186. Orientation Day: When Being a High-Achiever Isn't Enough

The problem with high-performance coaching for high-achieving women? They're already high performers. That's exactly the problem.

This episode kicks off something new: a multi-week series Laurie's calling Back to School (of Midlife) — not the pencils-and-Trapper-Keeper kind of back to school, the adult kind. Every week for the next several weeks, she's walking through the frameworks she's built over the years, where they came from, and how she actually uses them with clients.

Today's episode is the origin story. Before there was a BEST LIFE™ framework, before Learn/Earn/Yearn, before Curiosity → Clarity → Courage → Confidence, there was a certification — an elite one, one of only 1,100 in the world — and a realization that cracked everything else open.

Laurie walks through exactly what that certification taught her (and still uses in every session), and exactly how "she's already a high performer" turns out to be the whole problem, not a strength to lean on harder. She also gets into two decades of living this pattern herself — first in law, then in commercial real estate — before she ever became a coach.

What we cover:

• Why Laurie is kicking off a new podcast series, and why she's leaning all the way into the back-to-school metaphor
• The "adulting playbook" — school, job, marriage, kids, promotion, retirement — and the homework she gives you about it
• Why she chose Certified High Performance Coaching, and the Brendon Burchard connection that led her there
• What the CHPC curriculum actually taught her — and why she still uses those skills in every session today
• Why "busyness" is often an avoidance technique, including her own real example of over-boarding on volunteer work and marathon training to avoid being home
• The most important piece her clients kept missing: checking in with themselves
• Why it wasn't a gap in the curriculum — it was just more of the same
• The two decades she spent living this exact pattern herself, in law and then commercial real estate
• What Personal Leadership Development actually means, and why it's not life coaching or executive coaching — it's the umbrella above both
• A preview of the entire Back to School series: BEST LIFE™, Learn/Earn/Yearn, Curiosity/Clarity/Courage/Confidence, and an honest look at what's happening with the Mastermind
• The adult "back to school supply list" — a new notebook, a hall pass, an elective, and office hours
• Why "I just need to work harder" is almost never actually about working harder

Quotable moments

• "You have one life. You need to bring all of those pieces of your life instead of compartmentalizing them."
• "That feeling of having to become someone different depending on which room you walked into — that's not just a career problem. That's the whole thing I coach on now."
• "The problem with high performance coaching for high-achieving women is they're already high performers... they're missing the most important piece, which is checking in with themselves."
• "It wasn't so much a gap in the coaching curriculum. It was just more of the same."
• "Probably 95% of the time, the statement 'I just need to work harder' usually means I haven't asked myself what I actually want."
• "We use a busy schedule as an avoidance technique."
• "It's not the work that's leaving you burned out. It's the requirement to show up as a different person in every different role you're asked to fill."

Resources + links mentioned

• Episode 183 — "Did You Actually Choose This Life? Or Did You Just Do What Was Expected?"
• Best Life Planner 
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Transcript

0:00

It's back to school time, and at the School of Midlife, we are kicking off a new back to school series, but back to school for adults, not kids. You're not gonna wanna miss this. Let's get started.

Speaker 2 0:13

Welcome to the School of Midlife podcast. I'm your host, Laurie Reynoldson. This is the podcast for the midlife woman who starting to ask herself big life questions. Like, what do I want? Is it too late for me? And what's my legacy beyond my family and my work. Each week we're answering these questions and more. At the School of Midlife, we're learning all of the life lessons they didn't teach us in school and we're figuring out finally what it is we want to be when we grow up. Let's make midlife your best life.

