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Interview Transcription
Morris: Welcome to CreateGrowProfit: Coaching Stories, I’m Morris from creategrowprofit.com and today I’m speaking to Anita Tomecki. Anita is a human behavior expert. Anita, thank you so much for being here today. Where are you calling in from?
Anita: Thanks for having me. I’m calling in from Barry.
Morris: Anita, what led you to become a human behavior expert that you are today?
Anita: So the story goes when I was from a very young age. I was very interested in human behavior so I used to question people a lot and I’m not sure exactly what age from. But I remember being quite young and being asked if I was going to be a police detective because I was so nosy. So the way that I kind of piece it together is you know I grew up watching humans and watching adults. And I picked up a lot that people didn’t seem happy. I’d look around me from quite a young age and think there’s got to be more to life than this. I probably then started questioning people in some way to find out what else there might be to being human other than this thing that just didn’t seem like such a happy place.
So that was kind of the basis of it and then as I got older, I started seeing a therapist myself and I saw her for eight years and I always wanted to be in her chair. I wanted to be the one asking the questions because obviously I loved asking questions. But I always thought because I’ve done a degree at this point, I’ve been to university I had a full-time job a corporate job at the time and I thought it was going to be far too hard to ever start again. Then some life changes happened, came to the end of a long-term relationship and ended up moving to Australia.
As soon as I got to Australia, sorry about that, there was a lot of people there that were working as coaches and what I realized within that was that they didn’t all go to university and study psychology for years. They did some shorter courses and people have mixed opinions on this kind of course and coaches. But yeah they’ve done these shorter courses and I was like “Okay this is possible” and so I went and I did some shorter courses but I did these short courses for a period of seven years. So I studied more than I’d ever studied for my degree or ever studied at school. School didn’t really interest me too much apart from questioning people and so yeah I studied this thing called human behavior through various courses for the span of seven years.
But started coaching very quickly at the start of those seven years and started practicing and just getting in front of people as quickly. And the way that I see, it people say “Oh how long have you been doing this” and it isn’t seven years because I’ve been practicing asking questions which is what my job is since I was very young. So I’m very experienced at this much more than some of the people that came on to the courses and went “How are you picking this up so quickly?” I’m like “Because I’ve been doing it a lot longer than you”.
Morris: Practicing the coaching since a young age before you even knew it was coaching I guess.
Anita: Exactly. Because coaching is asking questions. That’s the essence of coaching. It’s not having the answers and that’s why I always say within what I do, I call myself a human behavior expert, an the expertise for me isn’t in knowing or guessing things about people. The expertise is in being able to ask the questions and allow the person to find their own answers. Because that’s what I thought I was an expert in before is, I thought I knew people but I was guessing, whereas now you know the real expertise for me is asking the expert questions so that they can find out about themselves. I don’t have their answers. I just have some questions that can help lead them to their answers.
Morris: When you had all those questions at a young age and then you’ve studied human behavior for so many years, were some of your questions answered in those studies?
Anita: That’s a great question. I would say that the questions that I would ask people growing up were all about their lives. The questions that I had internally that I didn’t necessarily ask people as I was growing up was there’s got to be more to this life in theory. How do I become the best version of myself? How do I become a happy human being? And so for sure through studying this stuff, I definitely have learned how to become a better version of a human being, a more healthy version of a human being. And so now, for sure, when I was younger it was like happy. Hw do I become happy? Then as I grew older and was doing this work, it wasn’t about being happy.
It was simply about getting to know myself and being a better version. This is still kind of the quest of life right now for me, whatever it’s “What’s the absolute potential of us as human beings beyond the thinking mind, beyond the torture that we put ourselves through every day in our excitements, in our anxieties, in the quality of our self-talk”. So it moved from happiness because happiness is just a construct in itself to what’s the possibility of us in the healthiest way.
Morris: When you talk about there’s got to be more to life than this, is that similar to talking about life purpose?
Anita: Yes but even beyond that.
Morris: Even beyond that, okay?
Anita: Yeah because what do you mean, so this will be interesting. What do you mean what would you say life purpose means?
