Career Coaching Secrets

From Theater Artist to Career Coaching: Rahti Gorfien’s Inspiring Journey

• Davis Nguyen

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In this episode of Career Coaching Secrets, Rexhen interviews Rahti Gorfyan — career and ADHD coach—on her remarkable journey from theater artist to successful coaching entrepreneur. Rahti shares her insights on planning as self-care, building structure that fits your life, marketing that actually works, and the power of community. If you're a coach, creative, or neurodivergent professional, you’ll find inspiration and strategy here.

You can find her on:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahtigorfien/
https://www.instagram.com/coachrahti/
https://creativecallingcoaching.com/
https://linktr.ee/coachrahti


You can also watch this podcast on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/@CareerCoachingSecrets

If you are a career coach looking to grow your business you can find out more about Purple Circle at http://joinpurplecircle.com

Get Exclusive Access to Our In-Depth Analysis of 71 Successful Career Coaches, Learn exactly what worked (and what didn't) in the career coaching industry in 2024: https://joinpurplecircle.com/white-paper-replay

SPEAKER_03:

I will quote my coach, Monica. She always says, and I've found this to be true, planning is the highest form of self-care. Because when you plan your week on a Sunday night or Monday morning, you're not waking up in the morning going, what am I going to do today? You have it planned out. You know you have a chunk of time dedicated to administrivia, projects, whatever. I always take the last week of the month off. I didn't always understand that, but now I do. You need the last week of the month to work on your business, not in it. If you're starting your business, track your time. See where your time is going. See what your patterns are. If you notice you're getting distracted a lot, there are certainly methods of dealing with that we all know about. But even more important is noticing what works for you and working with yourself. Make your life easy. Your business doesn't have to look like anybody else's. Your structure needs to fit you, not the other way around.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Nguyen, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to seven and eight figures without burning out. Before Purple Circle, I started and scaled several seven and eight-figure career coaching businesses myself and consulted with two career coaching businesses that are now doing over$100 million each. Whether you're an established coach or just building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to another episode of Career Coaching Secrets Podcast. Today, my guest is Rati Gorfyan, a career and ADHD coach who has been helping professionals and creatives overcome obstacles and find fulfillment for over 30 years. As a professional certified coach and ADHD accredited coach, Rati specializes in guiding artists, entrepreneurs, and neurodivergent individuals through career transitions, focus challenges, and personal growth. Her approach blends practical strategies with humor and compassion, empowering her clients to thrive. I'm excited to dive into her insights. Welcome to the show, Rati. Tell me a little bit more about what inspired you to become a coach, either a career coach, life coach, ADHD coach.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, it was cumulative. Life is just cumulative. I mean, you don't sit up in your crib and go, I'm going to be an ADHD coach. I'm a theater artist. Originally, I wanted to be a star. I wanted to be on Broadway. And in a way, it was great having that focus and that goal, even though it didn't take me where I thought I'd end up. The theater, the business broke my heart. frankly and at a certain point i i moved into an ashram and for your uh listeners who don't know what an ashram is i think most of them probably do but it's basically a hindu kibbutz all right i couldn't hide me to a nunnery because well i'm not catholic i'm jewish i'm not even christian i had to reinvent myself reparent myself by living in a spiritual community And what I learned there was that company is stronger than will. In this culture, we're taught that you can have whatever you want. You can do and be whatever you want. But what is not added to that is if you have the right community around you and you have the right set of serendipitous happenings that occur. There's some luck involved, your station in life, privilege. I struggled a lot as a young actress thinking, oh, I don't know why I'm not getting these auditions. And, you know, casting directors would say, well, you're a little too urban, which is showbiz speak for Jewish auditions. or black or any other ethnicity that's not like mainstream. And I didn't have the emotional tools to weather the business. But getting back to the ashram, living in community taught me that company is stronger than will and you don't get anything worthwhile alone. So when I got back to the city after being Well, I like to say I was one of the few people kicked out of a cult because, you know, it was a situation with a guru and it was a celibate community and we called each other brother and sister. And it was all about surrendering your ego. And if you left the community, it meant you were copping out on your spiritual growth. And so I was in such a conflicted space that I started acting out a lot. I sent you a bucket of zucchini on a woman's head at one point. You know, I worked in the kitchen, which literally was a pressure cooker because no sex, drugs or rock and roll. All you got is food. And people took their food very seriously. Anyway, fast forward, the guru said you should take a leave of absence. What a gift. Thank God. Anyway, I came back with that message, Company Stronger Than Will, and I started creating support systems using books like Wishcraft by Barbara Schur. A lot of your coaches, your audience are coaches. They probably know about Barbara Schur and Wishcraft. She, to my mind, is the mother of coaching. Then also The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. And as a theater artist, I went through that book four times, three times. with groups that I surrounded myself with. And I started creating my own work. And I started seeing other people succeed at things who were in my support groups. And at a certain point, I met my husband. He was a standup comic and I was a standup comic. We met at a club. And at one point he said, you should start charging for this. And I didn't know what this was. You know, it was the early 90s and I, you know, I was getting really burnt out on hostessing at restaurants and cleaning people's houses. You got to do a lot of things to survive in the business. So I discovered that it was called coaching. It was a new industry and I started doing it and put my shingle out. And I believe we always start coaching ourselves. So I coached a lot of artists. originally. And I sent a lot of artists into therapy because I kept hitting a wall not knowing how to help them, which is when I decided to get training and I became certified. I decided to go to the ADHD Coach Academy because one of my relatives is diagnosed with ADHD and my son has it, my husband has it. And I thought, well, if I can coach people with ADHD, I can coach anybody. That was my thought, you know. And it was great because it aligned perfectly with my tribe. A lot of artists, a lot of creatives, a lot of entrepreneurs have ADHD because they need to make up their own rules to succeed. So it was very well aligned. I don't like to say that all artists have it because they don't, but many, many, many of them do. and so at cocktail parties you know i like to say i coach creative professionals who feel pulled in 50 directions focus so they can grab the focus of others get seen and make money doing what they love and it's great because there's so many transferable skills between being a theater artist a playwright an actor a comic and being a coach you have to be able to listen You have to be able to help people shape their narrative and reframe things. So I feel as though this is what I was meant to do. And it was a long way around finding it, but here I am.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow, that was a great story. And very detailed, actually. It's almost like you were explaining the complete cycle of your life for a moment.

