Inner Critic To Inner Coach with Kym Coco

We can look strong on the outside… while quietly battling ourselves on the inside. In today’s episode "From Inner Critic to Inner Coach”, I’m joined by Kym Coco—author, yoga teacher, nature lover, and wellness expert whose life’s work beautifully blends movement, mindfulness, and emotional healing. 

With a Master’s Degree in Sports Kinesiology and years of teaching yoga and wellness workshops around the country, Kym brings both wisdom and lived experience to this powerful conversation. Together, we explore one of the most influential voices we all live with: the inner critic. 

Kym shares her own journey from appearing strong and   healthy on the outside while carrying unresolved anger and grief within… to learning how to create true alignment between body, mind, and spirit.  We talk about how the mind naturally drifts into the past, the future, and self-judgment—and how simple, grounded practices can help us shift that harsh inner voice into an inner coach that supports our confidence, growth, peace, and joy. 

This episode is a beautiful reminder that healing isn’t about becoming someone new… It's about learning to meet yourself with more compassion along the way.  

So let’s call in Kym… and let’s Call IT in With Dar. 

Transcript

We can look strong on the outside… while quietly battling ourselves on the inside. In today’s episode, I’m joined by Kym Coco—author, yoga teacher, nature lover, and wellness expert whose life’s work beautifully blends movement, mindfulness, and emotional healing. With a Master’s Degree in Sports Kinesiology and years of teaching yoga and wellness workshops around the country, Kym brings both wisdom and lived experience to this powerful conversation.Together, we explore one of the most influential voices we all live with: the inner critic. Kym shares her own journey from appearing strong and   healthy on the outside while carrying unresolved anger and grief within… to learning how to create true alignment between body, mind, and spirit.  We talk about how the mind naturally drifts into the past, the future, and self-judgment—and how simple, grounded practices can help us shift that harsh inner voice into an inner coach that supports our confidence, growth, peace, and joy. This episode is a beautiful reminder that healing isn’t about becoming someone new… It's about learning to meet yourself with more compassion along the way.  So let’s call in Kym… and let’s Call IT in With Dar. 

Speaker Dar 

Welcome in, Kym. I'm so happy to finally meet you in person and talk about, oh, what are we going to talk about? “The inner critic and flipping it into your inner coach”. I can't wait. But before we get started, how about telling our audience a little bit about yourself and how you got to this point? 

Speaker Kym 

Darla, thank you so much for having me today, and thank you listener for joining our conversation. I actually got to this point through, I would say sports is that's a very broad starting point, but it's very interesting how the body was a really great way to start to understand the environment in which I lived, the way I could move through it, the way I could make fantastic relationships through connecting in sports, and I found myself as the oldest of four on the road with other families, many times, traveling for much of my youth. And it wasn't until I hit college when I had decided, yes, I want to know more about this physical apparatus I'm in and studying kinesiology, which is a fancy way of saying human movement. And what I found fascinating is that while I was strong and healthy and I knew a lot about the body, I still had a lot of anger and upset around events of my childhood, losing my father, and it was almost as though I had a chip on my shoulder and I had to prove something to the world. And that level of stress was contradictory to this healthy lifestyle I was trying to create for myself, and at that time, I started yoga and learning about mindfulness and how we can utilize a sense of presence, a sense of observation, to look at what we're experiencing, understand our emotions without judgment, and starting to use The information we're receiving from the body, from the mind, from those emotions, to start to fine tune and move forward in a way that does align the body, mind and spirit. And that really set me on a course for the next 20 years of my life, which is where we find myself now, learning and experiencing this blend of modern science and ancient wisdom, so that we can really inhabit this body joyfully, and we can create and we can have fun, and we really get to play in this cool playground with the other beings around us, seen and unseen. 