Morris: Yeah that’s why I brought it up because coincidentally, this weekend I had a conversation about the question of what is the purpose of life and when I thought about it and an answer I really liked and that would be my answer is, the purpose of life is to always learn and improve. And it’s to me, it sounded like you were going in that direction as well when you said “How can I become the best version of myself or live up to my potential”. However, what surprised me is when you said not just the potential right like up here, so what other potential does a human have if it’s not just you know what we learn and what we can physically do?
Anita: We could take it to the levels of once you’ve got beyond that and you could say it’s kind of a process. So we go through life. We have our purpose and it’s to learn, it’s to be the best version, to learn as much as we can. Then say you’ve learned as much as you can or your purpose is to you know to help people or to serve people, to coach people whatever it is. But then you kind of look at it and then you go”Well you know what if I lose my voice one day or something, does that mean that I have no purpose in life anymore?”
So then once you start getting to those questions and what if I get through and I’ve learned everything that I told myself 10 years ago, I was going to learn so then what is it? So it just shows you that purpose is a construct that we’re constantly making up and changing. And some people you know there’s nothing against that but some people can tell themselves a story that they’ve purpose and they’ve got this gift in the world of doing something and then something happens to them and they can’t do that anymore. So then we’re just faced with this disappointment and this like unworthiness potentially within ourselves that we are unworthy now.
Because that purpose is out of our control, out of our hands so then the way potentially to you know we could start looking at it, you know once we get past this stuff, is this our purpose simply to be here? The fact that we’ve even made it here as a human being. Like when a baby’s born into the world are we looking at that baby going, is it going to be a CEO? Is it going to help people? I mean some people might if they’re quite high achievers or are we mostly looking at this baby like a puppy or something? Just seeing a bundle of you know existence that is beautiful and having no expectations of it. So it’s kind of going at what point does those expectations change of us to their need to become something that is doing something to contribute in the world? Is the contribution in itself being here to have made it here in theory? To be able to breathe? Is that not purpose enough?
Starting to look at it and you know and once we can get to the point where we’re getting a bit deep here but it’s like once we can transcend the thinking mind and have moments of stillness and silence, then we get to see the beauty and the purpose of what’s already happening in front of us with without needing the pressure of what we need to do in this world.
Morris: Yeah that makes total sense to me especially the part when you said simply being here is our contribution. I mean you didn’t say that as a fact but you asked the question and I think that is a very good question to ask. In a different interview, I heard you talk about mind patterns or thought patterns and you said that you work with your clients on 120 different thought patterns. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? I found that fascinating especially the number 120 and it feels like an overwhelming amount too.
Anita: So for those that might have heard of this, you may have, you may not have, there’ll be. I’m sure people out there who have the basis of my study were or are neurolinguistic programming NLP. Yeah, so it’s a modality that helps us to understand how we run our own minds. How do we do our thinking? How we take in the world and how we don’t see reality as it is. We see reality through the programs and the lenses of our mind so we don’t often just perceive situations and watch them play out.
We are often mostly taking in situations and making meaning of them. Yeah and the reason that we make meaning of them and the way that we’re able to make meaning of them is because of these 120 programs that have been programmed into us in the first seven years of our lives. So as I work with people, what I’m working on is helping people to see that this is what happens to us. As I said before, we’re born in theory is this blank canvas. We may have come in with past stuff so that’s another thing but let’s just say for the sake of this, we’re coming in as a fairly blank canvas without too much memory of maybe what was gone on before, whatever. And then we’re now around 8 months old, we’re now able to start holding things in mind more.
And the programming basically starts from there. So between a few months old and seven years old, we’re starting to program ourselves with these 120 programs but we are holding some of these programs much more strongly than others. An example would be are you an optimist? Are you a pessimist? Really simplistically? Are you judgmental? Are you more on the less judgmental side? Let’s say, are you a people-pleaser or are you more disagreeable? Yeah, are you confident? Are you not so confident? These are a few of the 120 programs and so within that, what’s happening is we are watching and we’re taking in the world. For example, we may be watching our mom, the extremely worst-case scenario thinking. More on the pessimistic side and as we watch her, we are matching her behavior and we’re copying that. Then we may become the pessimists. We may be watching her and go no thank you, I don’t want to be like that and we become overly optimistic.
