From Wall Street to Self-Awareness – the Journey to Life Coach with Michael Kohan & Manon on The Healers Café

do to, like, make you happy. And my friend gets off my back, I’ll come in, I’ll play cards with you, and I’ll do something healthy. And he said, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go take a yoga class once a week, and I won’t bother you. Well, you’ll come in, you hang out, and you’ll go home. And that’s what changed my life. Wow, crazy, because I was overworked. There was only one yoga studio I can go to, because they had a nine o’clock yoga class 9pm and it was a yoga studio called Jeeva mukti, and this was in the. Mid 2000s This is before yoga was everywhere, before Instagram, before social media, before yoga, pornography was prevalent. Right before people practice yoga and underwear and people and get became famous, and this yoga studio turned out to be the mecca of yoga. It was owned by Sharon, Garen Gannon and David life. It was owned by Sting, all these famous people would go practice yoga there, I know, and I just fell in love with it, and it transformed my life for the positive. I began to slowly wean myself off of drugs. Started developing healthy habits. I started feeling better about myself because, you know, as a as a heteronormative man, go to a yoga studio, especially in the early 2000s What do you see? A bunch of beautiful, athletic women that I wanted to be hooking up with, right? So I got really into yoga, but as an extremist, I took it to the other side, and I went all the way to the other side, and I ended up finding myself at 33 years old, quitting my job, pursuing a passion of yoga and becoming almost a hare krishna monk. So I’m on one extreme in my when I’m 30 right? Super corporate greed, workaholic, drug and alcohol, toxic individual, like horrible human being, treating people like garbage to the other extreme of money is the root of all evil. Can’t work. We should pray. We should chant mantra to the other stream. And I found myself on the other side, suffocating as well, because I was going from one to the other, yeah, and I did that for about three or four years, where I was finding the walls closing in on me because I was not my authentic, true self. So around 36 years old, I packed up all my belongings, sold everything I owned in and moved out of the city to start over and to really find a way to be sort of like the middle my authentic self. And that’s when I decided to teach yoga for a living. But I found I couldn’t make it a living teaching yoga. I loved it. Loved teaching yoga. It was great. Loved it, but I couldn’t support myself. And so I asked myself, What do I love about teaching yoga that I can support myself? And I went, Oh, I love helping people. That’s what my calling was. And I was like, Well, I have this master’s in psychology, I have an associate’s degree in religion, I have all this yoga practice. Maybe I can do something with that. And that’s how I became a life coach.

Manon Bolliger  13:09

Interesting, yeah, but it does afford you more freedom, right?

Michael Kohan  13:14

Like, yeah. I mean, I tried going back down the psychology route and being a therapist, and I really just don’t like it. I mean, it’s not that it’s a bad thing. It’s just not for me. I love sharing knowledge and I love teaching. I don’t I so I don’t like just sitting, having the same conversation with somebody every week, right? Or it’s just like, tell me how. Like, there’s not. I think there’s a purpose for that. I think a good therapist does help people, and I think a good therapist gets them ready for a life coach, and so I do partner with a lot of therapists in my coaching practice. I think it’s because of my background I’m able to work with therapist. But what I like is more of the dialectic teaching. I like teaching people emotional intelligence. I like teaching people belief, net beliefs and their default mode network. I like teaching about overthinking and catastrophizing and and what worry is and understanding their relationship to fear and imposter syndrome. I like teaching those aspects rather than sitting and discussing their childhood trauma and their presence,

Manon Bolliger  14:27

it’s like life skills, right, that they can then empower themselves and do, yeah, you know, whereas in the therapeutic model, you’re more the fixer, And in a sense, you hold the the power right, at least in the dynamic, often scene.

