Mindy Kaleta Blends Coaching and Book Creation to Help Women Tell their Stories!

[Day in the Life of a Coach]Interview with ICA Coach, Mindy Kaleta
(Life Coach, UNITED STATES)

When ICA graduate Mindy Kaleta sees a woman who is mindlessly moving through life unaware of her true potential, she feels deeply for her.

That’s because Mindy was once that woman. Divorced and going through her own transition, she experienced the power of coaching and the critical need for support when taking on a big challenge.

And that’s how she came to blend her coaching with her experience of independent publishing which includes her most recent book, Stop Bending Over Backwards Trying to Please and Start Being Who You Really Are! Now, as a Book Creation and Publishing Coach she offers women (and a few good men!) the chance to tell their stories, create their own book and publish it.

Coaching also offers her the lifestyle she craves, working at home and spending time with her husband Don and their blended family (they have a boatload of kids!) just kicking back, catching up, cooking and watching their seven grand children grow!

Check out Mindy’s Ladybugs-A-Plenty Facebook page with posts of inspirational quotes, personal insights, spiritual growth, positive encouragement, and emotional support.

Interview with Merci Miglino

Merci: Welcome to another day in the life of a coach, I’m Merci Miglino and my guest today is Mindy Kaleta from Ohio in the US. Welcome Mindy!

Mindy: Thank you for having me today, I’m so delighted to be here.

Merci: We’re delighted to have you.

So you are an ICA graduate.

Mindy: Yeah.

Merci: And currently you’re helping women to live their life by design. You coach women (and men) who might want to write a book and self-publish and needs some coaching around that. I also see here that you wrote a book yourself  “Stop Bending Over Backwards Trying to Please and Start Being Who You Really Are”.
I love the title! Love love love it.

Mindy: Thank you.

Merci: So you’re involved in so many things and I can’t wait to get into that but first I’m curious, how did you find coaching Mindy? What were you doing before and what led you to it?

Mindy: That’s a great question. Well I’m a mom of four and I was just working working, working… I wanted to work from home and I was trying to find something that I could do from home. And one of my friends just told me, “Hey check out this new thing out called coaching”. She told me a little bit about coaching and I looked into it and as I searched coaching schools,  I found ICA. And I loved what they had to say and I signed up at the end of 2005. So I probably started January of 2006. And finally I graduated in 2007 and I loved every minute of it.

Merci: So what made your friend think of you as a coach?

Mindy: Well I guess it’s because I was called on to do some coaching.

Merci: [laughs] I suspected that was the answer !

Mindy:  [laughing]And actually this is funny because before I even signed up as a student, I got a job which wasn’t from home but it was a great learning experience. It was a job as a coach in a wellness center!. I was coaching people to stop smoking and lose weight. And so I would just keep them on track and help them through that process. So I was seeing 6 to 10 people a day, and would work for about 10 hours a day, 4 days a week. That gave me a lot of time to find out if I really liked coaching. And so in the midst of doing that, I was also taking my ICA coach training classes. And that worked out pretty well.

Merci: Wow that’s great that you were able to combine working and studying to become a coach. Sounds like one way or another you were going to land on this coaching spot.

Tell me a little bit about how you came to do what you’re doing, who you coach and a little bit about your book and facebook page.

Mindy: How I came to work with women and ‘Life by Your Design’, was I was having some difficulty in my own personal life. And it ended up with a divorce and I wanted to help others go through any kind of transition that they were going through especially if it’s a difficult one. I didn’t necessarily want to coach just people going through divorce but I wanted to turn their thoughts on how to design your own life?

Me being a people pleaser, that’s what my book was about. People pleasers do things that other people tell them to do or expect of them and my book was definitely about helping women find out who they are, decide what they value and what their needs are, because no one really asks them right? And to help them to decide “Who am I really?”. And “Who am I showing up to be?”  I didn’t want to dwell on the difficult people they were dealing with but I wanted to turn their faces to, how am I going to change this and how can I make a difference in my own life?  And then how can I make a difference in other people’s lives and the people that I come in contact with? I did not want to think about things that aren’t going well because it just seems to make it bigger and beneficial to focus on the future and on positive things. So that was mainly what my book was about. I want to touch on what “ladybug” meant because people come to my site, even men and they’re like “I can’t get on that page because of the lady bug thing”.

Merci: I know, like what does it mean?

Mindy: Well I became interested in ladybugs early in my career because I watched the movie Under the Tuscan Sun.

Merci: Oh yes.

Mindy: Have you seen the movie?

Merci: Yes of course, many times.

Mindy: Diane Lane talking to her friend Katherine, and she came into the room, all sad and everything and her friend says “You’re sad again. How can you be happy if you keep wallowing?” And then she said, “When I was a little girl, I spent hours looking for ladybugs. Finally I just gave up and fell asleep on the grass and when I woke up they were crawling all over me.” And she goes, “So…?”

Merci: Yeah

Mindy: “So go home, work on your house and forget about it!”

Merci: Yeah, exactly.

Mindy: So the ladybug idea came into view because it just tells women that you look for the positive and go towards that and everything you ever wanted will come to you.

Merci: It’s that whole idea that if you’re striving too hard for something it tends to elude us and if we focus on something we can actually do like in the case of the movie, build/fix your house up, your lady bugs will just be there.

Mindy: Right right.

Merci: Wonderful.  So your facebook page Lady Bugs A-Plenty has lots of great quotes on it and personal insights and encouragement and support. If you’re looking for that kind of stuff, Mindy got you covered.  So it sounds to me like you do a lot of different things including coaching. What is a typical day look for you?