Overly best-case scenario is because we want to get away from her pessimism. So we are getting extreme within our programs based on what we’re taking in the world and some programs like you may go well, I do a bit of optimism and a bit of pessimism, so you’re not strongly driven by one end. Some people will be but you may be more strongly on one end of say being a people pleaser. And at the other end, there might be you know the disagreeableness, you’re a people pleaser. You don’t disagree whereas someone else may be really disagreeable and find it hard to be people-pleasing. Within this work, we’re identifying the main drivers so we’re usually working on around 10 of these drivers, 10 of these ends, and what we’re trying to do is understand the parent that we’ve got it from or the parent that we’ve got it not from because we’ve gone against them.
We’re looking at, is it fully serving us or might want to be a bit more in balance? So if I’m a real people pleaser would it help me to start to practice disagreeability a little bit more? If I’m highly disagreeable and it’s affecting my relationships because I can’t agree with someone, do I want to maybe lean in a bit more to the people-pleasing side so that I have choice rather than being driven by my parents or you know whoever it was that I was watching as I grew up?
Morris: And so it is possible to change these programs?
Anita: Absolutely!
Morris: How long does it usually take to reprogram some of these programs?
Anita: I mean it depends on the individual. It depends on how much you enjoy it even though it’s kind of not serving you fully but there’s something you know how much are we? Is there a bit of an addiction to it. So everyone’s different. I mean I work with people on a minimum of a three-month program. So within that time you’re going to have a change, you know. It may not be in all your programs but you’re going to have some change. In some of them you know some people stay for three months. Most of my clients are with me at least a year. I’ve had some for four years, others say a year. Some do the three months but you know three months is a minimum to get some start getting some real awareness and flexibility.
And it also depends on how much you practice it. Every time a client leaves a session so say someone is a people pleaser, there’s homework every session. One week’s homework’s going to be to try and practice saying no to someone. And they’re like “Oh God you know I don’t know if I can do that” and it’s like then they go away and they usually come back going yeah that was difficult but I feel really free after that. And so as long as they keep practicing that, they’re going to get flexible a lot quicker than if they come back and go I didn’t even bother practicing it.
There are amazing tools here but I obviously I’m not responsible for anyone’s change and that sounds but I don’t take credit for it and I also don’t take you to know anything when it doesn’t because I know that the tools I’ve got, they work. But they only work if the client wants that change. So it is true it’s like you know as coaches, we can go “Oh my God I take all the credit and I’m changing people”. You’re not. We’re not changing people’s lives more than they’re changing their own lives. So we’re doing it together but I don’t take credit for anyone’s. It’s them that are doing the hard work.
Morris: Yeah that’s so true. It’s like you know in fitness. You as a trainer, you can’t do the push-ups for your client or you can’t go running for your client. You can help them with the program but they still got to run and sweat and suffer.
Anita: Yeah and I think that’s the thing you know. I see. I do see you know that here’s you know bless everyone out there. We want to take credit for it but you can see the offense that people how people get offended as well if their clients aren’t changing or if their clients leave them because people get so attached to it being them that’s made that change in that person that the minute it goes wrong, we’re taking that on as well.
The best thing we can do as coaches is to see that we’ve got some great things and yes be proud of yourself for learning that stuff and being able to pass it on but don’t get too attached to people’s. It’s still them doing the work. The less ego we can have around it, the better we are going to as coaches as well. It’s a process.
Morris: It’s so good that you bring that up because it also applies to the stage before you get the client in the marketing and on the sales call when coaches new coaches, they have discovery calls and nobody wants to buy their package or they can’t connect on the level where it leads to a sale and there’s a lot of frustration involved in that especially when what they do know can change people’s lives but it’s exactly what you said.
Anita: It’s only going to change the lives of those that want their lives changed. Yeah, yeah.
Morris: That brings up the question of people being coachable. I really like this topic because I think different people and coaches have different opinions on this subject. So I learned that most people are not coachable and I learned that from reading and speaking to other people. But I also recognize that I learned this information from let’s say high performance coaching from that field. Whether it’s in the army or in sports or career, there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence, stories whatever you want to call it, that the most coachable people achieve the most and very few people are coachable. Hence, in conclusion, most people are not coachable. So where do you stand on this based on your experience as a coach?