Michael Kohan  14:46

So what I do that, what, what I find problematic in my industry as a life coach, is people think a life coach should tell you what to do, and I tell every client I ever. Worked with is if anybody tells you what to do, run as far away as you can from that person. That’s not the job of a life coach. That’s not the job of a therapist, that’s a cult leader. I know cults. I joined them. I like them. I know exactly what a cult is. I joined a yoga cult. I joined religious cults. I know what a cult is, right? That’s a cult leader. This is what you should do. A life coach teaches you the skills for you to become more self aware, so that you then make the decisions yourself that’s right for you. That’s all the job of a life coach is. It’s to teach you to understand who you are as a person, and to then look at how you’re living your life, and then apply that knowledge, right? So I teach clients like any corporate executives, moms, people that have just graduated college. I teach them like I start off with like, emotional intelligence, right? What are the five components, how to be self more self aware. What the foundations of self regulation, negativity, bias, understanding, motion, motivation and neuro associative conditioning, and that helps them evaluate how they’re living their lives. So then, then they begin to see where their imbalances are. And then when we go on to the next challenge and then the next challenge, like limiting beliefs. So also, I’ll break down how beliefs are formed. What is the difference between self awareness and self blame? Why we internalize beliefs? What is the difference between actual and perceived beliefs, and what happens when our values and beliefs contradict, and how to assess and reevaluate and realign them based on current circumstances. These are, this is the job of a life coach. Right? The job of a life coach isn’t well, you should wake up every morning at 5am and meditate and do yoga and write in a journal before you start the day and raise get up your kid, get your kids and work your 10 hour day. That’s not the job of a life coach. That’s an author selling a book.

Manon Bolliger  17:08

Fair enough. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah.

Michael Kohan  17:12

I mean, there’s nothing wrong with the advice. I mean, it’s good advice, get up in the morning and do something for yourself before you start the day. And a life coach can suggest that, but it’s not the job of a life coach to tell you to do that right. A life coach can do a SWOT analysis, help you set goals. Life Coaching, help you establish routine and habits, but under and teach you how to form habits, understanding the difference between empowering and inhibiting habits. A life coach can teach you while why inhibiting habits are so easily formed, but the life coach isn’t to sit there and be like, well, you should do dot, dot, dot, dot, and that’s how you’ll be your best self. The job of the coachee is to figure out what their best self is. Additionally, a life coach is helping someone gain perspective, right? So they’re not going so, like some, when someone goes to a therapist, it’s because they have a problem, like they’re depressed, they’re anxious, they have a debilitating circumstance that prevents them from living a normal or neutral life. A life coach helps someone have perspective like i i have executives that I work with that this their senior level, executives, fortune 500 companies, presidents of large companies, owners 100 million dollar portfolios and businesses where everybody turns to them for the answer, and they don’t have anybody that they can turn to, so sometimes they just need somebody to talk to, where they just say, here’s the situation at work, here’s the situation with this employee, here’s the situation with this vendor or this circumstance. And a life coach or an executive coach is just to help them evaluate the situation so that then they can choose what the right action is to take. That’s it. That’s what we do.

Manon Bolliger  19:10

So when you were sort of in the other extreme of going yoga, but also Hare Krishna and all the

Michael Kohan  19:22

way Ted and all,

Manon Bolliger  19:25

yeah, but What? What? What was the pivotal thing? Like you said you were aware of like the walls closing in. But what was it that gave you the self awareness that this too was not the answer like because you ended up teaching yoga. So it’s not like you thought, oh, it’s it’s all wrong. But how is that connected to, let’s say, in a session with people, right? You as a life coach, how would you. Bring out what it is that you experienced in that transition yourself. I guess that’s my question. Yeah.

Michael Kohan  20:08

I mean, it’s a little hard, a little more a little hard for me to pinpoint for myself personally, because I was in in it. So I can’t, I can’t really tell, okay, so when I was practicing yoga, and I was really studying yoga, and I was studying and I was getting a associate’s degree in religion, I was studying, you know, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and I did a retreat with a Buddhist monk as part of a course in upstate New York. And for those of you who grew up in the 80s and 90s and earlier, you remember those high school gymnasiums that didn’t have air conditioning, and they had the big, giant ceilings with 50 fans to keep the room Cool. Well, that was the retreat center, so that we were in a meditation center, and we were meditating, and there was about 100 of us, and it was a silent retreat for seven days. And I had the unfortunate mistake of sitting underneath a fan that was a little broken. And so every day I would be dropping into meditation, and then every once a while, the the fan would kind of like shake and get off kilter and would snap me out of meditation. We have an expression in in yoga, find the space between the breath, right? Find the space between the breath. That expression drove me nuts for years I hated us. But what do they mean? Find the space you inhale, you exhale, you inhale, you exhale. I’m breathing. What the heck do you mean? Find the space between the breath.