Speaker Dar  

Oh, thank you for that terrific story and the connection between or your awareness, between the brain and the body connection, some people go through their entire life only being healthy on the outside, and it sounds like at an early age you were even able to make that switch. So let us talk more about how those inner thoughts, the inner critic, I'll have you just dive right in. 

Speaker Kym 

Well, let's take a moment to talk about this ability we have with the mind to focus. That's our capacity to look at this environment with so much information and pick a few things to focus on. Maybe it's one thing in the moment that we highlight or amplify and let the rest fall into the background. Those are the things that interest us and get us excited, and yet the mind is going to wander. Our mind goes to the past. It goes to the future. This evolutionary nature helped us survive. When you're out foraging in the forest for food, you can become aware of a tiger, potentially in the bushes that wants to come eat you for lunch. That capacity to pay attention on multiple levels might not mean life or death for us today now, but yet we sometimes get caught up in looking too much to the past, too much to the future, too much to the external, in a way that starts to create a downward spiral of negativity. So instead of those ideas about the future being in the creative and energizing space, or looking to the past briefly to say, Oh, I learned from that. Now I'm going to do something different, or, wow, there's something in my environment. It's not related to what I'm doing, let me shift my focus back. To what does matter. What happens is that energizing space can quickly switch to a negative chatter, that inner critic that says, I'm not good enough, challenges your identity, challenges your worthiness, wants to second guess you at every turn, and can get you stuck on a loop where there's a problem you're trying to solve, let's say, and when you're in that loop, you can't get to the solution. They're different channels. And so the idea of starting to take this inner critic, it begins with understanding the voice in the head might not change. It's going to be there for better or for worse, as long as we're here. So let's start to pay attention to it. Two, notice when it shifts from helping you to hurting you. And then if you notice that, it starts getting in that critical, judgmental, ruminating, looping space that's when we want to start to integrate, to say, hey, let's flip the channel. Let's start to turn you into something that's going to help me not hurt me, so that I can still get to my goals and not feel like I'm dragging around this heavy weight of a person or an idea in my head along the way. Does that make sense? 

Speaker Dar 

Yes. What's great, great advice. I call that the mind chatter. But if we pay attention and then know when it's becoming judgmental, then learning tools to flip to the positive. So with those three things in mind, do you have some stories that you can illustrate this with? 

Speaker Kym  

Yes, I have a couple different ones. I'll start with a really light hearted one, because these ideas in the mind we want to take an approach. Sometimes we have short term tools to flip that inner critic to a coach, and sometimes we have long term approaches that will practice daily and consistently over time to help create a foundation for change so we don't get as upset when that voice shows up or somebody else wants to trigger that voice in us. So my friend Donna, for example, she was out on the golf course. Since I work with a lot of golfers, I am a golfer, and her husband is a very intense golfer, very serious, very focused. And what Donna would often find is that when her husband had a bad game, her inner critic would say, Well, you can't outplay your husband. You shouldn't be better than him. It's not right of you to outshine him and his favorite game. And so what happened was that voice often contradicted her wanting to be a better golfer, to play her game, she's great. And so we used a simple activity of, well, you're already out in nature golfing, so that helps to start to shift the perspective. But even using something like breathing to go, Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna walk from this hole to the next hole. I'm gonna put my feet on the ground. I'm gonna take some very deliberate breaths, and in that space, another tactic to use, you create a little bit of space from the immediate situation to go, okay, I can play well. I deserve to play well. I know my strength on this next hole is to use an iron off the tee and so to start to reframe and start to plan that new experience. And even though her husband had a meltdown that day and had a horrible game. She was able to shoot really close to her personal best, just by starting to pay attention a little bit differently to the voice and her surroundings and her body, to create an almost immediate plan to play her best on the course. So there's one. Are you ready for two? Alrighty, okay. Two. This is a little bit more, let's say, big picture life change. So when my late husband, Steve, had his motorcycle accident, he was in a hospital bed for three years. He had gone through 20 reconstructive surgeries, and took almost six years in total to learn how to walk again. And in that process, he found himself saying, I need other people to help me get well. I'm relying on other people. I'm scared to go back to my business. I'm scared to tell my wife that I don't want to go back to our business. I want to do something different. I want to help people again. I'm afraid that I'm not going to make it if I start over again. And so there was a lot of anxiety in his head, especially laying in a hospital bed. He couldn't move his body to disperse that negative emotion. And so when he started to understand the ability. To move energy in the body, to meditate, and we can do this activity today where you actually start to write down the thoughts you're aware of in the mind, and then change the negative emotion, switch it to something that is on the lighter end of the emotional scale, and then start to magnify that emotion and use other more mild body postures to really internalize those emotions at the at the body level, the physiological, the cellular level, and reprogram the mind so that becomes a new habit. Steve was able to start getting well. He began to teach people in his PT classes how to manage pain better. He was able to get a retreat in Oregon and build this retreat to help people and let the interior design business go to the past. And while he was honest with Paula, his wife at the time of his accident, to say, I can't go back and he was able to liberate himself through the honesty, their marriage didn't last because they were going to part ways, and he learned through all of it that I'm empowered in my healing process. I'm empowered in my honesty, and I really can create a magnificent life as I start to build a foundation of beliefs and body habits that are in alignment with where I'm going. 

