Sherry Essig With Flow Dynamix LLC

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor hear another episode of High Velocity Radio and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Sheri Essig. She’s an Executive and a Life Coach with Flow Dynamix. Welcome.

Sherry Essig: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn about your practice. Tell us about Flow Dynamix. How are you serving folks?

Sherry Essig: So I have been coaching for, oh my gosh, over 25 years now. And I work with clients who are really ready to create success and happiness without compromising who they are. I really believe you don’t have to trade one off for the other.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your backstory? How did you get involved with coaching?

Sherry Essig: So it’s a somewhat of a winding road. I can tell it in a way that sounds like a lovely, well-planned, very linear journey. But of course, most of us don’t have journeys like that. So I began my career in public accounting, and from public accounting I went into the financial services industry. And while I always really liked the people I worked with and I liked the work well enough, I was always had this feeling of, I want to do work that I really, really love. And at some point in my professional journey, I ended up relocating from LA. I am from Southern California. I’ve been working in LA since college and had an opportunity to work for a company in DC, and it turned out I wasn’t a great cultural fit with the company. I was pretty miserable. And that really was this moment of confluence with my best friend was dying from Aids at the same time, and I had just this huge moment of, wow, I do not want to. I don’t want to wake up when I am 70 years old and realize I never really had the guts to figure out what I wanted to do. So I was spending a lot of time with him at the end of his life, and there was just this moment where it struck me that he was really down to his very, very last choice in life, which was whether to end his treatments or keep hanging on. And I just had this moment of recognition of I was not really acknowledging that I had lots of choices and I had a choice to make. And so I made the decision to start really aggressively saving money and take a six month sabbatical and figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you were on that sabbatical and you were deciding what were some of the other things you were considering in addition to coaching?

Sherry Essig: Well, a funny thing happened, which was I really never ended up taking the sabbatical, I gave notice I left before I had even completed the notice I had given at work. I had a call from somebody at my prior employer in LA asking if I would come back. They would relocate me back to California, which sounded like a dream come true. Except I knew deep down inside that if I went back there, I loved the people. I would never have the oomph to figure this out. And so I said, no, it’s the hardest know of my life. And he asked if I would consider doing some consulting. And I said, yeah, and I have this really, really smart friend that also just left to take a sabbatical. And he’s like, great. And so my friend Karen and I kind of stumbled into being self-employed and having a consulting practice, which was really ironic because we’re both huge planners. And so the fact I stumbled into being self-employed still continues to amaze me all this time later. And we had have this wonderful consulting practice for little over five years. And I had this moment we were presenting to a client. It was a big financial services company. They were really happy. And I had this moment of, I’m really, really glad they’re happy. I want our clients to be, like, very pleased with the work we’re delivering. And this still is not what I am super excited about. This isn’t the impact I want to have on the world. And so it was really at that point that I said to my business partner, I, I want to take a step back. Um, maybe we could think about either doing less work or I do less work with you and choose in the same place. And so that really is when the self-exploration began, was a little over five years after I initially set out to take a sabbatical.

Sherry Essig: And through that process, what I really discovered was I really like having an impact on an individual. I went through this really amazing program called the Highlands Program. It was a very small group program at the time. It could only be led by therapists, and we did this exercise that was around. What were your favorite favorite days as you think back on your professional life? And I realized that my favorite days were really never about the kind of the core of my work. It would be when someone would come into my office and say, hey, can I just talk to you about something? And half the time I would be just shaking my head on. I don’t even know that person that well. Like, I don’t know why they wanted to come talk to me. And then when I was consulting, we would have clients who would say to me, can I put you on retainer or separate from the project? It’s really helpful to me when I talk things through with you. And I remember standing up in this small group and saying, well, this is all well and good, but how do you make a living? Like just talking to people and they’re just happened to be somebody in there. It was very early on in the coaching profession who said, well, that sounds like coaching. And of course my reaction was sports. And he’s like, no, no, no, there’s this whole field of professional coaching now. And he had a friend who lived in the area, connected me with her, and I discovered coaching. And as I started researching it, I just felt like I think this might be the thing.

Lee Kantor: So you had never been coached before?

Sherry Essig: No, I had never. I didn’t even know the industry existed. This was in like 1996, 97, maybe.

Lee Kantor: So at that point, coaching was either for the top performers or for remedial, like if somebody needed to be fixed.

Sherry Essig: Exactly. Exactly. It was just starting to be a thing. And. But you’re absolutely right. It was for the very, very, very senior executives had always had some kind of external advisor that like, ultimately became executive coaches. But like I said, my first reaction when he said coach was, sports like that doesn’t even make any sense to me.