Anita: I love this one because I’ve heard coaches say that they have certain clients that aren’t coachable and when that happens, that’s usually a personality clash. And I’ve taken on clients especially because I’ve heard that people said they’re not coachable and I’ve found them coachable and often it’s because what’s happening is there’s this shadow aspect in those two individuals even though a coach is meant to be the professional but if you’ve got someone difficult in front of you and you are jarring each other, the coach is going to turn around and go they’re not coachable.
And this is what I love about this work is to go put anyone in front of me, as long as they are willing to sit and talk to me, no one is beyond being coached if they really want to be. If someone’s sitting there poting blank and saying I don’t want to be coached or whatever that is. But I have never to date ever said that you know any of my clients is uncoachable even when I’ve had ones where it’s been difficult. We’ve had some really difficult times and I have gone you know I don’t know how much more I can take of this. They’re going to end up leaving me before I leave them but we’ve always got through it and they’re the ones that have been my greatest you know moments because it’s kind of a proud thing as well to go.
They’ve never been coached by anyone else. They’ve never either allowed anyone to coach them or they’ve been told they’re not coachable or they’ve walked away where is the experience with me is just to sit through it and allow it and to watch myself internally get triggered by it. But never to kind of ever say anything that’s not kind of within those professional realms to always have that compassion running even though it’s triggering me and they’re saying things about me to always be able to hold that objectivity and not allow myself even if the internal is feeling like quite shaken by it. To allow that to go like kind of thing you know so that’s kind of my thing in life.
And this is part of you know when we talked earlier about the potential of us as human beings the rest of it for me is to see that however badly anyone behaves or however much they’ve hurt people or done anything to know that they are traumatized and that no one is innately bad that there’s always something that’s happened to them that has made them the way that they are and that if someone just one person can listen and understand them however bad they’ve been, that is the potential for that person to change because they’re misunderstood. People that have done the worst things in the world, that people are never going to have no one’s ever going to be able to have compassion for.
If I can be that person to sit with them and be able to understand what they’ve done and why they’ve done it, to me, is the ending of world wars. That is just you know and that for me is why I do what I do because I I want to hear everyone’s story and I think that was part of it, for me growing up, it’s understanding what makes people do what they do. There’s always a story behind it and especially the worst things that people have done, they are going to have some serious trauma.
Morris: That is very deep especially since there is a misunderstanding behind it. So we as a coach, we feel like this person is not coachable. It actually means they’re not coachable by me right? That’s what I heard you say and the other thing I heard you say was they might choose to not be coached in this moment or they might choose to not be coached by you but it doesn’t mean they’re not coachable.
Anita: Exactly, for sure and I say that to people. Go and find someone that is if it’s not me. Then please go and find someone that is or find whatever it is whereas some people can get offended they go I can’t believe that they’ve not come in and you know but that’s ego and that’s obviously rejection and all the rest of it. But for me, it’s always, if it’s not you know this is one of my standard lines, whenever I’ve done intro calls in the past. If it isn’t me please go and find what resonates for you because that’s the most important thing you know that they find what works for them for sure.
Morris: And how did you start getting clients when you began coaching people?
Anita: Most people that I met, would be like what are you doing at the moment whatever and I was just on a sales pitch from you know but not from a way of trying to get clients, just from a way of going I love what I’m doing and if you’re asking me what I’m doing I’m giving you the passionate story of what I’m doing and that’s how I got clients.
I would meet people in the street. I was living in Bondi or was sitting on benches or sitting in calves. People would watch me and even nine years later they’d be like what do you do because all you seem to do is sit in that same place in the cafe and then there you know people would come and start sitting next to me and we’d start having conversations. I’m like yeah I’m a coach. I work a couple of hours a day. They’d be like what are you coaching? Human behavior and having these sorts of conversations, say in day out right and that’s how I would get clients.
And then I would you know social media, a few posts here and there. And then in the old days when I used to go to parties in Bondi, I’d all normally end up in a corner with someone. They’d be asking me loads of stuff and I’d leave parties with clients like it was just very organic. I’ve never paid for any, never done any paid advertising. I would run workshops as well I did quite a lot of workshops like free things around Bondi that would usually bring in a client or two.