0:51

Hey, friends. Welcome back to a new episode of the School of Midlife Podcast. I'm your host, Laurie Reynoldson. You may have noticed that I am a day late in getting this to you. Um, that's because I literally woke up this morning and thought it was Saturday morning. That's how ridiculously busy my Monday was. And when I got home at, like, 10 o'clock at night, I thought about recording a podcast, and then I thought, "No, that's absolutely fucking ridiculous." So I'm a day late. I get it. Um, please forgive me. It's back to school time. I am super excited about this. I love this time of the year. It does feel like it's a little earlier this year. I mean, every year back to school feels like it just gets earlier and earlier. But I grew up in Washington State, and we didn't go back to school until the Tuesday after Labor Day, which is in, I don't know, three weeks, four weeks. But in Idaho, some schools started last week, which is bananas. A lot of them start this week, though. Which makes me think, I wanna talk about back to school, but not back to school like we gotta go pick out the right pencils and get that box of tissue and the crayons and get the Trapper Keeper. Not that. Although I do have a list of school supplies for you that I'm going to talk about later in the episode. This series is about back to school as an adult. Interesting, right? Okay. Um, a little more context, though. I was out on my hike this morning, and it occurred to me that back to school is still this incredible opportunity for adults, for high-achieving women. Because we get this opportunity, this chance to get back into the routine, right? I love that it's getting dark earlier, because it makes it so much easier to go to bed at a reasonable time. I mean, it's either that or start a new movie on Netflix at 8:00, because it's still too light out, but it's not cool enough to take the dog for a walk yet. But now that it's getting dark a little earlier, it's cooling off faster. I love it. I can go to bed earlier without feeling like I'm missing a bunch It, it's great. I love it. I also love this kind of with the getting back into the new routine, it feels a little like a new beginning, doesn't it? And it's better, in my opinion, than the new beginning at New Year's, because that's like dead of winter. You don't wanna do anything in the dead of winter. But we're just now, we're fresh off the heels of summertime, and we're ready to get back into the routine. This feels like a new beginning. And then there's this, I don't know if I wanna call it pressure, but it's... Like, you start looking at the end of calendar, and there's essentially four months left to wrap up 2026 in a way that you wanna wrap it up. So it's not pressure per se, it's more like momentum and excitement. I love it. I love, love, love this time of year. So I'm out on my hike today, and I've been thinking about what makes my approach to coaching different than so many other coaches who work with women Which led me to this idea of, well, maybe we should kinda do a curriculum overview, I'm, I'm really leaning hard into the metaphor here, of the School of Midlife and talk about all of the tools and the frameworks that I have developed over time and how you can actually apply them to your life. That felt like a lot to put into one episode, which is why this is the first episode in a multi-week series. I know it's been a while since we've done a series, but I'm very excited to kick off the series today. We're gonna do a different framework every week. I'll talk to you about what I've built, where it came from, what it actually means, how I use it with clients. I'm really excited about it. It's gonna be great. Today, we're gonna talk about the origin story. How did I get here? How did I realize that the very important certification that I had and I continue to hold, uh, which means I continue to recertify, but how I realized that that wasn't probably the best option for my clients We're gonna talk about before there was a BEST LIFE framework, which if you've been around here for a while, you know that everything that I coach is built on the BEST LIFE framework. Before there was Learn, Earn, and Yearn. I don't know if I've talked about that here, but that's another framework that I use with the clients. Before there was ever Curiosity, which leads to Clarity, which leads to Courage, which leads to Confidence, another framework that I developed. Before all of that, there was a certification and a realization for me that cracked everything open. So let's start there. I am a certified high performance coach. By any measure, that is an elite level certification. There are 1,100 of us in the world. I chose to go with that certification because it is linked to the High Performance Institute, which is owned by Brendon Burchard. If you're not familiar with the name Brendon Burchard, you might have read his book High Performance Habits. If you haven't read the book, you might be familiar with someone named Oprah or someone named Tony Robbins. And of course, I'm trying to be funny here. But Brendan Burchard is actually who many people collaborate with when they're looking for answers about personal development. And for me, from a credibility standpoint, if Brendan Burchard is good enough to collaborate with Oprah and Tony Robbins on personal development, then that's who I wanted to learn from. He owns the High Performance Institute. It links to High Performance Habits. You know, all of it kind of is under this umbrella. So when I was trying to figure out how do I want to get into the coaching industry, I knew that I didn't wanna just call myself a coach, which anyone can do. I don't know if you know