We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Christie Cotcher, M.A., LMFT a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Christie, thanks for joining us today. What’s the best advice you ever gave to a client? How did they benefit / what was the result? (Please note this response is for education/entertainment purposes only and shouldn’t be construed as advice for the reader)
Managing stress and burnout is do-able! It’s about starting small with things you can control and using self-care in ways that make sense for you. It could look like not answering emails outside of work hours, taking micro-breaks during the day to breathe and regroup, having that conversation you’ve been avoiding so you don’t have to stress about it anymore, or finding moments to do something frivolous simply because you love it, as well as looking into larger and more holistic changes you might need to make things feasible. Self-care acts put something back into your emotional bucket and free up your mental real estate, which helps to create a sustainable approach to living and maintaining your well-being. When exploring self-care, the number one blocker that comes up for folks is feeling guilty or that they haven’t earned the right to rest, and when that comes up I invite them to challenge that. Rest, like water, is not a reward or something we earn, it’s a vital need. We have to have it to survive. And we deserve to not only survive, but to thrive. Removing the moral imperative around acts of caring for ourselves and our needs, i.e. reframing self-care not as selfish but as an act of self-preservation, is often a pivotal step to fostering work-life balance and sustainability in our lives and careers.
I worked with a woman who was a manager at a large corporation in their creative department and was feeling burnt out, overwhelmed, and exhausted. She knew it was time for a change but wasn’t exactly sure how to make that happen. Using this advice helped her to take time off without feeling guilty, to feel present and refreshed when she rested, and confident to use her personalized and pragmatic tools to navigate stress. Her biggest takeaway was to prioritize her needs, and to be able to, as she put it, “finally figure out how to put myself first.” By doing this, she felt significantly more capable to handle challenges, to identify and solve problems in the moment (rather than stacking them on top of an ever building to-do list), and to take the next steps in her career she had been avoiding due to fear and fatigue. She was able to make plans and take action in remarkable ways that she wasn’t previously doing, and felt a lot more joy in her life as a result.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m a Self-Care Coach for Burnt Out Professionals and I love what I do. Through individual and group remote coaching, I help professionals prevent and manage stress and burnout, cultivate resilience, and create a sustainable work-life integration that supports their well-being. With 15+ years of mental health experience as a clinical therapist and coach, I support my clients to clarify and connect to their needs and priorities, build personalized and practical skills, and move from surviving to thriving by using their customized self-care techniques to flourish and feel in control of their time and energy. I love to connect with folks so I offer a free Discovery Call for anyone interested to learn more about how coaching works, to explore their goals, and talk about the next steps for them. There’s nothing more satisfying than witnessing someone’s lightbulb moment and knowing I had a part to play in that. I’m really lucky to have my job and get to do the work that I do, and I’m proud of creating a space where clients can show up where they are, as they are, in a non-judgmental place to talk about what matters to them and sprinkle in some humor, joy, and fun on their way to progress.
As a California native with a B.A. in Psychology from UCD and a M.A. in Counseling from UNR, I trained in trauma-informed and mindfulness-based approaches serving marginalized communities, and developed a curriculum and trained health care professionals on protective practices to prevent and treat burnout during my therapy internship. As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, I continued to teach professionals to cultivate resilience and effective responses to stressors to create work-life alignment and well-being. After a decade of clinical experience and a personal journey with burnout, I found my passion for coaching and helping folks navigate the modern world and their careers in healthy and affirming ways. Outside of work, I’m passionate about human rights movements, and challenging toxic/oppressive policies and systems using human-first approaches. You’ll also find me on a dance floor, swimming in a river, or singing my lungs out as I drive with my windows down, my apologies to anyone listening!
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I had to unlearn that if I could just work harder and ignore some of my needs and boundaries to get things done, that I could solve all of my problems through sheer effort and willpower alone. At the time, I was working in a very demanding job, dealing with my own health issues and family conflicts, along with the regular tasks of living, and one afternoon it hit me that this way of doing things wasn’t going to work. I realized that my pace and the energy I was exerting, all driven by the expectations I was putting on myself, just wasn’t sustainable. Something was going to have to give or I was going to end up in serious trouble with my health, my relationships, or with my well-being in general, and I didn’t want to have to pay that price. So instead of going back to my old ways of doing things, I committed to figuring out a healthier way to accomplish my goals. I learned how to assert and honor my needs and wants, to ask for help, and to rest without guilt, which gave me more zest and focus to get things done. I started to make one day of the week just for recharging, put limits on my work hours, delegated out some tasks, started saying “No” more often, and customized my schedule in ways that were more doable for my night owl tendencies. In essence, learning to work smarter, not harder, helped me be so much more efficient, effective, and productive with my time and energy, and I felt so much better! Putting those skills into action brought me back to a place where I felt resourced to handle challenges and energized to go after what was important to me. I have so much gratitude for the mentors that helped me to learn these strategies and I really want to pay that forward by showing others these techniques.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to change careers and start my own business, what a journey that was! As my world came to a halt, it gave me a powerful moment to reflect on my decade-long career as a Marriage and Family Therapist. For the first time, I was able to slow down and feel the full effect that experience had on me. All the joy and sorrow I had shared with clients, the tremendous impact that work had, and the effort and toll it took, not just from the work itself, but also the organizational and systemic constraints and demands that made the job so much harder. I realized I was at risk of burnout and needed to do something about it to protect my career longevity. And that until I addressed this, I couldn’t “vacation it away” because I’d always return to the same old problems. So I made a pros and cons list of all the aspects of my career I loved, was indifferent to, and truly disliked, immediately noticing that the elements I resented were the ones that had the most impact on me. Diving deeper, it became clear the key to my burnout wasn’t necessarily how hard I was working, but how I felt about the work I was doing and that addressing my resentments was imperative to preventing and resolving burnout. Sometimes self-care is doing the tough stuff that supports our overall wellness in the long-run.
Looking back over my career, I fondly recalled the successes I had working with folks on managing self-care and burnout, including the specific steps on how to do so. Remembering how much I loved being that action-oriented inspired me to transition from therapy to coaching full-time. It has been so wonderful and fulfilling sharing clients’ journeys with them, and doing so as a business owner on my own terms, which has been a perfect fit for my skill set and my love to serve. I feel so energized watching my clients thrive and succeed in their more balanced and sustainable approaches to being a modern human.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.christiecotcher.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/christie_
cotcher_coaching/ - Facebook: www.facebook.com/
ChristieCotcherCoaching - Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/christie-cotcher-coaching/