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Michael Kohan  23:01

We live in this state of overwhelm these days, right? We wake up, what do we do? We turn on a like, even if we turn on it, we turn on the TV, or we turn on a podcast, right? And we’re not like listening to like a meditation. We’re listening to like, murder mystery, true crime, news, politics, financial news, right? We get up and we’re stimulated. Then we get our family up, we have kids, and we’re stimulated. Then we get in the car and we’re stimulated. Then we go to work and we’re stimulated. Then we get off of work, we drive home and we’re stimulated. We walk in the house. What’s the first thing everybody does? They turn the TV on, because being in the house and quiet is painful and unpleasant, so we’re stimulated, then we run around, we feed, feed everybody, then we watch TV and we go to sleep. Then on the weekends, when we’re waiting in line to get our caf and go grocery shopping, what do we do? We’re on our cell phones every five seconds. So we never have the chance for self reflection. We never have that space. That’s what it means to find the space between the breath. It’s the pauses between the activities, whether it’s five minutes a half hour, it’s to find that those moments where you’re just with your thoughts, the advantage of studying yoga and meditation and prayer and mantra, you have the time to find the space between the breath, so you have time for self awareness and self reflection. It’s part of the practice. So it became very natural for me over over a period of time where I began to see the walls climbing in, because I felt like I was very much trapped in a box that I had to behave in a way that wasn’t ideal to who I am as a person. I love the Hare Krishna culture in the community, but I like nice things. I like having a nice house and a car and clothes, and I like earning a living. Doesn’t mean that I’m a bad person. It just means that. That wasn’t the right fit for me, right? The problem we have as individuals is we’re so overwhelmed, and we’re in a constant state of survival mode, because we gravitate towards negativity, right? We Doom scroll on Instagram, right, or Tiktok or YouTube, and I’ll have clients I go, but, but, but I follow these really inspirational people. I’m like, Yeah, you might see one post that’s really positive, but the rest is crap, because we gravitate towards negativity, so the stuff that we see is more negative. Therefore we never feel good about who we are as a person. So as a result, we need more and more and more and more. And so what I teach clients to do, and I do it in every practice. I teach them the box breathing. I teach them so, like, whenever I do a coaching session, I first do a check in from the previous session. I have, like, next steps, I just go down the list. I say based, you know, did you do you know, did you implement this step? You implement that practice? Did you incorporate this self reflection? Did you do this exercise? The end of all that we we center close our eyes, we do box breathing, and I teach them to incorporate that into their daily lives, to find the space between the breath for that self reflection to be comfortable with it, so that then they can begin to see where things aren’t working for them, just like I did when it came to aspiring to be a monk and and living in a very beautiful community that wasn’t right for me,

Manon Bolliger  26:36

right? That’s all I do. Yeah? Yeah. I think it’s it is that space or the gap, or whatever one calls it, but where you can have self reflection, otherwise you’re just on one train or another, right? And you Yeah, and then you have to stop it, because it’s interesting that you ended up teaching yoga. It’s not like said, the whole thing is not worth it.

Michael Kohan  27:03

It’s beautiful practice. It’s beautiful. Yeah, it has a lot of wonderful things. It’s this. What I have found is, with a lot of people, is we keep looking for the complex and the simple, right? Most of us, it’s like, it’s like, I was reading this article where, like, 70% of people that work from home feel lonely, and I’m like, I work from home, I don’t feel lonely. And I’m like, Oh, wait, it’s because I go to business events every week. So every week I go to some sort of, like, at least twice a month I go to a business meeting where they’re teaching, there’s a workshop and a seminar, and at least once a month I’m going into like a cocktail hour in my for like, small business owners in my area, and I go and I play pickleball and I go to the gym, I’m like, Oh, wait, it’s as simple as that. It’s like, you can work from home and feel lonely, or you can work from home and choose to get out of your house to not feel lonely. It’s this, the simple seems too easy. Simple doesn’t mean easy. It just is simple. Sometimes the simplest things are the hardest things to do, and I find that that’s like a growing thing for us as a culture. It’s like the more stuff we have, the more wealth we have, the more isolated, the more lonely, and the more trapped that we become.