Lee Kantor: Right? It’s kind of ironic that in sports, like almost every sport, there’s coaching is built in and nobody thinks twice about it. But in business it was like a it took a while for it to get some legs.

Sherry Essig: Right. It did. It took quite a long time. That wouldn’t happen now. Now I can just say to somebody, I’m a coach and they know exactly what I’m talking about.

Lee Kantor: Right? Right. But back then it was it was not the same. So are you seeing it in your practice? Are you seeing coaching kind of going to all levels or it’s still primarily mid to upper management that it gets involved in coaching?

Sherry Essig: Um, I don’t know that I have a great benchmark for that because I work with clients that come to me as individuals. Sometimes their companies are paying for it, but I don’t come in through the company. And so having said that, just being in the industry and knowing lots of HR people, it’s definitely goes deeper into companies than it used to. It’s one thing that I think has dramatically changed is it’s not seen as remedial anymore.

Lee Kantor: Right? I think that’s that’s over with. Uh, hopefully. Um, but maybe maybe not like with private equity boards or things like that that have plugged people in or they just acquired a company, maybe they use it in that regard, uh, to get the alignment they need or the culture they want.

Sherry Essig: Yeah, I think that’s true. Again, that’s not my area of expertise, but I do think that happens. And I don’t think of that as remedial at all. That’s really more on helping people navigate a new culture, right. Or bringing disparate teams together. And so But I haven’t. I haven’t heard for a while of giving somebody a coach because they’re failing.

Lee Kantor: Right. Yeah. Like fix Bob that that’s not happening. That’s not happening.

Sherry Essig: Exactly.

Lee Kantor: So now when you’re working with people, how are people finding you? Is it just kind of word of mouth?

Sherry Essig: At this point, it’s very word of mouth. It’s either one of my clients will refer somebody or somebody I know will refer somebody. And sometimes it’s actually someone I know will reach out and say, hey, I’ve got this going on. Can we talk about a coaching engagement?

Lee Kantor: And that’s interesting as well, because at some point some people, um, aren’t bragging about needing help in areas. Um, like a lot of people who have personal trainers or coaches, they don’t, you know, kind of lead with that. They they don’t want people to know they’re getting help on the side.

Sherry Essig: Yeah. I don’t really see that anymore. I. I don’t. Let me. Let me say that a little bit differently. I don’t quite see it that way anymore. I think that we culturally have evolved to asking for help is not a bad thing. I think people will still individually struggle with, oh God, I hate having to ask for help. But we live in a in a culture, at least here in this country, that’s much more oriented now around self-development.

Lee Kantor: And what part of the country are you working in?

Sherry Essig: I mean, I live in Raleigh, North Carolina. I have clients all over the country.

Lee Kantor: Oh, and then is it industry agnostic, your work?

Sherry Essig: Yes, yes, my work is much more person specific than industry specific.

Lee Kantor: And what’s kind of the challenge that they’re typically coming to you with.

Sherry Essig: So I would say everybody’s details are different, but it normally Involves feeling stuck in some way. The people I work with are used to being. Being able to solve problems and they tend to be successful people. And so it’s a frustrating experience around. I’m just feeling really stuck. And that stuck. Could be anything from. I want to make a career transition to. I am so out of alignment in terms of my time. I am just working all the time and I’m not great at boundaries, and I have a lot of fear about saying no. But if I don’t. If I don’t create a different way of moving through my life, I’m going to get sick, right? Or I am going to miss out on seeing my kids grow up. And so it always comes back to feeling stuck in some way and being really frustrated about not being able to get unstuck.

Lee Kantor: So what are symptoms of stuck?

Sherry Essig: Well, I’ll. I’ll speak to my own personal symptoms. When I feel stuck. I’m frustrated. I’m annoyed. I’m stressed. And I think there’s. I think that’s pretty universal of this sense of I. I keep saying I want to fix this or change this or resolve this, and I’m getting sick of hearing myself still having that same conversation with myself.

Lee Kantor: But how do you differentiate that just from this is just life?

Sherry Essig: Well, it’s a really good question because all of those things are part of life. But a lot of it is how are you navigating it? Are you? So I have a phrase I use. I used it as my tagline for a long time. I had a trademark for a long time, and then I realized I didn’t really need to be paying for the trademark anymore. But I very much believe that the way you live your day is the way you live your life. And I will. I will often have a new client, or if I’m doing a presentation or a program, have people take out a piece of paper and write down five words that describe the way they want to live their life. And so people will write down things like, you know, happy or, um, fulfilled or calm or, you know, just any kind of infinite number of adjectives. And then I’ll have people take out a piece of paper and write down five words or phrases that describe the way you live your day, and they will be things like stressed, harried, frustrated, overwhelmed. And I’ll make the comment that the reality is the way we live our days is the way we live our life. And so I focus a lot on really getting into all the micro choices that we are making day in and day out. And that ranges from everything to mindset to being aware. You’re even making a choice, recognizing that every yes you say is a no to something else.

