We were lucky to catch up with Kurt Bush recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Kurt, thanks for joining us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?
Once my friend and co-founder, Chris Godfredsen, and I decided that we’d start our own coaching practice together, we knew the practice’s name would be important and difficult to nail down! What we also knew was that we started our practice because we believe that transformation (that is, transformation in all aspects of our lives) is possible even today. That mindset led us to think about incorporating a butterfly into our practice’s name. The Brimstone butterfly is a species of butterfly found outside of the U.S., but they are the longest living butterfly of all butterflies. That captures exactly what we hope for ourselves and for every client we have the privilege of working with: A long experience of transformed life!
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
By education and trade, I’m an ordained minister, and so most of the last decade or so of my career, I led a couple of different local churches, and led the volunteer leaders of those organizations. And as with so many things, the pandemic (along with some denominational strife at the time) in 2020 brought an immense leadership challenge. As any leader can attest, that time was a time when good leadership looked like being the calm presence in a room. Leadership looked like helping other leaders understand and navigate their own anxiety. And leadership looked like coaching those leaders when they knew that they were showing up in places and spaces in ways they didn’t understand or prefer.
While I would never want go back to leading during a global pandemic, my leadership grew immensely, and I realized that I REALLY loved the work of helping other leaders grow in self-awareness, understanding why they feel like their leadership and life are stuck, and helping them find a new, more preferred way of being. As we got further away from the immediate effects of the pandemic, the culture of the organization I led had really taken hold, and the leaders were coaching one another, meaning that I just had less and less opportunity to coach in the way I loved to coach. I knew that for my own fulfillment and alignment with my skills and passions that I needed to do more of the coaching I loved than maybe my current role in the church would afford me.
So early in 2024, I called a good friend of mine (Chris Godfredsen) and asked, “Hey, do you want to launch a coaching practice with me?” To which he said, “NO!” But luckily, after about 37 seconds, he’d changed his mind! So we began the hard work of building a practice, a client base, and a business all while doing the coaching work I loved doing! I think Chris and I would both say we’re made to coach in the way Brimstone Coaching Group allows us to coach!
Throughout 2024, we began to get clearer on who Brimstone Coaching Group is and what makes us stand out as a coaching practice. At a high level, we’d say that we exist to help leaders who feel exhausted, frustrated, and overloaded begin to feel contentment, fulfillment, and wholeness. We believe that most adults and leaders are just white-knuckling their way through life, merely surviving. Not because they’re bad people, but because they don’t know any other way of “adulting.” I believe that to be true, because for a long time, that was Chris and me both. Just hanging on for dear life amidst all the demands of leadership, family, and social lives. But we believe so deeply, like deep down in our core, that we are not created for white-knuckling! We believe that we CAN stop doing that, and we help our clients do just that.
Another distinctive that makes BCG who we are is a core belief that the way we show up today (leading/working/being with family/playing) is deeply impacted by the things of our first formation; those years early in our lives when we learn how to be safe, get accolades, and find our place in the world. Unfortunately, many of those ways of being that served us well as younger versions of ourselves don’t serve us well today as adult leaders. We’d actually say that often those ways of being get in the way of our own growth and thriving. In mid-2024, we developed a core curriculum and workshop that helps people identify Protective Promises they made to their younger selves. These are things like “I will never allow myself to be embarrassed” or “I will never appear dumb in front of peers.” Again, promises that probably served us well earlier in life, but are simply not needed in the same way today. Then, once those are identified, we help clients navigate the creation of more Purposeful Promises to replace those old and tired Protective Promises. Lastly, we guide participants in establishing Preferred Promises that will help cement and crystallize those new, more preferred ways of showing up in the world to be more aligned with their most authentic selves.