that, but it's totally unregulated. You can literally go buy a URL and Launch a website and start taking money, call yourself a coach. I didn't wanna go that route because I wanted to make sure that I had the, the tools and the frameworks to actually make lasting change in my clients. That was very important to me. So I settled on high-performance coaching. That was the certification I was going to. And the curriculum, rigorous. It takes a while to get the certification. There's a lot of role play involved, which is amazing because that actually teaches you how to listen to somebody, right? And then once you're listening to them, how can you respond by asking appropriate questions for what they're telling you and what they're not telling you? That's part of it, too, right? Like, how can you dive a little deeper and uncover either what they don't realize is going on or for some reason they don't really wanna tell you, okay? Um, I got really good at that. That's one of my superpowers. That is one of the things that I am really good at, is you are telling me one thing, I'm hearing this, and it seems to me that this other thing is the thing that's actually going on, which leads to incredible breakthroughs, ahas, clients who say, "You know, I've never thought about that before." Or it, it just gives them something to think about in a different way, and, um, it's great. I'm good at it. I like doing it. It's served me well, it's served my clients well. That approach to coaching still informs how I approach coaching today. I still use skills in every single coaching session that I learned through my certification, that I had to perfect... not perfect, but certainly work on and hone through multiple recertification processes. I mean, I've had this... I, I was trying to remember if it was 2021 maybe. I don't think it was 2020. It might have been 2020 though, because I did certify, um, virtually. So I've had the certification for five or six years, and I, I recertify every year. Regardless, there's been a lot of training that has gone on. Still, a lot of how I approach coaching is based on the skills, not necessarily the frameworks I learned as a high performance coach, but the skills, the listening, the questions to ask, the permission to push when you're running up against a, a wall or some sort of resistance, knowing when to, to back down and not go somewhere and maybe revisit it later. All of that, skills that I learned through the certified high performance coaching curriculum. Really, really good. Highly recommend it. That was 100% of the type of coaching and the coaching sessions I was delivering for probably the first year, two years of coaching. But somewhere along the way, I started to realize something about my clients. They're already high performers, right? They're already high achievers. What that means is they have a tendency to look ahead at the next goal, the next strategy, the next thing that they think they need to do, which constantly keeps them in motion. There are so many ways that you can level up your life in high performance coaching. That, that's the other thing that I really liked about it, is with most coaching, you focus on one thing that you wanna change, and then it feels like everything else falls apart, right? You wanna focus on your health and fitness, that's great, but then your relationships suffer a little bit, or maybe you don't show up like you want to in your career. Th- there's always this kinda give and take. Like, if your focus is in one area, then other things are gonna fall apart. That's not how high performance coaching is set up. It's to level up all areas of your life equally without sacrificing the important relationships in your life. And that is, that includes the relationship you have with yourself. So I, I wanna be clear that I am not knocking high-performance coaching at all. But what I started to learn, what I started to realize was my clients are coming to me because they want help with what's next. And their MO, their way of operating up until this point has always been, "I have to add more to the to-do list. What is my next goal? What am I working on?" Because they're high achievers, right? They're high performers Well, that's great. But when they are in constant motion and constant, "What's next for me? What do I do now? Where am I going now? What's next?" Always in motion, then they're always in motion. They use a busy schedule as an avoidance technique. Do you understand what I'm saying when I, when I say that? Can you relate to that? You don't wanna have a tough conversation with somebody, you get too busy to go have lunch with them, or you get too busy to have dinner with them, so you can't have the conversation. You need to do something at work that you don't really wanna do, then you take on a lot of other projects at work so that maybe that one thing that you don't wanna do will get offloaded or someone else will do it. We get really busy. As high-achieving women, we are no strangers to busyness, and in fact, we rely on it to get out of doing things we don't wanna do. I know for a lot of my clients who are trying to figure out what they wanna do with their relationship and their marriage, 'cause they know that something has to change. This is not the type of partnership that they, they had in the beginning of their marriage. You know, they've, they've both been busy. They spent a lot of time raising kids. They've, they've grown in different directions, and now they're just trying to figure out, well, is this the marriage that I wanna have for the next 10, 20, 30 years of my life? Not because there's anything wrong with the person they're married to, it's just the relationship is