SPEAKER_03:

I became a coach and I said, well, this is the journey. And

SPEAKER_01:

I don't

SPEAKER_03:

think any coach you're going to talk to who doesn't have a journey, who doesn't have something they've had to figure out and work out for themselves.

SPEAKER_01:

So initially we're working with artists. And actually, before we get to that, can you tell me a little bit more about your journey after you became a coach to where you are at today?

SPEAKER_03:

Yes. Good question. Well, I became a coach. And I was muddling about. I took a training in creativity coaching with Eric Maisel, who was with Julia Cameron, probably the premier creativity coach in the industry. And he wasn't, you know, it was great, but it wasn't an ICF accredited training. And the International Coach Federation, as many of your listeners, I think, will agree, is the regulating body of the coaching industry. industry so it it helped me somewhat uh however i wasn't feeling very secure and as i said i was still sending people to therapy a lot which is not to say that that isn't appropriate it often is but i couldn't distinguish between where i didn't know how to help them and where they needed to be in therapy so i got the icf accredited training and that elevated me and i was able to get my business to the 19k mark i was making about 19 000 a year you can't live on that new york city and you certainly can't raise a kid on that and uh you know my husband is also i'm not you know if you're fortunate enough to marry someone who is neurotypical has a nine to five job you know and it makes a good income great But my husband also is a comedian, an artist. He has ADHD. He runs his own business. We didn't have stability. So I had to figure out a way to build my revenue. And when I was ready, you know, I used to say when the cycle's ready, the guru appears. Well, when the mentee, the coach mentee is ready, the mentor coach appears and i met monica shaw of revenue breakthrough i went to a three-day workshop of hers and it blew me away and i did something that at first my husband wanted to kill me for which was put nine thousand dollars on a credit card to work with her but that's what i needed to do to get the tools to really understand what it was to treat my business like a business instead of a hobby. And she took me to six figures. She took me to$100,000 working with her. And that was, you know, but it took a few years. You know, it did. I met her in 2016 and my best year was 2021. That was my highest income year.

SPEAKER_01:

So basically that investment worked well for you and it actually served the purpose.

