We recently connected with CHRISTINE BAUMGARTNER and have shared our conversation below.

CHRISTINE, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I was my first client. I married when I was 18 and divorced at 32. I’d not dated much (I met my first husband when I was 16) so I had a wonderful time dating in my 30’s and 40’s. I tell people I ‘did puberty in my 30’s.’ I learned so many helpful and important things about men and myself during these years. I never had an awful date or met an awful man (even though I dated A Lot!). I learned very early to trust my instincts and intuition.

My friends would ask me what I thought about the men I was dating, and I’d always say, ‘They’re all very nice men and I wouldn’t marry any of them.’ This was okay with me because I truly didn’t want to get married.

Then when I turned 50 I decided that I was ready to get married again and announced this to my friends. And this is also when online dating was about a year old and I started using a few of those services. Now I had an even wider range of men asking me out.

My friends asked me again what I thought of the men I was dating and I realized even though I continued to date very nice men I didn’t want to marry any of them. This seemed to be a problem since I said I wanted to get married.

I started paying attention to the traits the men had that were preventing me from wanting to marry them. I discovered the biggest trait they had in common was they all had great jobs and made great money and had no money to their name. They all had huge debt and no savings or retirements provisions. This was a problem for me because I had made good financial decisions for myself and confirmed I needed this from a man as well.

This puzzled me how I was meeting so many men with this trait even though I was living (and dating) in a pretty affluent area. This sent me to therapy to discuss this challenge and I discovered these were the traits of my father and my first husband. They were both entrepreneurs and made good money and had to savings. This helped me understand that in the back of my mind I thought ‘this is how all men were, This is all I deserve to have in a man. This is all I would ever attract and be attracted to.’

My therapist helped me heal this part of my belief and the very next man who I met made good money and had savings. Realizing how much control I have over my beliefs and who I attract and am attracted to was a very powerful discovery. And I created a process to help me look at what other traits were holding me back and with each new man I dated I found they didn’t have any of the traits I’d healed.

When my friends asked me about the men I was dating I was so happy to tell them they now had so many more of the traits that are important to me. They asked what I was doing differently, I told them about my process. I said I wasn’t sure if it would work for anyone else and they were welcome to try it. And happily, they started dating men who had more of the traits that were important to them.

And happily, my process ultimately led me to meet and marry my late husband Tony in 2007.

Once I married Tony my friends all said I needed to tell more people than just them about my process. So, I began my coaching business 14 years ago.

The first two years of my coaching I had the pleasure of working for John Gray (Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus author) and became one of his top telephone coaches. I also had the privilege of flying to northern California to make a few videos with him.

One of my favorite stories about my early dating time with Tony is; he invited me to go on a cruise with him, his daughter and a friend of hers. And on that cruise, he gave me two gifts I didn’t ask for. One was diamond stud earrings and the other was his Credit Report. I was quite surprised by both these gifts. I asked him why he’d given me his credit report. He said, ‘You were very clear in your profile and in our conversations how important being with a man who was financially secure was to you and because I’m falling in love with you, and I wanted you to see ‘I am.’

Such wonderful confirmation that I truly healed this part of me and how my process works.

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 native California gal. Even though I’ve visit many other states (all my family live a plane ride away) and other countries I’m always very happy to return to my home state. The beach, mountains and desert at such close proximity draw be back every time.

I’ve loved spending time with horses since I was a kid. I had the pleasure of riding other people’s horses all through my teens. 14 years ago I met my dear friend Donna and learned she had horses living on her property and we’ve continued our fun weekly rides since then. For over three years I volunteered at a local Equine Therapy ranch that serves children and young adults with special needs. I said for the entire time the only downside was my cheeks hurt at the end of each day from smiling so much. Recently I’ve changed to volunteering at a local organization that rescues neglected, abandoned and abused horses. It’s fun to be able to spend all my time and energy on just these very deserving horses.

My personality has always drawn people in to talk about what’s going on in their personal and professional lives. Even strangers will stop me and tell me personal things. I’m a good listener and I’m pretty non-judgmental. This was a very helpful trait when I began my successful Event Production Company (I planned parties for a living) and continued for over 25 years. And it was even more valuable when I added wedding coordination to the services I offered. I found myself (as we drove around looking at locations and meeting with vendors) discussing with my couples their; personal financial arrangements, plans for children, rent/buy homes, vacation plans, etc. I learned quickly that most had not had these conversations with each other (sadly pre-marriage counseling had gone out of fashion at this time so I found myself filling in this space). I’d talk about how important their wedding planning was and that the marriage afterwards was essential to talk about ahead of time too. Little did I know this was going to be an important foundation to my future Relationship coaching.

As I mentioned above, after I married my late husband Tony, I began my coaching business. I found coaching was the best next step for me to make in my career.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I started doing Facebook lives on a fun 26 day challenge. I learned I don’t like making videos by myself. I ‘struggled’ through doing 18 videos and was very uncomfortable every time. I even made a video about how uncomfortable I was. Lol! Ultimately there were 600 people who participated in the challenge and I found my videos often were watched by between 500-800 people. This confirmed people were definitely looking for dating advice.

I contacted a few people to help me get ‘comfortable’ with doing videos on my own (I even paid someone who’s really good at her job) and nothing worked.

This led me to go looking for someone who would want to do them with me. There was a widower on one of the Facebook groups I belonged to and he did and he created a ‘FB live’ every day! I watched him and commented on his posts. Then he mentioned he was going to talk on Valentine’s Day about finding love again and I wrote to him asking him if he’d like to do a ‘he said she said’ video that day.’ He was very happy to. We had a blast and talked for 30 minutes. So many people commented on our video and said how helpful we were so we started doing one together once a week, then three times a week and ultimately every day. This confirmed for me how comfortable I am when there is someone to talk to.

Ultimately FB change their ‘live’ platform and he could no longer invite me to be a part of his live video. I contacted a women who had interviewed me a few times on her radio station and asked her how we could create a podcast. She offered us a program on her station. Now we had an even larger audience. So fun!.

That man ultimately went on to do other things and for over two years I’ve had another dating coach as a cohost on our Let’s Talk about Dating podcast. We are on all of the major platforms; Roku, Apple, Spotify, UTube, etc.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I began my coaching business after I married my late husband. All my coaching clients were all divorced people (like me). I understood their journey and their frustrations and their pain. I was a very effective coach for divorced people.

After my husband died suddenly and a few weeks of pulling my life together enough to coach again I had a new level of appreciation for finding love. I had a client mention she was so sad for me and so worried about herself. I asked her to tell me more. She said, ‘You waited such a long to time to find Tony and now he’s gone. I’m concerned that will happen for me. I told her I wouldn’t have known this before and I now I completely understand, ‘I’d rather have wonderful love for a short time then no love (or mediocre love) for a long time.’

After a few years I discovered the widow support groups on Facebook and started getting and giving support to people who were newer in their grief journey. So many were married a very long time (30, 40, 50+ years) and I discovered I am able to help them date safely and consciously in this new world of dating as I’m healing and dating in my personal life.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ThePerfectCatch.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coachchristinebaumgartner/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ThePerfectCatch
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinebaumgartner/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Christi13863116
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@CoachChristineBaumgartner/playlists

Image Credits
I have permission to use all these pictures.