Speaker Dar  

Wow. So that was quite a teaching experience. And let's delve into that a little bit, because I know that you wrote a book about it, 

Speaker Kym: 

Yes, before Steve made his transition, we knew we had a shorter time together, and we didn't know how long that was, and so we would sit in the morning over coffee, and we would tell stories audio to become books, and part of those were His stories of dealing with his parents, his near death experience, what it was like to step into the infinite and then come back into his body, to be able to trust his intuition and to know that he lived his best life, ups and downs, and really connecting with that spiritual essence and amplifying his capacity in the human body to live fully, and I found his story inspiring. So did many people that came to our workshops over time, and I promised him I would write his memoir. And so this book,” Miracle on the 

Mountainside”, is full of short stories that'll make you laugh, that might make you cry, but we'll definitely have you looking through your life, looking at your life through a new lens, and I believe his stories open up the possibility of what we're capable of, and it's also a reminder that we don't have to go through incredible trauma To embody these principles, to live really vibrantly today, 

Speaker Dar 

Absolutely, let's not go through those traumas for sure. 

Speaker Kym 

Yes! 

Speaker Dar 

So as we're talking about inner Critic flipping into your inner Coach, I know you have a short activity to share with us, so would you like to do that next? 

Speaker Kym  

Yes, let's do it. Okay, so if you're joining us, the first step in this activity, we would call it the 21 day plan. We're on day one. You can do it for as many days as you want, but it's a practice I've used for decades now because it's so powerful and how it starts to give you back the control, and how you're approaching a situation, a relationship or something that's causing maybe a little bit of angst. So the first step you would do is write down a sentence of something that might be a little bit uncomfortable right now, so that you honor the experience, the negative emotion, the frustration, instead of letting it linger and avoid it, you can say, Okay, I am frustrated that My grass is taking too long to grow in. I am annoyed that my mom hasn't called me back, or my sister hasn't called me back. I'm disappointed my colleague didn't finish their side of the project at work. I'm disappointed in myself for not showing up my best today. Whatever that one sentence is, we want to keep it very simple and succinct. Okay? So that's step one. Darla, do you have any questions? 

Speaker Dar   

Oh, I'm just busy answering it. 

Speaker 2  Kym 

Okay. Step two is a little easier. You're going to identify that. One emotional word in your sentence. Again, as soon as you start to label the emotion, it's minimizing its sense of control over you and taking that control back. So let's say, instead of frustrated, I am peaceful, instead of disappointed, I am understanding instead of anxious. I might be eager or I might be satisfied. Whatever word you want to use, it doesn't have to go all the way to the other end of the spectrum, but we're looking for something, a word that makes you feel good, an opposite word to what you might be experiencing now, and how it could be different. 