Mindy: Typical day … I have changed a little bit of what I am doing but its similar to what I was doing before. In 2015 I was doing a lot of coaching with coaches, singers, artists and writers about how to get their business going and I started helping people put their books together.  I coached them through the book writing and business building process as well as helping them with the technical stuff, because I knew the technical stuff as I had done in myself. So people started asking me, “How did you do that?” Organically, my coaching became what it is today. So I would meet up with clients in my home.

It’s great because I love working from home and it’s great because there are people out there that would want to have a career, they can stay home with their kids or, you know I had an autistic daughter at one point and that’s one reason why I wanted to be at home. But one of the reasons was, I love my animals. And when I go to work, I miss them. We have 5 animals actually. We have two dogs and three cats. So my dream is to move to a farm and possibly have even more animals. Like some goats and maybe a couple of horses. I would love to, in my ‘Life by Design’ area, I would love to help people connect with animals, to see how they can change their lives by design. Animals don’t worry about anything. And they’re great teachers. And so that’s something that’s on my back burner.

Another thing that I do daily, people email me, in fact I got an email just before you called, that somebody wanted to talk to me about their book. So since I did my book about “Bending Over Backwards”, I’m getting an array of books that people want to put out and what I do is that I have my team that puts it all together and they are my formatters and designers. I’m the coach so when people come to me and they want to put a book together, usually they’re apprehensive about what’s going to happen, how long is it going to take and I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be. And so I’m trying to get that from them and I give them step by step “This is what you do, then I’m going to do this.” So they don’t have to worry about the whole entire process. A lot of people want to put their book out, send their message out, they may want to use it as a signature book for their programs, which is a great way for coaches to do it, or for a speaker. So that’s basically what I do day to day. I’m hanging out with people who are eager and excited about their project and I just help them get through that.

Merci: That’s incredible, I really appreciate how this works for you, this lifestyle, being connected with your fur-babies, and also being able to really take advantage of the virtual world. People can email you, you don’t have to travel to them if you don’t want to. And somebody once said that everyone has a book in them and I really believe that. It’s a great way of connecting with others whether we’re coaches or other individual or we’re just authors who really want to write a book and it can be quite a daunting process.
And what came up for me when you were talking Mindy, was when you are a book coach or a creative coach, or publishing coach, something in that area, you work on two levels, don’t you? You work on the strategic, “What do you want to do?” “By when?” The steps that get you to the outcome you want. And you also work on this second level. Because so much of what holds people back on their story are perspectives. You know, ideas and thoughts and beliefs that aren’t really working for them. They get stuck. That’s where the coach is an essential part of getting it done.
I really like the way you blended that. The strategy and the personal shift.

Mindy: Yes because that really holds people back for years. I have another author that said, “I wrote a book for my son, and he’s 26 now and I still don’t have it out” [laughing]

Merci: [laughs] Oh gosh

Mindy: So she’s eager to do that.

Merci: Well I love it. I have so many things in common with you. I wrote a book too. I did it for a reason you talked about, creating a signature, a way to get your message out. And today with self-publishing, it’s really a viable option and it’s rather inexpensive if it’s in digital printing and print on demand. It became a really viable option for myself, a small business person. So glad you’re out there doing this, I totally get it and I’m glad we could connect.

Mindy: I’m so excited you called.

Merci: Oh no it’s great! I love hearing what people are doing with coaching. It’s because no two coaches are the same.

Mindy: Right.

Merci: And people think that first and foremost, you have to come out of some academic or psychology background, and it’s just not true. You don’t need to start all over but rather you build on your past experiences.

Mindy: Exactly.

Merci: Whatever your experience was from the personal, being a divorced mom, to the professional, to wanting to work at home and the way you found that wellness center, these are the remarkable things I hear when I interview people about how they got into coaching. So I really appreciate you.

Mindy: Me too.

Merci: So how about our last question. If you could tell the world only one thing, this is the challenge, only one thing about coaching, what do you think will it be?

Mindy: Oh wow, that’s a big question. Because I’m one of those people who just can’t tell you only one thing. And there are many things I love about coaching.

Merci: [laughing] I suspected that. You’re like me a little bit. But if you could just name one thing, what will it be?

Mindy: So the one thing is that coaching helps so many people. I think it goes back to what you just said, the shift in perspective. The biggest thing for me was distinguishing that it’s not therapy because you have so many people who come to you with issues and then you find out that coaching is for those who are ready to move on. There are some people who have issues and they’re not ready to move on. And I would refer people, “You need to go to a therapist for now and then let’s talk later. I want you to feel healed when you come. And then we can work on what you want to do next”. I think that’s the biggest thing, they have a different perspective when they come to me. You know they felt whole, they didn’t feel like they still need to talk about those past things, and they’re like, “Ok, I’m good to go”. And that’s where coaching comes in. I think people have a misconception about coaching. They think, “I need a coach to get me to do something” and that’s not it at all. It is a co-creation. You’re working with somebody like you are their cheerleader. There was a quote from Joan Erickson, who said you’re a cheerleader for them. They’re not to take your particular path to find their own.

Merci: Right. Right.

Mindy: And I love that because you can just save a space for them to do all that. And I think that’s the one thing about coaching that I want everyone to know.

Merci: That’s wonderful. And well-said too. So co-creative and shifting perspective. Good to go from this point forward… It’s both about what’s your path and if there are any pebbles in your shoe, we need to explore them because odds are that pebble needs to be reframed. So I really like that. Nicely said. All right Mindy, so thank you for being our guest on Day in the Life of a Coach.

Mindy: Thank you for having me.

Merci: And all the best!

Mindy: You too and ICA!

Website: www.MindyJKaleta.com

LinkedIn: www.Linkedin.com/in/MindyKaleta