We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mollie Birney a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Mollie, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?

There was absolutely a defining moment! I first started working in the mental health field as a therapist – I specialized in addiction and eating disorder treatment and worked with families and couples in crisis, and although I enjoyed the work itself, in sessions I felt like I was constantly biting my tongue. We we’re trained to operate within a certain framework that felt a little sterile and withheld, and my work felt overwhelmingly careful. There were so many things I couldn’t say for fear they wouldn’t be clinically appropriate – I couldn’t ask disruptive questions, I couldn’t share my personal history, and I couldn’t freely share my opinion, even when it would have unquestionably changed the game!

I had worked with my own coach for about 10 years at this point, and prior to getting my masters in clinical psychology he had suggested I go directly into coaching, but I dismissed his recommendation because I felt coaching lacked credibility (despite the fact that I was working with one – hah!), but once I had a few years of clinical training under my belt he doubled down on his recommendation, and I finally took him (and myself) seriously.

He said “Mollie, stop pretending to be a therapist! Are you ready to get trained as a coach?” And that’s when it all fell into place for me. I was choked as a therapist because I wasn’t a therapist – I’d been chomping at the bit to have a different conversation all along. So I surrendered, I apprenticed under him, and I stepped on the gas of my own coaching practice. The rest is history!

Mollie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a Clinical Life Coach, and I’m always clear that’s a title I made up when I pivoted from therapist to coach. I work with over-thinkers, high-achievers and folks who have experience with therapy and are ready for a fresh approach to personal growth work. Most of my clients come to me saying “I’ve done a decade of therapy, I know WHY I do what I do – now how do I change the pattern? How do I transform my relationship with my feelings, my thoughts, my career, my habits, my communications etc.” I work individually with clients and I have an intimate virtual coaching group I offer about 6 times a year called The Living Room. I also run a supervision group for Coaches to run cases, sharpen their skills and continue their professional development.

The big difference between coaching and therapy is that therapy is all about healing and getting back to baseline, but coaching is all about disruption and growth beyond that baseline – we’re looking to shake up our patterns and study not just the content of our minds but the mechanics! And for me to do that work effectively I need the freedom to color outside the lines a bit, I need to be able to push back, to be irreverent, to be my authentic self, to challenge you, swear, or share a personal story in order to make a point. So it’s not only a different flavor of work, it’s a different kind of relationship entirely. There are plenty of therapists who practice authentically and incorporate coaching work without formally changing careers and I have enormous respect for them, but in order for ME to approach the work authentically I knew I needed to make that shift.

One of the things I’m most proud of is bringing credibility to the coaching field. Coaching is an unlicensed and unregulated field – anyone can call themselves a life coach (and they do), so it’s up to clients to be discerning about who they choose to work with. If you’re going to get your hands messy in people’s psycho-emotional worlds I feel its important to have formal training in clinical modalities and evidence-based practices, so I’m looking to bring more visibility to the conversation of coaching while also insisting upon appropriate training and supervision around the quality and caliber of work we offer our clients.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

Honestly, doing high quality work that gets my clients the transformation they’re needing has been my most effective strategy for growing my business. I do get a fair amount of new clients reaching out because they find me on Instagram or heard me on a podcast, so there’s something to be said for being bold and direct about promoting the conversation your business stands for – that’s important – but the bulk of my long-term clients are referrals from clients who told a friends “Hey you need to go see this coach.” Call me old-fashioned but I don’t think there’s a better strategy for growth than doing damn good work.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I grew up in LA in a lot of privilege and the anxiety of perfectionism was just…in the water. My parents were actors – my mom especially was in the spotlight when I was young, so we were all unconsciously trained to have this constant, stinging awareness of how we were perceived, to appear poised and successful and classy at all times. I went to a rigorous all-girl’s prep school where excellence was expected at every moment, and my experience in college and grad school were no different so it’s no surprise that I’d bring a raging case of perfectionism to my business strategy – not just the craft of coaching, but to my career itself! And it was incredibly painful.

As a business owner I felt I always HAD to be seeing clients or writing or marketing at every available moment, and if I wasn’t I must be failing. The worst of it was when I had my son and I took two weeks off for maternity leave because I had so much noise in my head insisting I had no business resting from childbirth when I should be earning and building and achieving. That’s how loud and abusive the perfectionism was!

But somewhere I’d been indoctrinated with the belief that my perfectionism was a noble quality that made me driven, and diligent – and the most dangerous lie of all – that it was the reason I’d been successful! That’s the messaging we learn when we’re raised in capitalism – many of us fall for the lie that rest is indulgent, unproductive and something to be ashamed of. And perfectionism can be so productive that it’s weirdly celebrated, and hard to let go of as a compulsion. It’s hard to let go of any coping skill that was once productive, even when it begins to fail!

So I’ve had to discover (through motherhood, through my own personal work, and through the practice of coaching itself) that my perfectionism was just anxiety and low self-worth masquerading as discipline. I had to un-learn the version of self-discipline that was driven by fear and shame, and rebuild my self-discipline from a place of self-trust, faith in my inherent worth independent of my business success, and trust in the natural rhythm – the ebb and flow of my productivity and my business itself. Like – sure I had the discipline to take no days off, NOW do I have the discipline to practice rest as diligently as I practiced work? Do I have the freedom to be disciplined where appropriate AND undisciplined where appropriate? Or do I ONLY have the ability to be disciplined – cause that’s not freedom! There’s been a lot of unlearning around my definitions of success, happiness and my expectations of personal growth work, I think letting go of what we’ve learned is a crucial part of evolving. I’m psyched to keep my (un)education going.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.molliebirney.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/molliebirney/?hl=en
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mollie-birney-5857b2b

Image Credits

Josh Fingerhut, Natalie Kristeen