Sherry Essig: And so are you really being conscious of the tradeoff that you’re making? And is that the tradeoff you want to make? Some of it is. Looking at the stories you tell yourself. I worked way too much in my corporate life, and it wasn’t at all because I thought I was indispensable. It was that I’d look around and see that something needed to be done, and nobody else was doing it. And I had the script of, well, if nobody else is going to do it, I have to do it. When that was me making that up. And so we all make just a bazillion choices every single day. And a lot of times we’re not even aware. And I think it’s those micro choices that impact our life the most, right? It’s not the choice around should I move? Should I take a new job? Uh, should I, um, start dating this person? Those we tend to make with some consciousness. But it’s the. It’s everything from the way I choose to spend my time and how I choose to interact with people and the mindset I choose to hold. And I think when you really look at that all of a sudden, first of all, we have a lot more agency around that and feel a lot more like, okay, I can control this, I can control that. And it starts to spill out into feeling a lot less stuck.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you find that a lot of it is just what people are paying attention to. Like they’re not focusing maybe on all of the things that they should be grateful for, and they’re focusing on the things that are irritating them. Like you mentioned earlier, like they’re saying I’m stressed. I’m, you know, I’m anxious. Whatever the the issue is when you’re asking them to describe their day, but how they’d like to live is more in, you know, gratitude and appreciating things, but they’re just not paying it. Like good things are happening throughout the day. They’re just not seeing that, and they’re just putting attention into the things that are stressing them out.

Sherry Essig: Right, absolutely. I mean, it’s it’s it’s really hard to pay attention to everything all at once unless you are really mindful of saying, okay, I’m feeling really frustrated. Let me think about why am I feeling so frustrated? And I think gratitude is such a powerful skill and to be able to take a look at something like that and say, well, let me think for a moment what might what might be some of the good things happening right now. I don’t think that means that being grateful for everything means you might not have some legitimate frustrations. But if all you’re focusing on is the things that don’t feel like they’re working, that is part of what makes it really hard to to move forward and to get unstuck. So getting unstuck, I do want to say getting unstuck does not always mean dramatic change. For some people it means dramatic change. But it often doesn’t mean dramatic change. It’s often an internal shift or a recognition of I’ll just use boundaries as an example, because a lot of people struggle with it of, wow, I have really been had a lot of fear about saying no or making up a lot of things about what will happen if I don’t agree to this, or if I show up differently than that.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, I think a lot of life is just how you kind of frame things and, you know, like you can say, oh, uh, every day I’m stressed because I was sitting in traffic. Or you can say, wow, I get to sit in traffic and I get to relax and do deep breathing exercises like it’s the same activity. It’s just how you’re framing it.

Sherry Essig: Exactly. And what you’re saying is such a perfect example of being really mindful of the choices you’re making when you’re sitting in that car. Nobody’s making you think about anything a certain way. Right. So you are what you’re describing is you’re choosing to look at it as, oh, I like this transition from X to Y or oh, I’m so annoyed at all these people around me. That’s a choice.

Lee Kantor: Right? Yeah, that’s what I mean. That’s helped me over the years, is just reframing things to something positive instead of just kind of sitting there in stress or anxiety when like you can look at things differently, whether there isn’t one way to see something, right?

Sherry Essig: I have a really good friend who will often say that when when you’re if she’ll use it as a metaphor, that if you’re sitting in traffic or you’re on the freeway and somebody comes flying by and you’re just thinking, oh my God, what a jerk. She said, I go to the assumption of, huh? Maybe that is somebody who just went into labor and couldn’t wait for an ambulance to come, and their partner is flying to the hospital. And that’s such a great example of reframing when in those cases, we’re making it all up anyway, we don’t actually know what’s happening with someone else, right?

Lee Kantor: It’s your own kind of, uh, fantasy.

Sherry Essig: Absolutely.

Lee Kantor: Now, let’s talk a little bit about the podcast, uh, the perfectly imperfect journey. How did that come about?