Speaker Kym  

I'm not going to put you on the spot, but do you want to give an example of the word, maybe an emotion from the past, an emotion that you're switching to? 

Speaker Dar 

Yes, I can do that. I'm switching from frustrated to more at ease and even eager, 

Speaker Kym 

Oh, I like that. And what's great is Darla gave a great example. If you might have a couple different ideas, and as you go through this, you'll get to see what resonates with you more. So the third step, and I will, I'll add this in the podcast bonus, this idea that we're going to now start to amplify the emotion. So I'm going to ask you, Darla, because you've already offered this, can you share what at ease feels like in your body? Can you can you give me an example of what when you felt at ease before 

Speaker Dar  

Sure, I know that I carry stress in my shoulders, my neck and shoulders, so when I'm at ease, my shoulders drop. They're not so close to my ears and my body will actually relax into the chair, feet still on the ground, 

Speaker Kym   

That's perfect. Okay, go ahead. No, go ahead. Keep going. 

Speaker Dar 

I was just gonna say, and I'm and I'm more centered or grounded or or in the moment. 

Speaker Kym 

Okay, so Darla gave some really great examples. We have. You can actually, literally feel your shoulders relaxed, and if you didn't drop them already, maybe you do. So like us both, you feel your feet on the ground. You take a deeper breath, your jaw is relaxed, and you mentioned even that sense of being grounded or centered. And I'm sure you can imagine a situation in your life where that's already the case, that's already a match. Am I right? 

Speaker Dar  

Yes, 

Speaker Kym  

yes. So that third step in this process is saying, Okay, this isn't foreign to me. My body knows this. I understand what this is like. I experience these emotions in other areas. So let's imprint those emotions and this feeling right, this internalized understanding in the body to the subject at hand, which you wrote down in one and became number two. So your new sentences, I'm at ease with blank, or I'm peaceful with blank, I'm eager about blank, right? So you've now got your new sentence, and we've amplified that emotion. And one of the easiest things to do as the fourth step to really lock that in is to cross one ankle over the other, or one knee over the other, cross one wrist over the other, or cross your hands, so you create this crossover pattern in the body, and you can sit back in your chair, and as you embody those sensations, imagine those sensations getting even brighter of being at ease, or whatever you wrote down, and whatever you're amplifying in that emotional space in the body, imagine that getting brighter as you repeat that sentence to yourself, that new positive sentence, I am eager about blank. I am at peace with this, and you can take a moment and you literally pause and turn up the volume of the sensation in the body using a crossover pattern with this new sentence. This is the belief we're creating, the save button in the mind, in the body, the body that's become the mind. 

Speaker Dar 

I love that statement, 

Speaker Kym pardon, 

Speaker Dar 

I love that statement of create the save button, 

Speaker Kym 

And that's what we're doing. And with this activity, you can pause the recording and actually stay and do this work. It's so wonderful, because when you start to cross over the body, we have the corpus. Blossom in the brain that starts the right and left hemispheres. It allows them to communicate. And when you cross over, it starts to bridge the gap, because oftentimes when we're feeling negative emotion, you become overly logical or overly emotional, and so we're starting to bridge those two so that you can think logically and use the best emotions to give you the pathway forward. So this now becomes the blueprint. This, like he says, the mental Save button to go, Okay, now, when I think about this, what can I do? And that's the fifth step. Is there something I can do now? Is there a new insight? I have a new way to approach this same situation moving forward, and maybe it's simply reminding yourself what at ease feels like, and tapping into that throughout the rest of your day. And so this starts to become the foundation for the beliefs, those ideas we're holding about the situations. It can automatically lower stress in that short term period, but also starts to become that longer term foundation that we have access to as we approach similar situations in the future. 