different. But instead of handling that Straight on? They get really busy so they don't ever have to be home. I know that too because I, it's really easy for me to see that because I went through a period of that myself, which was, yes, I will stay after work. I will take on more work. I will go home. I will make dinner. I will go back to the office so that I can take on more work. I. i was over-boarded. I was on so many boards, it, doing all sorts of volunteer work, which took me away from the house. I was training like crazy for endurance events. I think at that point I was probably in my marathon phase. So I got really good at not being home because I just didn't wanna deal with it. Bringing this back to coaching, if you are a high performer or a high achiever who wants to feel something different in her life, she's got to approach it differently, which means let's not just add more things to the to-do list. That's what I kept seeing with my clients over and over again, is we just kept getting back to the same patterns, and it's not because they were doing anything wrong. It's that they didn't know any better. And I was finding that working through a high-performance coaching curriculum with them wasn't necessarily delivering them the results that they wanted. What I realized is they were still missing the most important piece, and that was checking in with themselves. Like figuring out what do they want? How do they want to feel? So often we get stuck in this cycle of doing that we forget about checking in and asking ourselves how do we wanna feel And because we don't do that, We achieve the goals that we set, but then we get there and we don't feel the way that we thought we were gonna feel. So we set a bigger goal, a more important goal, and we just keep in this busyness, next, bigger, more cycle, and we never feel the way that we wanna feel. So after doing this for a couple years, it just became very obvious to me that the most important piece that was missing was this inward-focused work, the work that most of us had never done before because we were too busy trying to figure out what we needed to do next or what we should do next. Which led me to believe that there needed to be some foundational work that all of these women needed to do for this season of life, not who they were 20 or 30 years ago when they were making big life decisions that put them on the path to where they are right now. You know, what are you gonna study in school? What kind of job are you gonna take in school? Where are you gonna live? Who are you gonna marry? We, we made those decisions a long, long time ago, and they've served us great, most of us. They've got us to the point where we are now, but they don't necessarily align with who we are and what we want in this season of life. And that, to me, was the piece that was really missing. That's when I started asking questions like, "What do you actually want?" Not what you've been conditioned to want, not what your parents tell you to want, not what some influencer on social media tells you to want, but you, what do you want? What do you want to feel like in your day-to-day life? What does success mean to you now? What does a perfect day look like? It was like, if you're living your best life, what does that look like? What does that feel like? What are you actually trying to build? And, and kind of related to that, what's the hole that we're trying to fill here? Because if it was just to do more and have more, most of us would be wildly fulfilled. We would feel fantastic about our life. We wouldn't still be in this searching piece of, well, what's next for me? Because the fact that we're looking for something different necessarily means we don't have it right now. That makes sense, right? We wouldn't keep looking for something if we felt very good about where we were. So here's the thing: the problem with high performance coaching for high achieving women is they're already high performers. They're already high achievers. Their tendency to look ahead at the next goal, the next strategy, it keeps them in like nearly constant motion. And when they do that, they're missing the most important piece, which is checking in with themselves. What do they want? What does success mean to them? What does their best life look like? What are they actually trying to build? That's the piece high performance coaching was never going to give them because it's not designed to ask those questions. It's designed to help them execute on an answer they already have. So what I was finding was It wasn't so much of a gap in the high-performance coaching curriculum. It was just more of the same. Like high-performance coaching was helping reaffirm their belief that hard work is the best way to move forward. And after a while, it became very clear to me that we were just underscoring that belief. Here's the thing: I didn't figure this out from another textbook or another certification. I figured it out because I'd lived it myself for the 20 to 30 years of my life before I ever became a coach. When I say I understand what these women are going through, I absolutely do. I've been there. That's what makes it so easy for me to spot. That's what makes it so easy for me to help these women through the periods of transition where they can't figure out what's next for them, where they just, they feel a little stuck, where they don't feel like themselves. That's the thing that sets me apart is I didn't just go get certifications and start coaching, I've actually lived this for 20 or 30 years, right? I was a high-stakes, high-stress attorney for the first 20 years of my career. And then for nearly 10 years after that, I was in