Manon Bolliger  28:28

You know, simple things, yeah, like, I mean, community is a simple thing, yeah, it’s

Michael Kohan  28:35

why I’m moving I live in the, I like to say, the gilded prison. Right now, I live in a classic suburban, you know, community where everybody doesn’t know their neighbors, and everybody’s either in their house or in their backyard with the giant privacy fence. And I was like, I don’t want this. I was like, this is boring. So I’m I’m moving to a town that is, I’m moving to a place that has a town where you live in, you live on top of each other, and everybody knows each other’s business, and it’s not you know like and everybody knows each other, because community is what makes us feel connected. Isolation is a growing concern, but it’s also a self inflicted wound. We don’t have to be as isolated that we are. But that goes back to what we were talking about earlier, when, before we started recording this, about like, you know that the growing phenomenon that our society, our culture, seems to lack purpose these days, like we’re all just snarling at each other, you know, and saying and and looking at everybody and saying, Well, if you don’t look like me, you think like me, or believe like me, you’re somehow the enemy, and that’s my purpose. Now, instead of me finding connection and compassion, empathy and empathy, everybody that’s different than me, it’s just all lost. Everyone’s lost these days. Everyone, everyone,

Manon Bolliger  29:58

yeah. I know. I think that’s very true. It’s well captured, that that’s the the state and and there’s a victimhood that comes with it, as if we aren’t the ones who can’t change that, you know? And I think you’re right. Often it’s, it’s very simple things that make the biggest differences. But we’re, we’re trained to believe that simple is like not effective, or it’s not big enough, or not worth it. Or, why would that? You know, go for a walk,

Michael Kohan  30:35

yeah,

Manon Bolliger  30:37

leave some air, you know, touch a tree.

Michael Kohan  30:41

Yeah, I was, I literally was watching Good Morning America. I love Jane, that show with Jane Pauley, like Sunday morning. It’s great show. You get a little culture, you get a little art, you get a little politics, you get a little world events. It’s like the best of everything. It’s a nice thing to watch on the weekends when you’re just waking up. And they had a whole segment on outdoor spaces and how people are building these lavish outdoor spaces, and they were interviewing somebody, and the person said, Yeah, being outside is healthy for you. That’s why everybody wants these outdoor spaces. I’m like, doesn’t you don’t have to have these complex outdoor spaces. You can just go outside and stand in the sun for five minutes and you’ll fall better. I do that every day, every day, I make sure I go outside and I just sit there and look up at the sun and I I work full time from home. Today was a busy day. I had a call. I had a seven o’clock call, an 815 a, 930 an 1112, 30, a two, and now this I’ve been working all day. I still went outside for five minutes and looked up at the sun, and I’ll go back outside after this podcast. It’s I find, I just, I find this phenomenon Fascinating, right? And this like cultural phenomenon that we debt. We now identify our, our, our trauma and our, our, our emotional imbalances as shields and excuses. Right when I was a kid, I had ADHD, and I as a result, you know, kids with ADHD tend to have degrees of anxiety and behavioral problems, but I they weren’t excuses. My parents were like, sit still and study. It was hard, but I had to do it now. It’s my kid has ADHD let them run around and be disruptive, and that’s, I think it’s a problem. I think we I think I think we should recognize our trauma and we should validate our trauma. We shouldn’t dismiss our trauma, but we shouldn’t use our trauma as a shield

Manon Bolliger  32:49

and an excuse, yeah, or an excuse for everything.

Michael Kohan  32:53

Yeah, right. And I find like, it’s like, whenever you like, go online, anytime of the year these days, New York Times, Amazon, Goodreads, and you’ll find at least one self help book in the in the top 10 every month, without fail. And I just think it’s just because everyone is just searching for meaning, and we’ve come to a place in our society where it’s like, everybody has access to cheap clothing, cheap entertainment, cheap goods, cheap food, and everyone’s like, wait, I have all this stuff and I’m still miserable. It’s because we’ve traded all this stuff because we don’t want to deal with the tensions of this world anymore, and this stuff, this isolates us, the stuff leaves us lonely because and it’s like, whenever you hear these, like the tech bros talk about, like, AI and everything, I’m like, and they’re like, Yeah, we’re gonna create a fictionist world. We’re gonna have no friction, and you’re gonna have an AI companion. You’re gonna have aI friends, and you’re gonna have an AI assistant with that, and there’s going to be no tension. Well, that’s not gonna make you feel better, because tension is part of life. Like, you can’t walk without tension, right? Tension is what keeps you standing like there’s tension between you and the earth when you walk. There’s tension on the earth when you touch something and then you grab something, and when you hold something, there’s a tension between you and the object, right? Tension is what makes us alive, right? Without tension, we don’t have any joy, right? You can’t have pleasure without pain. You can’t have light without the shadow, and it’s just like we’re so afraid of the shadow these days, and all we want is the light. I think that it’s like, I find that really interesting, and I find it to be a big problem in the spiritual community, is all about the light, like light, be light, be light, be light. And I’m always like, where’s the shadow? What’s wrong with the shadow?