The last important piece that sets BCG apart is our Transformational Equation: E+R=T, or Encounter + Reflection = Transformation! If we desire transformation, to move from white-knuckling to thriving, then we believe we must engage in some different practices and rhythms. Each of us has hundreds of encounters each day that threaten to stir us up, and that have the potential to cause us to react out of an old Protective Promise or anxiety. That’s likely a default response, not an intentionally aligned response. When those encounters inevitably happen, we invite our clients to reflect on those encounters. What happened? Who was involved? What emotion did I feel? What did I do? And maybe most important, am I happy with my response, and would I do it the same way next time? We believe that Reflection is as close to a silver bullet of transformation as we can give clients, because once we see our patterns of showing up in encounters, we can’t unsee them. We can, however, transform them!
All that to say, in the fall of 2024, I stepped away from my role in the church to give full-time energy and effort to operating and growing Brimstone Coaching Group, the Brimstone Coaching Podcast, and to give full attention to the coaching I so love doing! It’s just a gift to wake up every day and do what I love to do!
I’m really proud of the practice we’ve built and the philosophy and methods we’ve created. We believe that the answer to getting away from white-knuckling life and growing leadership capacity is already in our clients, and it’s our job to simply ask the right question at the right time that unlocks it in them! There’s nothing that makes me prouder than seeing the “ah-ha” moment when a client unlocks a connection between a present-day response and an old Protective Promise!
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I really do believe that this work of self-discovery and self-awareness using E+R=T to understand the Promises we’ve made and can make will change the world! I believe that it changes what it means to be a leader, our workplaces, our homes, and all the places we go. I want to be really careful, neither I Chris nor I are changing the world, but I very much do believe that when our clients grow their own self-awareness and seek transformation, the places around them literally transform with them over time!
BCG does both 1:1 coaching as well as group coaching, and offers a FREE inquiry call to anyone interested in pursuing a coaching relationship with us!
How’d you meet your business partner?
I met my co-founder (Chris Godfredsen) at the very beginning of the process of getting my Master’s degree, later in life. Chris and I both entered into seminary studies together as “second career” types of students, and were pretty unaware of what that would mean for our lives, or how we’d manage to juggle the demands of graduate studies, full-time leadership roles, and family commitments. That was about a decade ago, so the details are a little fuzzy, but what I do remember is that we bonded really quickly over the work we needed to do in our studies. We started “hanging out” virtually to work through some of the most challenging coursework we needed to slog through.
All the while, Chris had been engaging in a guided process of self-discovery and growing self-awareness, and I could tell that his life was changing. And like any good friend would do, Chris said, “I’d love for you to join me in this process of self-discovery, since it’s had such an impact on my life.” Of course, I said, “Nah, I don’t need that!” Little did I know, I very much did need that. I was barely surviving my graduate studies and all the other demands on my time and energy.
Eventually, I joined him on the journey of self-discovery and transformation. Through some wise coaches, we both experienced deep transformation! From there, we began coaching and facilitating similar journeys with people through an organization called Faithwalking. We did that together, but separately, for a number of years, until finally, in 2024, we decided to go all in on our own coaching practice!
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
While I certainly think this is an ongoing thing for us, as I’m not sure we’ll ever feel like our reputation is fully where we want it, I think our willingness to be curious and to listen has had the greatest impact on how people see the Brimstone Coaching group.
I think there are a lot of voices “out there” that claim to know all the answers as they pertain to leadership coaching and the work of growing self-awareness. Our posture truly holds to the belief that situations and people are complex, so it’s rather presumptuous to think that we can simply prescribe cookie-cutter answers to people. We CAN, however, assume a posture of genuine curiosity and listen well to help clients unlock the solutions that are already inside of them.
I think that philosophy of being a wise guide WITH our clients rather than a “giver of answers” or “distributor of step by step guides” really has helped shape our reputation in a positive way.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.brimstonecoachinggroup.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brimstonecoachinggroup/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brimstonecoachinggroup
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kurt-bush-7b345830b/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Brimstone-884
- Other: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4dlfGR8hGw2NJhSSGEPzOI?si=d6cd07a2c7df4fce