Then it became word-of-mouth you know. A lot of my stuff now is client referrals and yeah that’s really it yeah. People would just like I’d be on say I’d be on one of my courses or something on a call and someone would hear me speaking and then they would contact me. So I think for me, I mean I do it a lot less now and I guess there is something within me that you know to speak about it passionately. I still love it now but back in the day, I was so you know this work was amazing. I just wanted to share it with everyone.
So back then I’d be talking about it a lot more and so people would be listening and they’d be coming in that way. I guess as I’ve gone on, I don’t need to be talking about it all the time anymore for one because I’ve got enough clients. They come in differently now but yeah it’s just yes social media is great but I always find that with me, my social media people don’t usually come to me really organically through my social media.
They’ve usually met me and then what would happen is I’d meet someone and they’d tell me their story and then they might be considering coaching and I would make posts based on something they told me. So it is quite sort of subtle and I would usually get someone come in from a post like I’d get like maybe a couple of likes on it so I don’t get a lot of likes or a lot of followers but it would just take that one person to see it for them to just you know become a client. That’s kind of the most important thing so yeah that’s I think a bit of a different way but it seems to be the way it’s worked for me.
Morris: I think that’s really great. I don’t do it exactly like that but very similar in the sense that whenever I create content, I created for a person that asked me the question or a conversation that I had with someone one around that topic. And in my mind, I create usually the video I create that for that person.
Anita: You love that.
Morris: It just helps me to feel better on camera when I can speak to one person and I can already before I produce it, I know this is for you, right? I’m creating this for you as opposed to a faceless audience that’s out there.
Anita: Definitely got you on that. Yeah same and I think that’s the thing it’s like for me, it’s a lot less about getting the following in theory because I know that a lot of the stuff that I do is it’s what’s known as it’s later stage so the stuff that I talk about can be quite disrupting and confronting for some people and a lot of people will sit down with me and they’ll be like you know that thing you posted the other day and they’ll get really quite mad about it and I know a lot of you know a lot of the stuff that I do compared to you know some of my other beautiful friends that are coaches that have got thousands of followers and all the rest of it but I always think like I’ve chosen to kind of keep it at a level of I don’t ever want to be popular because for me, the minute I’m popular it means that I’m not ahead of the game.
Whereas the disruption in the work that I do is because it’s ahead of what is happening in the mainstream so there’s a lot of like you know quite a few my clients that are coaches or friends that are coaches and their popularity is big because they’re at a place where I was a year or two ago and they can get a bit triggered by some of the stuff that I say and Iook at them and I just have a laugh and I’m like let’s see what you’re writing in a year’s time or in a few months time and you can see because there’s a process that we go through and people think that obviously people don’t unless you’ve studied this. It’s like IQ you know you move up the scales or if you’re at school, you’re moving up levels and within human behavior within emotional intelligence there’s a process that we go through.
There are nine stages of development mapped in one modality that I use and I watch myself as I go through those stages and I watch the people and I watch them getting annoyed and getting triggered by stuff and then I go. They’ll be at the next stage of development in a few months time and then I see them talking about the stuff that they should be talking about at this point because it’s just you know. So once you learn this stuff, you’re just seeing we’re just in this healthier type of programming let’s say. But it’s still a type of programming that we’re going through to reach enlightenment right?
Morris: Yeah yeah no absolutely! So for people listening to this, where can they find you, and connect with you?
Anita: So Instagram Facebook. My name I’m sure will be there Anita Tomecki. So yeah hit me up find me there. Feel free to send me a message, or send me a DM. Always love to you know answer people’s questions here what they like especially what they don’t like that’s my favorite topic.
Please disagree with me, argue with me. I love it. Send it all in. Yeah always you know I never get too flooded so whenever people contact me, it’s always yeah great to have that conversation. I don’t ignore anyone as long as I see those messages, so please feel free.
Morris: I’ll put the links below this episode. Go to Instagram and Facebook, check out Anita Tomecki, and anything you don’t like, comment on it and tell her. Thank you so much for being here today, Anita.
Anita: Thank you so much. It’s been amazing to finally get to do this with you. Thank you so much.
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