SPEAKER_03:

Oh, yes. yes and you know you do have to be discerning i think and it's i think it's well it's gotten dicey because now there are so many coaches who are coaching coaches and turning out more coaches who are coaching coaches that it can uh be a little cannibalistic and you really have to vet people if you're going to invest in their trainings i think

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that most coaches actually do still receive coaching. And if you manage to find someone that you feel that is right investment, in your case, you did the right one, totally go for it. And did that get you to stability after that point?

SPEAKER_03:

Oh, yeah, I was much, we were much better off. I mean, you know, I didn't incur any debt going to college. And what's nice is also when you're in a bohemian type marriage like ours when somebody's income is down hopefully the others is up and that's what happened my husband was having a rough time with the pandemic and everything he has a brook and mortar bookshop and my income went up and that saved our butts and you know it has shifted a little now he's doing better than me and i'm you know catching up again so uh yeah it really has worked out It's worked out well.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for sharing it. I wanted to ask also a marketing question now. Where do you find your clients? What is the main marketing channel that's working out for you in terms of finding your ideal client persona?

SPEAKER_03:

I know a lot of people will say speaking, speaking, but for me, it's been the internet straight up. You know, I mean, for some reason in the first few years of my business, after starting to work with Monica, 95% of my business came through Yelp. Now that's, shifted. Yelp has kind of dried up, but I've really put energy into my Google profile and still people are finding me online. I do have a marketing system. I do social media a couple times a week. I do reels a couple times a week. I send a newsletter out three times a month. You know, I do have a marketing system. I've gotten clients through that. So I would say for me that's been secondary to just having the right keywords. Having people, you know, be able to find me.

SPEAKER_01:

And when it comes to online, when you say the newsletter also mentioned doing reels, what platform online has been most successful? Is it LinkedIn? When you say reels, is it YouTube reels?

SPEAKER_03:

I do TikTok, I do Instagram. I'm getting more and more active on LinkedIn and I'm finding really nice collaborations through that. I also have a networking group that I founded after joining a six and seven figure business owner networking group and realizing I wasn't going to get referrals there because like everybody else, I coach artists, I coach creatives and they were all trying to sell me. I was being pitched to all the time. I started my own networking group called Muse, which is for professionals who serve creatives. So I had a comedy coach for a long time. I have an IP attorney. I have a bookkeeper. I have people in the visual arts who coach me. visual artists to sell their work, you know. And that has, you know, we can pass referrals, we can help each other. That's been a better use of strategic networking. for me, you know, founding that group. And I'm happy to talk to people if they're interested. I think, did I answer your question?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that does answer the question. For anyone who wants to know more about this network, where can they find it if they wanted to?

SPEAKER_03:

They can find it through my website. That's the safest, the drop-down menu, Muse Networking. You'll get it from Thunder Services.

SPEAKER_01:

So it's basically, it's not a public community per se. People would have to join through you, right, is a paid

SPEAKER_03:

community. If they have to join through me, there's an intake process. It's really inexpensive. It's$35 a month now is what I'm charging. Or you can pay in full for the year and then you save a few money. You save a few ducats, you know, for the year. But I have to vet people. I can't have people who are all about me, me, me, me, me, and I did a TED Talk and I'm so great because it's really about relationships first, cultivating trust and relationships. So it's not a group for narcissists. It's for very authentic, heart-centered people. So I have to talk to you. Schedule a conversation with me. And the way to do that is meetrati.com and choose the Muse option. That's where you can schedule a conversation. That's not where you're going to learn about the network.

SPEAKER_01:

Great. So the next question I have for you is what are your... future goals or any future goals you're working towards for the next one to three years

SPEAKER_03:

