You're Not Just a Coach, You're a Legend.

In this episode, we’re talking about what it actually takes to be a coach who leads, transforms, and gets paid. Coaching isn’t new, women have been leading since the beginning of time. But the best coaches? They’re legends. They’ve walked through fire, built themselves from the ground up, and now they’re using their wisdom to change lives.

I’ll break down:

• Why great coaches were leaders long before they ever sold an offer.
• How to own your story and use it to create undeniable demand.
• The real reason some people thrive in this industry while others struggle.
• How to attract clients who don’t need convincing, they just know you’re the one.

If you’ve ever questioned your power in this space, this episode is your reminder: Your voice matters. Your work matters. Your movement is bigger than you think.

xo

Bridget James Ling

Freedom Queen

Transcript

Your work matters, it matters, it matters, it matters, it matters. Before you were a coach, I guarantee you were a leader of your life. You were a woman who valued mentorship deeply. You were someone who believed in other women, and your life changed when other women believed in you. Because that was my experience. and I find that often great coaches in the modern coaching industry are also women who have been through some crazy stuff in their life but they are legendary women and what I mean by that is a legend is somebody who has been through things and they decided to become the hero of their story and make it through every single challenge and as a result of that they become a legend because when you do that, people tell stories about you. And so great coaches are legends. There are women who have every reason not to be where they are today, but instead they are. Wow. I love the coaching industry. I've really been thinking about this a lot recently. I've been thinking about how much I love the coaching industry. Now, coaching is not something that's new. Women have been doing this since the dawn of time. Men as well. I mean, Jesus was the best consultant out there. Jesus, if you want to talk about the best coaches of all time in terms of monetization, I would say Jesus. Probably the best. If you tally together the amount of money that the Jesus LLC has made, probably really big. And oftentimes I see this interesting narrative that I think is interesting to listen to, which is people don't like the coaching industry. And I think, but at the core of what coaching is, it's seeing other people for their power. We are uniquely designed to be coaching one another. And some people are just better at it than others. And it's usually the women that before they were a coach, they were a leader. And you had to become a leader at some point in your life. You experienced something where you had to lead yourself first. And you became what people would call the modern day coach. Because you had wisdom that other people needed. And so maybe in your high school, I know for me it was around middle school, where I really had to step up in my life. I couldn't just, if I didn't rise, I would have entered into a really dark place. But I had to step up in my life. I had to choose to be bigger. And as a result of that in high school, I became this person that people wanted to follow. People wanted to learn from me and they wanted my wisdom and they would come to me and ask me, well, what do you think? You're so wise. Tell me this. What's the solution to this? Or my friends would say, okay, let's send Bridget in first. Like she can answer the door. She can call the person. She can do those things because she's willing to put herself out there. She's not afraid. But the thing is that I was afraid. I still had the fears like everyone else. But I led myself. And that's what makes a great coach, especially in the modern day coaching industry. Not because you've taken qualification certification programs, not because you've invested a certain amount, but because you've been through things that other people just couldn't make it through. Or other people wouldn't even dare to make it through. They wouldn't even try. And so you decided to go forward and create this extraordinary life where you do extraordinary things. And as a result of it, God then puts you through tests and challenges and things that give you insane amounts of wisdom and data. And then you use that wisdom and data to transform other women's lives. And so coaching has changed my life. And before I even bought into the modern day coach, I've always been buying into coaching. Maybe you have as well. I want you to find and look back over your life one of your first mentors. For me, I was about nine years old and I, my parents, I didn't have a lot of money growing up. We lived in a very average house. It's pretty old. I loved it though. It was creek when you walk up the stairs. There was giant pit bulls running around the house constantly. My dad had guns everywhere. There was a big barn in my backyard. There was like a bulldozer always around. Things were being built. Things were being taken down. New projects, some projects never finishing. Always the vision that we're going to change something and then we might change it, we might not. And so I didn't grow up with a lot of money, but I did grow up with a lot of creativity and drive and ambition and great work ethic from my family. And really caring about people and connection. My family is a naturally happy family, despite the crazy challenges that they've been through. But they really love and care about people. I remember as a kid, for Thanksgiving, my parents would invite homeless people over for dinner. gas station who we see who's homeless there every time just sitting at our Thanksgiving table and that's the kind of family I grew up in and when I was about eight or nine maybe ten around there I really grew fond of dancing I had been dancing and performing I loved the unspoken conversation or unspoken power of the body and I was really good at it and I would put on shows for my family and I started going to recreational dance classes. They were really cheap. You know, you would dance on like marble floor, which is so bad for your body. If you know anything about real professional dancing, you should always jump on a floor that's Marley and it's sprung and boxed and everything. Okay. And so I'm dancing in this really cheap dance program. And my family says, okay maybe we should send her to a more advanced dance school just for the summer because I don't know if they could really at that time afford like long-term professional schooling and so I go to this dance school and I'm in the class and I'll never forget this studio is a giant dance studio And previously I had been dancing in a classroom of a public school where they moved all the desks out of the room. And I was dancing in a classroom in a public school system in the United States of America. And so I get to spend one summer at this fancy place with floor-to-ceiling windows and ballet bars lining the windows. And floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the other side. And the floor was sprung so that when you jumped, it would hold some of the power of your body so that you could jump higher. And it wouldn't mess with your ligaments and your body and your muscles and your joints. And I walk in and I take this class and there's this woman, Patricia Enoch. This is my first mentor. And I believe that a great mentor will see you for who you really are despite the evidence around you. This is something I do a lot for the women of Freedom Queen. And this woman sees me within the very first class. And she calls me over to her at the end of class. And by the way, she was very hard on me. She was very hard on me. Constantly correcting me. constantly saying, fix this, do this, do this. And I realized in