commercial real estate brokerage, also high stakes, also male-dominated. I really loved the brokerage. I only quit that so that I could go full in on what I really feel like is my life's work, and that's working with high-achieving women who are trying to figure out what's next for them. For many of us, just working harder, more high-performing, the next achievement, that just comes naturally because that's what we, that's what we've been raised to see as successful. It's what we've been doing. That's what we know. But I also know what it's like to feel like you have to separate yourself or, like, compartmentalize yourself and show up in a different way for every different role you're playing, right? You show up at home differently than you show up in the office. You think you can keep what's happening at the office at the office and come home and be somebody different. Uh, you can't. I don't care how good of an actress you are. That's not how it works. Took me a while, but I began to realize that that feeling of, of having to become someone different depending on which room you walked into, that's not just a career problem. That's the whole thing I coach on now. That's where personal leadership development comes from, and it's this... It's not even a marriage of life coach and executive coaching. It's more of an umbrella over the two of them. The core idea is that women, high achievers, high performers in particular, need to be brought back home to one person, one role, which is herself. The woman she really is, instead of everyone the world needs her to be. Instead of wearing seven or eight hats, 10 or 12, however many you have, you know, daughter, mom, wife, business owner, best friend, community leader, church member, uh, volunteer, like, the, the list goes on. How many hats does she need to wear? How many hats are you wearing? You have one head. You need to bring all of those pieces of your life instead of compartmentalizing them, instead of showing up one way for one role and another way for another role. It all has to come back to the one person who you are. That's what all of my coaching is about. And yes, I still use the tools I learned from Certified High Performance Coaching. I have created a number of frameworks and strategies that we're gonna dive into moving forward, one each week. Again, I'm very excited. I'll, I'll share the syllabus with you here in a minute. But do you see how This isn't goal setting. This isn't how can I do the next thing on my checklist? This is how do I actually wanna live my life? How can I show up and be the most authentic, most aligned version of myself Because it's not the work that's leaving you burned out. It's not the life that's making you feel overwhelmed. It's the requirement to show up as a different person in every different role than you're asked to fill. If you could just be yourself In every single room? You would not feel burnout or overwhelm or stuckness like you feel because you would have the tools and the discernment and the boundaries to just be yourself. We'll get into that a lot more in the, in the next couple of weeks, but I just need you to understand that doing more isn't the answer. And I pretty quickly figured that out. I don't need you to perform more or check more boxes. I need you to figure out what's important to you in this season of life, figure out who you are now, what matters most to you, and pursue that in a way, a singular way, as just the woman you are. That's what all of my coaching is about. And that's why you've, you've heard from a couple of women who've been on the podcast in the last couple of months. They're the ones, you know, who have gone to the retreats or who have done the coaching, and they come on and they're like, "I'm now living my best life. I am happier than I've ever been. I feel so grounded. You can see it. It's a real thing. It's a real thing And so much of it is rooted in the fact that they are making decisions in their life and showing up in a way that they never have before, but in a way that is exactly who they are in this season of life, maybe exactly who they have been their entire life, but just never gave themselves the luxury to be that woman. Okay, that was a lot. Let's do a quick preview of what's coming in the next several episodes of the School of Midlife podcast. I'm not gonna teach on these yet. I just want you to hear them so that you know what's coming. Okay? We're gonna do a deep dive in the BEST LIFE framework. We're gonna talk about the three seasons of life, which I call Learn, Earn, and Yearn. We're gonna talk about the Curiosity, Clarity, Courage, and Confidence model, and that's how I actually move clients through the work. And then Later in the series, I'm gonna share an honest look at what's happening with the Mastermind right now. Uh, we were supposed to be starting in September. I've got some news on that and how that is being retooled. Um But that's the syllabus. It's back to school time at the School of Midlife, and that's what we're covering this semester, even though the semester is really just, like, four weeks. I don't know. It might be five weeks. I haven't done the math on it. It also occurred to me when I was on my hike today that I do a lot of thinking on my hike. A lot of the seeds of what I talk about on the podcast actually happen when I am out walking in nature with my dog. I do a lot of thinking, I do a lot of processing, and that's where so much of what I talk about on this podcast comes from. Well, I thought it would be kind of fun, since it's back to school season, right? If we also maybe had an adult back to school list. A supply list, I guess. I don't know. Supplies are real things like