well i you know i'm of a certain age and i'm looking towards what i want to retire to i don't imagine myself ever retiring i mean if you play your cards the way i did you know uh there's no 401k or anything uh so I want to retire to a residential retreat center. I see myself living in a big, beautiful, painted lady with a wraparound porch. And I love artists to come, creatives to come who need time to do their work. And I will be on call there by appointment, of course, not on people's back. But, you know, I will be available to coach, do creativity coaching, focus coaching, AKA ADHD coaching, organizational coaching, tarot card readings, theta healings, whatever they need to get their work, their creative work to the next level. And a very wise woman who works at SCORE, she said, why don't you try it out first and see if you like it? What an idea, I hadn't thought of that, right? For the moment, I've created this. Again, I'll share it with you. Maybe your people on YouTube will see it. I have set up a trial retreat. I have a friend who owns a beautiful farmhouse and lodge upstate New York. And so it's going to be the weekend after Memorial Day. Here's some beautiful pictures of where you will stay. Lovely place. Yeah, that's the longhouse. where most of the rooms are. This is the environment. And it's really about, you know, stop the world and reclaim your creative focus. Now, I said tuition required because Eventbrite's a little dicey. You know, it doesn't let you, it says free, it's not free. Because you have, again, I don't want just anybody coming to this retreat. I can't have strangers showing up there and I have to live with them for four days. So, yeah, there's an intake process. You know, I want everyone to be safe. But this is going to be my, this is my experiment. So folks can go to Eventbrite and, you know, find this. Now we're going to segue to a conversation of transparency. The reason I did this on Eventbrite is because for the moment I've furloughed my team. My business has been a little slow, honestly. And at a certain point I was, you know, I mean, you can't have a negative profit margin. Because then you're cosplaying and having a business. So right now, I'm doing a lot of my own administrivia, including setting up this Eventbrite page. Things are starting to pick up, but I'm still doing a lot on my own. So my advice to beginner coaches especially is, yeah, you can get yourself to six figures. That's great. But what people won't tell you sometimes is that it takes six figures to make six figures. You're not going to necessarily be making a living yet, even if you can say you're bringing in six figures. And it doesn't just stay there. With the best marketing systems in the world even, and you do have to always be marketing because you'll have a full roster and then all of a sudden it starts dropping off. You've got to have pipeline, you've got people in the pipeline. The world at large doesn't always cooperate. Things change. We get pandemics. We get elections. We get the stock market plummeting. We get all kinds of things that happen that are not your fault. And I think there's a lot of spiritual bypassing in the coaching industry that just makes people feel bad if they're not happy and successful all the time. There's nothing wrong with you. If you sometimes have to do the work you're not brilliant at, like setting up an Eventbrite page, right? I'm probably, you know, I'm going to go to Fiverr. I'm going to hire somebody because I also have it on my website. But quite frankly, it's, you know, I tinkered around. It doesn't look great on my website. I can handle Eventbrite. I can't handle updating my website. So I'm going to hire someone on a project basis for that. Right? Yeah. If you're spending more than an hour and a half doing something, you probably shouldn't be doing it. You might want to look for some help. But I really appreciate you letting me talk about this, and I hope it'll be part of the podcast.

SPEAKER_01:

You're welcome. That's what I asked you in terms of the goals. So, yeah, thanks for sharing that. I also wanted to ask you about what resources or support has been most valuable in you growing your business. You did mention... a coach, which you paid initially when you were starting. Apart from that. And I

SPEAKER_03:

still work with her to the degree that I can. And I worked with her privately. I've worked in her group program. You know, right now I'm part of her Soul Speak business collective, which is very woo. You know, I stay aligned with her because I do believe you need a coach. You need a coach, however you can. And she's a smart lady. She's starting to launch a lot of less expensive programs for shorter time commitments because that's what people feel secure enough to do right now.

SPEAKER_01:

And apart from her, what other investments have you seen that have been supportive in you growing your business?

SPEAKER_03:

Well, yeah, being flexible. That's supportive, right? I have my rates, but I needed to get creative and be willing in this climate, especially with the demographic I coached. to offer partial scholarships. And I even bartered with one client and the exchange was that he would introduce me, do like email introductions to like four other artists who he thought could use my services. And I ended up booking one of them and giving them a partial scholarship. And so now I'm working with them. You can use your alumni clients. That's been very valuable. Referrals. Get comfortable with asking for testimonials because that's your social proof. You know, that's the other thing that's buoyed my business. You go to Yelp, you'll see a lot of nice testimonials and people feel comfortable contacting you when they see that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, totally agree. Yeah, testimonials are very important to showcase that they can trust in your work. I wanted to ask you also, and you probably may have mentioned it already, but what is something that you wish you had known when you first started scaling your coaching business? What is like one unexpected lesson learned?

