00;19;54;04

Matt Thieleman

And as I started to train to be a coach some years after that, I started to write post-it notes, and I would tape them while stick them around my monitor. There aren't any currently because we just moved, and they were the things that I wanted to be reminded of. And so we we talked about values. They'd be my values, be love, be integrity, be ecological, etc..

00;19;54;09 - 00;20;11;26

Matt Thieleman

Yeah. Or be whatever I want to be focused on. One of them might be see God, find God in them, or get on their side. So this is my reminder as a coach, how do I want to be with this person in front of me? And so again, I had like dozens of these post-it notes that, you know, one I would need after a while and go away.

00;20;11;28 - 00;20;31;23

Matt Thieleman

And as I started to create and write more on LinkedIn specifically, I thought, well, I love these quotes, right? Like they just work. And so I might as well just start making them. And I actually I have a client who writes on three by five cards these bit longer. He would make doodles and I thought, I'm just going to borrow his idea.

00;20;31;23 - 00;20;49;19

Matt Thieleman

And what's amazing is I think it's kind of silly. I think my handwriting is okay. I get to make art, so I get to draw these little deals. I do not have an art background in fact, I would have not considered myself an artist until when I published my book. I had their doodles in it that I, I made for my publishing team.

00;20;49;27 - 00;21;04;29

Matt Thieleman

I said, hey, I want you to make a better version of this doodle. And they said, no, they're great. We actually want you in it. Yeah. So they helped me to see that I'm an artist. And so it's a really fun way for me to create art, to do something fun and apparently people are noticing it. It's becoming a brand I had.

00;21;04;29 - 00;21;05;03

Matt Thieleman

No.

00;21;05;06 - 00;21;24;18

Cherie Lindberg

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think some of them are like a little wake up call. Some of them are like a daily affirmations. So they all have different things that they're, you know, well, is there any I just really love to have the opportunity to talk to. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you think would be really wonderful for the audience to hear.

00;21;24;21 - 00;21;42;20

Matt Thieleman

If I may, I have an invitation. It's entirely free. And so I'm so pleased for me that you read my book. And after I published my book, I had no business idea about how I was going to use it, aside from like, I think this should be in the world. And it took me a couple of years and in January launched a community on a platform called school called This Is Coaching, which is the name of my book.

00;21;42;23 - 00;22;06;09

Matt Thieleman

Yeah. And it is a free community to join, and it's intended to be a place we have paid opportunities for folks who really want to get into more practice. My philosophy about coaching is we get better through practice. I played baseball for 20 plus years, so playing I just turned 40, not professionally for fun and so I'm all about delivery practice.

00;22;06;09 - 00;22;26;02

Matt Thieleman

And so we create that environment if folks really want to, to get in training. And if you just want to show up around coaches, healers, therapists who want to talk about what it's actually like to do this without all this, like, you know, scale your business in six months to Six Sigma, like real. You conversations know, like Instagram hacks.

00;22;26;02 - 00;22;45;05

Matt Thieleman

We can talk about the business side if you want. And mostly what I'm talking about is the human element of coaching. So how do we celebrate ourselves on a regular basis? How do we show up and just be human? I have monthly teachings that are my observations about coaching, and really, I want it to be a place where people can just land and say like, I'm not alone.

00;22;45;11 - 00;22;50;02

Matt Thieleman

And like you said, like something is possible because other people are still doing are doing this courageous work too.

00;22;50;04 - 00;23;08;19

Cherie Lindberg

Wonderful. Yes, we will make sure that we have that in the social media link so people can find you and, and go there. And I too am going to take a peek at that because I really our philosophies are very aligned. And so I was really excited when we got you as a to come on here and share.

00;23;08;22 - 00;23;22;05

Cherie Lindberg

All right. Well, I want to just thank you so much for for being here and for sharing yourself with us today. And I wish you well in your new home and excited to see, you know, and keep following and see where you go.

00;23;22;07 - 00;23;28;28

Matt Thieleman

Thanks, Cory, and thanks for doing the work you've been doing for so long in trauma. And as a therapist and a coach, we all need this work.

00;23;29;03 - 00;23;35;01

Cherie Lindberg

Yeah, I, I've said this many, many times in the world that we live in today, like bring your light, everybody bring your light.

00;23;35;05 - 00;23;35;25

Matt Thieleman

Yeah, yeah.

00;23;35;25 - 00;23;39;11

Cherie Lindberg

Thank you so much.

00;23;39;13 - 00;24;07;28

Cherie Lindberg

I hope you really enjoyed what Matt had to share about what it means to be a coach that is helping his clients evolve, to align with their values, and to create a life that they've basically been programed to think is impossible. I really loved how he worded that and how he was talking about wanting to create change in the world.

00;24;07;28 - 00;24;52;28

Cherie Lindberg

That's what we're looking to do here at Elevated Life as well. He also talked about reorienting your central nervous system and reminding his coaching clients that they're the ones that want it, whatever it is. And I really liked his quote, and I think I'm gonna use this, Matt. We get better through practice. So many people out there think it's silly to have a coach, or it's silly to go to therapy or things like that, and it's all about learning new skills and letting the old programing and things that we learned that no longer service when we were younger, that we're still trying to use today.

00;24;53;00 - 00;25;22;10

Cherie Lindberg

And we can think bigger, strive bigger, and we can do it through joy and an enjoyment of life and not as a trauma response. So I love all those different ideas. And if you're interested, he has a coaching community. We'll make sure that the link is there for you to connect to his community. Until next time, thank you so much.

00;25;22;12 - 00;25;41;08

Narrator

Thank you for joining us on another uplifting journey on Cherie Lindberg's Elevated Life Academy. Stories of Hope and healing. If you found resonance or connection with what you've heard today, we encourage you to share this episode and consider becoming a subscriber. Please spread the word so others can live an elevated life.