crayons, and Trapper Keepers, and pens, and that's not what I'm talking about. I guess it's more of a back to school list of ideas. Okay? So as we are heading into this new season of life, or as we are heading back to school in a metaphorical sense, here are some things that might be on your adult back to school list. A new notebook for you, not for the kids. Uh, I can hook you up with a Best Life Planner. A, a great way to take a notebook and start some new habits that might support you. I'll put a clickable link in the show notes if you wanna learn a little bit more about the Best Life Planner. Another thing on the back to school idea list is a hall pass And by that I mean how about permission to say no without an explanation? Uh, an elective, something that you can do purely because it's interesting to you with no productivity attached. That could be reading a book On a Sunday when maybe you should be doing laundry. Maybe it's taking a painting class. Maybe you, you wanna learn how to make jewelry, or you wanna take an adult education class. Whatever. Take an elective. Maybe you set up office hours for yourself, which is just a standing appointment for yourself to write for 15 minutes or to meditate for 15 minutes. Or if 15 minutes isn't enough, maybe you give yourself an hour a week in office hours. That's not the whole list. That's just a list of back to school ideas to get you started. I'll share more in the coming weeks. This is gonna be super fun. Well, I'm excited about it. I hope you are too. Um, since we are back to school-ish, probably I should give you some homework, right? Or like how, how much can I beat this metaphor to death? But, um, we'll call this the orientation episode. So, um, most of us have followed the adulting playbook, right? The go to school, get a job, get married, buy a house, have some kids, raise them up, get promoted, work until retirement, right? That adulting playbook, the success checklist, what... I call it all sorts of different things. But the whole idea of you go to school, you get a job, you make some money, you buy a house, you get married, you have kids. All of the things that we are supposed to do, right? For homework this week, maybe you actually think about every step along the way of the adulting playbook that you followed. And think about, maybe for the first time ever, did you do that because it was something that you wanted to do, or because it was something that you thought you should And it looked like it might have been dressed up like something you chose. Like you made a decision to, "Should I take this job? Should I take that job? Should I move to this city? Should I stay in this city?" It sort of looked like a choice, but underneath it was some expectation that you were going to take the job that paid the most. There was some validation you were seeking or some approval you were looking for. So it wasn't really a choice at all. I talked about that concept in an episode a couple of weeks ago, episode 183, did you actually choose this life or did you just do what was expected? That episode really made people think. I got a lot of emails about that. I will link that here in case you haven't listened to it. That might be something that would be good to go back and listen to. But that's, that's your homework for this week. Take a look at The Adulting Playbook. Think about the decisions that you made along the line and whether they were really your choices or something that was expected of you. I'll wrap up this orientation episode with one of the things I hear probably more than anything else from my clients. And it's this idea of I just need to work harder. And since I've been trained to listen for what's underneath what people say and, you know, what it is that they actually mean, most of the time, not always, but probably 95% of the time, the statement I just need to work harder usually means I haven't asked myself what I actually want. There's still that conditioning of hard work is the only way to get ahead, and the assumption that because I want something that I don't have, that just means I need to work harder. That's what they think. Truly, what's underlying that is they haven't asked themselves what they want, and that's the basis of everything. We'll get more into that next week. We're gonna do a deep dive into the BEST LIFE framework, but that's it for orientation today, class. Like I said, class is in session for the next several weeks. Make sure you are subscribed to the podcast and following it so that you don't miss the rest of the semester. At least I'm entertaining myself with all these metaphors, but, um, thanks so much for being here today. I'll see you right back here next week when the School of Midlife is back in session. Until then, take good care.

Speaker 33:07

Thank you so much for listening to the School of Midlife podcast. It means so much to have you here each week. If you enjoyed this episode, could you do me the biggest favor and help us spread the word to other midlife women? There are a couple of easy ways for you to do that first. And most importantly, if you're not already following the show, would you please subscribe? That helps you because you'll never miss an episode. And it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. Second, if you'd be so kind to leave us a five-star rating, that would be absolutely incredible. And finally, I personally read each and every one of your reviews. So if you take a minute and say some nice things about the podcast, well, that's just good karma. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you right back here. Next week when the School of Midlife is back in session until then take good care.