that moment that this woman cared. The reason she was so hard on me and gave me so much attention is because she cared. She saw something. And so at the end of class, she calls me over. She's like, I need to talk to your parents. Like my parents. Okay. So I bring my mom in and basically Patricia Enoch tells my mom, like, you need to get Bridget training with me. She needs to train with me. And so my mom's like, okay, well, here are the classes we can do. So we sign up for these classes and I start training with her. And she ends up moving studios to a studio, a different dance studio that was closer to my house. And I start training with her even more. And then I get to know the owners of the dance studio. And I start learning from these incredible businesswomen. They are like the top female entrepreneurs where I grew up in Maryland for their dance studio. It's a high-end dance studio. They're beautiful women. And I feel so blessed that my first experience of entrepreneurship was learning from these incredible women. And they take me under their wing. all of them that patricia enoch i start to go year after year after year with her and again she's so hard on me she's taking care of me i've cried in her classes before she's held me she's yelled at me and i go on to be her top student that was how i was able to get into one of the top dance universities in the world and get a scholarship to go there. Then I go on, before I go to university, I spend a couple of years in high school working at the dance studio and being a mentee to these incredible mentors who were in their, let's say they were, one was in their 50s and one was in their 60s. They were these two women. And my mom would clean the dance studios at night to be able afford for some of my classes and I would work there and get free classes in exchange for some of the other ones that we that we had to pay for and then I started working there and getting paid to do it and I kept moving up in the ranks and I became an incredible employee and asset to them and my life was changed through learning from these women I mean they changed my life forever They believed in me. They saw me for what I could really do. At one point, I even remember us talking about me potentially owning. There was talks of that could be a possibility down the road of owning the studio. Because they saw something in me and that changed me. And then I had other mentors along the way in college. And then after college in New York City. And that woman, though, Patricia Enoch, who I'm not sure if she's still alive today. She might be, but I guarantee she's in her 90s now. Because she was pretty old when I first met her. She saw something in me. And that's really when I learned the power of other women believing in other women. That's really when I started to realize there's something here. There's something here. And when you find a woman that you deeply believe in, I want you to pour into her. And that doesn't always mean that you're buttering her up and gassing her up. That means like Patty Enoch, Patricia Enoch, she was very hard on me. She was very real with me. She was what I call in Freedom Queen, she loved and shoved me. she was like you need to improve on these things you need to get better at this you need to fix your bun why are you wearing this these tights why do you have this leotard on did you practice today why aren't you practicing I remember she would make us when we held passe a routine what is it retiree passe we would have to I can't even believe I remember some of this we would have to say our vegetables and you could see how many vegetables you could say while holding it while elevated and she loved me and cared about me and that was one of my first mentors and then I went on to hire my first ever paid coach besides I actually well I had hired other coaches for dance, like trainers and coaches and thousands of dollars in that. But I mean like a life coach. And she sent me a cold DM. I barely knew her, but she had one thing. She had the life that I wanted, a version of it. I looked up to her. I admired her life. She embodied the vision that I desired. And her coaching was $800. And I thought, wow, that's a lot of money for eight weeks of coaching, $800. But I found a way and I got an extra job in New York City and I paid her. and the coolest thing happened. She never gave me a step-by-step. She never told me what to do. She never gave me a strategy or a framework. She did something that I believe the coaching industry is designed to do, which is to see people's infinite potential and say, I know for other people that might be impossible, but for you, that is easy. You can do this. And you're going to have to let go of some of your older patterns. And you're going to have to let go of some of these older habits and mindsets. But you can step into this next level. And I'm going to guide you. And I'm going to help you rise. I'm going to help you stay on your pathway. And I'm always going to mirror back to you who you really are. And I'm going to be on my own journey. And I'm going to go forward. I'm going to go first. I'm going to lead the pack for us. For all of us together. And I need you to stay with me. By my side. Let's go. And that changed my life because I started seeing rapid results, insane amounts of change in my life. And then I went on to hire more people. And now I have no problem investing in myself because I'm the best asset. And I love working with people who are experts in whatever it is that they do. And I love coaching because coaching is about leading. It's about leading ourselves first. It's about becoming a legend of our own story, even when we don't have to. And then using that to share that wisdom with our people and say, come on, you can do it too. And the reason I'm sharing this is because I believe that some women need this word. That maybe for some reason somebody told you something about coaching. They've said something about your work. You have had a client leave. You've had a client lose interest. You've had somebody default on payments. You've had someone who you thought loved doesn't like you anymore. Do not let these small scenarios, these things that inevitably happen because we're in the business of people, stop you from doing work that changes people's lives, that wakes women up, that makes them feel like, you know what? You're right. I can do anything. Thank you. You know what? You're right. I can go way bigger. Thank you. Because there are women that need to hear your voice. They want to hear your story. They need you as their mentor. There are dream clients that are destined for you. Anyone that doesn't like coaching is not meant for you. Speak to the woman that loves coaching. Speak to the woman that's obsessed with working with mentors. Speak to the woman who already values mentorship. She doesn't need to be convinced to become a coach, to be coached by you. Speak to the woman who desires to be mentored by you. She's like, oh, thank God. I've been wanting you for so long. Thank you. Yes. Yes. Sign me up. I'm ready to work with you. Because there are far more of those women than there are the people, there are the naysayers of your work. And I said this last Friday, I did a 20 person mastermind dinner in Vegas. It was beautiful. And I said at the opening of it, I said, I love this work. I love coaching and your work matters. What you're here to do is changing people's lives. And I cannot stop thinking about how you deciding to do this business, which I don't even know if business is really the word for it, this creation process. this art making, this love making, this performance art, this masterpiece, changes people's lives and wakes them up to what is possible. And so your coaching matters, your leadership matters, your service matters, and people need to hear your voice.