SPEAKER_03:

That nothing lasts forever. That the one thing you can count on is change, is impermanence. I had a full practice for many years and I got cocky and I thought, oh, it's always going to be that way. And all of a sudden it wasn't after the pandemic. And I had to, you know, I had to go through a period of feeling like it was my fault. You know, maybe I'm being shadow banned. And then realize, no, you're not, you know, it's a little grandiose to think that everything's within your power. So what I wish I had understood was that line between grandiosity and responsibility. It's not either you're a victim of circumstance or everything's within your control. What's true is nothing stays the same. So that's why I'm so big on staying in the moment, staying present, staying flexible. with circumstances. So in my old age, I finally learned that one. But as a coach, I think it's a great thing to know.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think that's very powerful. Being aware that change is consistently going to come is, I think, very important and that things don't stay the same. I also wanted to ask you, because there's a lot of experience here, how do you currently handle the balance between delivering great results to your clients and, on the other side, managing business operation.

SPEAKER_03:

I'm very organized. I wasn't always that way. But you have to plan. Planning, I will quote my coach, Monica. She always says, and I've found this to be true, planning is the highest form of self-care. Because when you plan your week on a Sunday night or Monday morning, you're not waking up in the morning going, what am I going to do today? You have it planned out. You know you have a chunk of time dedicated to administrivia, projects, whatever. I always take the last week of the month off. I didn't always understand that, but now I do. You need the last week of the month to work on your business, not in it. And that works for me. I have days where I don't. book clients. For a while, it was Tuesday afternoons. I wasn't talking to anybody on Tuesday afternoons because I was working on my business. I still do what Monica calls money Mondays. Money Mondays are for meetings, errands, looking at my finances, looking at my numbers, which is very important. And I don't schedule things on Friday afternoons. I don't schedule things past my last appointment at 6 o'clock. For me, I need to stop after that. You're not going to get good results if you're working with me at 8 o'clock at night. I actually have a couple of coaching slots on Saturday at 11 and 12. So if someone's full-time and they want it, I'm going to be fresh. They're not going to feel pressured. So I love coaching on Saturday morning. If you're starting your business, track your time. See where your time is going. See what your patterns are. And, you know, if you notice you're getting distracted a lot, you know, there are certainly methods of dealing with that we all know about. But even more important is noticing what works for you and working with yourself. Make your life easy. Your business doesn't have to look like anybody else's. Your structure needs to fit you, not the other way around.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I really like that. So making sure to plan ahead, block certain times for the business operation side. And yeah, that's very helpful. I wanted to ask another question, which might be related to this, is what aspects of running your coaching business, in quotation, would keep you up at night?

SPEAKER_03:

Oh, well, when I go through a fallow period, when people aren't booking consultations. Oh, my God, where's the money going to come from? You know, this person paid in full and I spent it already. That's a real trap. Be careful. You get people to pay in full, great, because they're highly committed. And try not to debt yourself, right? You know, I know some coaches who will only take monthly payments. because they don't want to end up doing that to themselves. But sure, if you don't have clients in the pipeline, if you don't have consultations lined up, that can keep you up at night.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, lead generation, I think a lot of people are going to resonate with that because most coaches do face an issue with lead generation. And even if you don't, just like I said earlier, things can change. So things do change. What advice would you give to other, in this case, the community is going to be career coaches, other career coaches looking to scale their impact.

SPEAKER_03:

Just stick around and stay visible. And I would say also, don't just take shots at things. Don't do a webinar once and decide it doesn't work for you because it's a skill. There's a learning curve. You know, the conventional wisdom, and I do believe this, is that do something for 60 to 90 days. and see what your results are to decide whether or not it's going to be working for you. It is really, I think, about that kind of discipline.

SPEAKER_01:

So don't take short shots. Try it for a longer period of time. Be consistent and see how it goes. Thanks very much, Rati. This has been very helpful for anyone who wants to find you or wants to connect with you after watching this podcast. They can even find you on your LinkedIn, Rati Gorfyan, or they could also go into the website, creativecallingcoaching.com, or also go into the Muse network and maybe book a chat. chat there. And also

SPEAKER_03:

Linktree. I love Linktree because it has all things Rati on it. So it's Linktree forward slash Coach Rati. That's all things Coach Rati.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for sharing Rati. It was a pleasure having you on the podcast today.

SPEAKER_03:

It was lovely talking with you and spending time with you too.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much.