Sherry Essig: Well, I will often say it is very much a product of the pandemic. So one of my really good friends, in fact, the friend who has the uses as the metaphor, the person is on the way to the hospital to deliver a baby. She and I had been kicking around the idea of doing a podcast for over a year. We we met. She lived in Raleigh. We’re both from California. She moved back to California. We’d done some work together, and we were kicking around ways that we could do something professional together. And we landed on the idea of a podcast. We were both like, that sounds great. Yes, let’s do that. And we were in San Diego on vacation, and we both went home and got busy and didn’t do anything with that. And every so often we’d be like, yeah, we gotta make time to talk about that podcast. And then the pandemic hit and literally the day or the week that we all started sheltering in place. She reached out and said, hey, let’s put a standing time on the calendar to start talking about this podcast. And that was in March of 2020. And initially we we were very enthusiastic. We were very excited. And we were like, we should put a date on the calendar when we’re going to launch, because that’ll give us some structure. I think August, we should be able to launch by August because this was March. Well, we launched in January of 2021. It took a lot longer to really get all the ducks in a row and have some episodes in the tank and, and all the things, and be super clear on what the podcast was going to be about. And we launched in 2021. We dropped an episode every other week and we are actually on sabbatical right now. We’ve been on sabbatical for the last three months, but we and we decided after 108 episodes we just needed to catch our breath. But it it is one of the most fun things I have ever done. And don’t talk about it as past tense. It’s just we needed to catch our breath.

Lee Kantor: So, um, how did your kind of coaching background help you launch something like this?

Sherry Essig: Um, I, I would say I don’t know that it’s the coaching background that helped us launch it. We both have really strong business backgrounds. And so I think having the business backgrounds were really helpful in terms of knowing how to tackle a project and knowing not to bootstrap it ourselves. And, you know, a lot of those things. But where my coaching background and she’s she’s an HR professional really came into play was the whole focus of the podcast, is talking to people about their perfectly imperfect journeys. We very much believe that, like nobody gets a perfect life. And it is often in the hard stuff that we get our most profound and dramatic opportunities for growth and development. And so I think for both of us, our backgrounds really gave us a lot of skills around being able to have those conversations with people and to be able to go really deep with people really quickly.

Lee Kantor: And then what were some of the kind of memorable key learnings you’ve gotten through that, learning about these people in your podcast?

Sherry Essig: Well, in terms of key learnings from our guests, it just it reinforces the incredible resilience of people, the fact that it doesn’t matter what somebody’s life looks like from the outside looking in. Again, no one gets a perfect life. Everybody has a story to share. And I think what we really I mean, we both knew this, but what we were really taught time and time again is that we all have something to learn from each other.

Lee Kantor: Is there a story you can share about your coaching where you that illustrates how you’ve helped somebody get through? Maybe that, uh, place of being stuck to a new level?

Sherry Essig: Uh, sure. Let me just think for a moment. Um.

Lee Kantor: Obviously don’t name the person, but just.

Sherry Essig: No.

Lee Kantor: No, no, no, I.

Sherry Essig: Would never.

Intro: Do.

Lee Kantor: That. That challenge that they were having or the and how they were able to kind of get to a new place.

Sherry Essig: Yeah. Um, so one of one of my clients came to me because she There were a couple of reasons she came to me, one of one of which was just a lot of work stress. And she worked in corporate sales and had been in sales her entire career, and really wanted to figure out how to get better at managing her stress. And at the same time, she was also very interested in a career for when she left corporate that she could start doing well, I could start doing while she was still in corporate, and I’m going to just be vague on the the industry just because I don’t want to give too much information about about a client. Sure. But, um, but she ultimately really had to confront a lot of issues around scarcity and money fears and what Constituted security. And what’s been really exciting is she’s two and a half years now into the career in the industry that she ultimately wanted to go into. She has just been knocking it out of the park, and what’s been super interesting for her is to see how some of the things that she attributed to corporate cultures and, um, not being your own boss and some of those things she’s discovering like, oh, wow, I did a lot of that to myself. And it sees some of the same stuff show up for her when nobody is telling her what to do. Right. She does not have a boss. And and so it’s been just such a privilege to watch her thrive in this and to watch her. So I don’t know that enthusiastic is the right word. I will certainly say I don’t like go tackle my own stuff enthusiastically. But to see how motivated she is to keep stretching and keep growing. She’s got a big, huge goal out there for herself and her recognition that if she really wants that. This is the personal stuff she needs to work through. And this is a good example of why I so deeply believe that personal growth is professional growth. They’re not two different things.

Lee Kantor: And they can live in harmony.

Sherry Essig: Absolutely. I mean, professionally, I mean, there’s a side of professional growth around specific skills or, you know, technical stuff. But the way the kind of leaders we are and the way we navigate in our environments, that’s going to show up no matter what environment we’re in.

Lee Kantor: Good. Good advice. Um, if somebody wants to learn more and connect with you or somebody on the team, what is the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Sherry Essig: Uh, so the website is great. The the website is flow hyphen dynamics. Com dynamics.com. I’m going to guess you’ll have that in the show notes. And or the easiest way to reach out to me is via email email or LinkedIn.

Lee Kantor: Well Sherri, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Sherry Essig: Well, I appreciate you as well. Thanks so much for having me on.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.