Speaker Dar 

Thank you for sharing this activity with us, and how simple it is to just move on with the new approach, to keep that, that statement we formed, and then taking a new approach. I think it's something we can all do right now, right here today, and I'm glad you suggested they just pause the recording and get it done, because I can just, I'm going to continue this after the interview, but before we wrap up, I really want you to talk about these gifts that you have available for our audience. 

Speaker Kym 

Yes, if you go to swagtail.com, forward slash podcast bonus, I know Darla is going to put it in her show notes as well. You are going to get the mental and emotional approach to transformation. The first is a 20 minute training video on how we get to understand a little bit more about the mind and our attention, and how we can zoom in and zoom out for more energy, better memory. I often think that if you're not present the first time, you're not going to remember it later. So it's usually not a memory issue, it's a presence the first time around the issue and then greater connections. Because when we are present with the people in our life, we have better harmony, and we can really benefit from those interactions. So this attention video will show you how to start to fine tune the elements of the mind. And then there's a really great story about how to overcome the fear of transformation. Because oftentimes the unknown gets scary, and it doesn't have to be a big unknown. It can be a small unknown too, but you can start to become aware of when those indicators of fear or discomfort show up. And there are also a couple practical tools in there too. So in addition to this 21 day plan of reframing beliefs that you got here today, you can start to understand how we might use that fear as a way to learn about a best path forward as well having it be your coach instead of a critic. It can be on your side, helping you move forward through the unknown instead of holding you back from those transitions and transformations you want in life. 

Speaker Dar  

Yes, which great insight and so generous of you to give those things to our audience. Is there anything else that you would like to leave our audience with today? 

Speaker Kym 

Listener, I just want you to know that you are brilliant and you are constantly becoming and this idea of expansion and new ideas and new desires, they're going to keep happening, and the mind is going to want to have a say about it, but you have So much power within you to understand what the dialog means, to know that you are bigger than the moment, bigger than the emotion, bigger than that thought, and you can start to move those ideas and emotions into place. You can mold them into something that's working for you instead of against you, and that power is within you right now. It's just a simple step away. It starts with awareness, and then you can continue to let your brilliant light shine as you continue to step into the new version of you, moment by moment by moment. 

Speaker Dar 

Thank you. Thank you. Yes, that sure gets rid of that victim mentality and changes that inner critic to an inner coach instead. Thank you for those clear steps and that wonderful activity for us to just keep working at and see some transformation right there on our own. 

Speaker Kym 

Yes, give us feedback. I'd love to hear how it goes, and I'm sure your audience will tell you what they've found from it. But yes, it's an ongoing process that's simple, and it can be a great tool in your toolbox to keep shining. 

Speaker Dar 

Thank you, Kym for this very uplifting, beautiful conversation today. I'm so appreciative. 

Speaker Kym 

Thank you for having me, Darla, and thank you so much Lister for joining us. I appreciate you spending the time and energy with me today. 

Speaker Dar 

Before we close today’s episode, I want to leave you with this reminder: your body is always listening to the way you speak to yourself. 

And so many women have spent years criticizing their bodies for being tired, stiff, achy, or slower than they used to be… when what they truly need is more compassion, support, and simple ways to reconnect with themselves again. 

A big thank you to Kym Coco for sharing such beautiful wisdom about transforming that inner critic into an inner coach. 

And if today’s conversation stirred something in you—especially if you’ve been feeling disconnected from your body or frustrated by stiffness and limited mobility—I’d love to invite you 

to my upcoming workshop, “From Stiff & Achy to Strong & Mobile.” 

It’s designed especially for women who are ready to move with more ease, confidence, and freedom again using gentle, powerful practices that support both the body and nervous system. Because no matter your age… it is not too late to feel stronger, steadier, and more at home in your body again. 

Until next time, keep calling in the life you truly want… and let’s continue to Call IT in With Dar.  Transcribed by https://otter.ai