Manon Bolliger  34:57

Yeah, well, I think that’s it. You know, the exercise of being present, right, in and of itself is, is, is a tension, right? It’s a it’s a contrast in being present and then re being present because there’s that gap where you weren’t aware that you were not present, right? And that even just sitting and, you know, looking out the window, or, you know, I don’t know, we don’t have a television so I, I, I’m really outside of the culture in that sense. I have no idea what’s going on. I do, you know, see social medias, and I’m like, wow, you know, it’s a crazy kind of world. But people could say, Oh, you must be so lonely, you know, what are you doing? It’s like, you know, I do things I love, you know, I love doing interviews. I used to have a license to help people now, okay, I’m so called retired, but it’s like part of it is just being with with nature, being with people that come your way. There’s conflict, there’s not there’s it’s observing all of this and just being yourself, you know? And I think there’s a kind of a

Michael Kohan  36:23

What’s wrong with conflict,

Manon Bolliger  36:24

exactly, you know,

Michael Kohan  36:25

what’s wrong with disagreement. I can’t i i get nauseated by my friends on both so, like, as a life coach, I coach people all over this country. I coach people north, south, east, west, up, down, right, left in the middle, and I find that everybody’s the same, ultra right, ultra left, super Religious, atheist, spiritual, agnostic, straight, gay, everybody’s the same. Everybody has the same challenges, the same wants, the same needs. Sometimes we label it a little differently. Sometimes somebody has a little some sometimes we, you know, we have a little bit more extreme in one category than the other. Of course, right? Trauma is trauma. Some people have it a little bit harder than others, but by and large, unless we’re an outlier, right? Unless we have severe trauma, right? Physical harm, you know, you know emotional harm, like extremes, violence in our lives, like unless we have those extremes, and those are real. We shouldn’t ignore them. We all have the same wants and needs, but we’re afraid of the tension. We’re afraid of the conflict, right? We all, I tell this to every client, whenever I’m working with I’m like, right now we’re working on this problem, right? Maybe you have a you have imposter syndrome. Like, here’s the problem. You either always going to have imposter syndrome, or you’re going to learn to work through it, and then you won’t have imposter syndrome. But guess what? You’ll have something else next. Yeah, that’s why it’s called a project. That’s why I call my business the Elevate life project. Life is a project, right? You’re always working on something. My emotion that I struggle with is anger. There are times when my anger will get the best of me and all excessively ruminate for hours. I don’t rage and throw things and scream and yell and diminish people, but I’ll ruminate. I’ll just sit in it, right? And just sit in it, and sometimes silently, sit in it. It’s an emotion I have to work on, right? And I’ve been working on it for 20 years. I don’t allow it to control me, but it is my shadow. And too many times, when we look at our shadows, we look at our problems and go, Oh, those should go once those go away, I’ll be happy. Finally, I’ll be a good person. And I tell every client, your problems are not to go away. They’re what make you a better person if you look at them as opportunities and say, What can I have learned here to improve upon so as a result, because anger is a challenge for me, I have more empathy, I have more compassion. I’m able to recognize my emotions a little bit better, because I know that it’s destructive if I let my anger take hold, that’s all shadow work.

Manon Bolliger  39:20

Yeah, exactly, yeah. You know what, Michael, our time is up. Oh, really, no worries. How do people get hold of you and how? Tell us a little bit more, because I’m assuming they don’t have to be local.

Michael Kohan  39:36

They have clients in Australia. I have clients in Europe, I have clients in Europe. I have clients. And most of my client, I would say, like, 80% of the people I work with are in Canada or or the United States. Because, you know, the time zone purposes, Europe is good too, because, because of the time zone differences, like it does work a lot easier. Australia is a little tricky. I find. Sometimes I have to, like, kind of be like, it’s like Friday, when it’s Thursday. So it’s a little weird sometimes when I make it work. So yeah, I work with everybody. If you go to my website, elevatelifeproject.com, you’ll find my newsletter, my blog coaching articles, my, you know, my quiz where you can figure out your life purpose, and then additionally, if you’re just looking to explore coaching, I always offer one free coaching session how I started my business 15 years ago, so I do it to this day. No strings attached. Great.

Manon Bolliger  40:34

Well, thank you very much for sharing your time with us.

ENDING: 

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