Episode 163 - A Deep Dive into Life Transformation with Adele Kamel Whitley (Part 2)

 Good day, and welcome to The Budding Entrepreneur podcast. I'm your host, Randy Bridges. In each episode, I cover my experiences, both good and bad, of being a business builder, as well as my journey through the crazy world of entrepreneurship to reach my goal of earning $10 million a year.

All right, all right, we are on episode 163 of the podcast. Today is Friday, August the 30th, 2024. We're going to jump right into our interview with Adele Kamel Whitley.

This is part two of my interview with her. She is a life transformational coach. She focuses on high performers and professionals.

So we're going to jump right straight into the interview. How would you describe the perfect client for you? That's a heck of a question, but it's... I got asked that once, and I went, I have no idea. And it made me really think.

First of all, I do work a lot with perfectionists. So I do try to get away from the word perfect in that sense. But the perfect client to work with is absolutely someone that understands that there is another way of living life.

There is another way of thinking. You know, your thinking influences your behavior. So how can we go from the root cause and start changing that? But also in between the sessions are willing to put in the work.

Because I don't think everything happens in the session. I think everything happens in between. In the sessions is where maybe an aha moment can come, where you get an insight, or you get to learn a specific tool.

But the work is when you get out in the daily life, when you get maybe talking about getting triggered, for example. So if I help you understand your triggers, what those means, and how you can start to learn from them instead of being reactive. The work is not done when I talk to you about them.

The work is done when you go out in the world and come to a situation where you're triggered. And now how do I act? And of course, if you're 40 years old, and you've been doing something for 40 years, like a pattern of how you react to a certain trigger, it won't change in one go. It won't change in one week or one month.

And that's what I mean. The work is always going to be going out to real life. And that's also my aim with my work, is to equip you enough to have so much confidence, and believe in yourself so much, and have enough tools to know that I am so strong within me, like the inner work, the inner world is so strong that whatever the world is going to throw at me, I'm going to be able to handle it.

Sure. Yeah, that's good. I mean, that's a great point for both coaches and coachees, because they have to know that they can actually rely on you.

The commitment and the trust factor, those are heavy, because you're making a difference in somebody's life. Yeah, but I can't want it more for them than they want it for themselves, Randy. So that's what I mean.

If they're not willing to do the work, nothing's going to change. We're going to have our three months or six months program, and then they're going to go back to the world and fall into old behaviors and patterns, unless they've done the work in between. Yeah.

Yeah, the last five minutes of my mentor sessions, I have a mentor, and we usually spend about an hour. And usually like the last five minutes is where he's able to wrap everything together and put it into that last five minutes, and give it to me as a, I won't say marching orders, but he'll say, if that's really what you're trying to solve, and here's a way to go about it, I'll see you next month. And so it gives me the capability to be able to go back and look at that and kind of rethink that process and how I'm doing things.

That's really important, that last five minutes. Absolutely. Luke Reisberg said the same kind of thing, is that that last five minutes can make all the difference in a session because it helps spin that person out the gate the right way.

Exactly. I call it embodiment. How do we take everything we just talked about and embody it and go out and do it now? Right.

Otherwise it just works. Right. Yeah.

So what would you say your ultimate goal as a coach is? I think I touched that before, but my ultimate goal is to, because, again, many people come and they have a goal they want to work on, which is often an external goal. It can be get a job or get into a relationship. But my ultimate goal is and will always be to work on their inner self.

So have a look inside, reconnect you with yourself, and equip you and build you up together with you to a point where you are so confident in yourself that you don't need any external validation, any external motivation, anything from the external world to show up as the way you want to be. So my goal is to make sure that you have everything you need from inside of you, which you already have. This is the thing.

Everyone has everything already. You're already whole. What's happened along the way is we're taking on different kind of layers from society and parents and friendship groups.

And all of a sudden we don't know who we are and how to tap into that resources that we have within. So my ultimate goal is to make you so resourceful that you will go out and tackle anything and say, I got this. I got this because I believe in myself, because I know who I am.

I know what I can bring to the table. I know what I'm here to do, and I believe in myself and my capability to do this. This is my ultimate goal, because if you have that, everything will be easy.

Everything will be figureoutable, as Marie Forleo said. So essentially what you've done for yourself, you want them to come up to that same level so that they can handle whatever the world throws at them. Absolutely.

So many people say to me like, Adele, you're so brave and you're this, you're happy and you're that. And I'm like, but this takes constant work. Yes.

I work on myself every single day with a coach, without, like with a coach, but also in between working with a coach, meaning I read, I observe my thinking, I think about how I want to show up, and I show up like that instead of just react to the world. Constant work. So yes, everything that has got me to where I want to be and the fulfillment and the self-insurance that comes with that, I would love people to have that.

Yeah. That's good. That's great.

That's a fabulous goal to have, because it's not centered on yourself. It's centered on everything else by controlling what you are doing and managing, I should say, not controlling, right? Because we don't ever control anything in our life. No, exactly.

And that's important to know. But Randy, I have a fundamental belief that if we can help enough people to wake up every day to a sense of excitement and fulfillment instead of anxiety and hate and everything, I truly believe that this will have a bigger impact on the world than how people are waking up today. And I also believe in the ripple effect of helping one person.

And I've seen that in my coaches. Once I help one person, now this person all of a sudden wants to go out and talk to their mom and their sister and their spouse. Once they feel the effect of helping themselves, now do you want to go out and tell the world about it? So the ripple effect of you becoming, let's say, a better person or a better version of yourself, it will touch people around you.

So that's why I really believe that this is the work we need to do in order to have a better world. It sounds big, but this is the mission. No goal ever got achieved by being small.

No. Never did. It doesn't make any benefit.

Do you have a distinction between coaching and consulting? I know in The Wealthy Consultant, they kind of blend together, but do you have a distinction on that? Yeah. So the way I see it, and this is the way I see it, is that coaching is more me sitting here, creating a space for you, asking you the right provoking question, and drawing the answer out of you. You have all the answers within you because it's about you.

I cannot sit here and tell you what your values are, what your aspirations are, what your dreams are, what your pain are, what your fears are. I have no idea. All I can do is hold this space and ask you the questions and guide you in the direction to draw it out of you.

Consulting, I believe, is more showing you the way. So it's more like this is the 15 steps of how to build a business or how to grow on social media and how I've done something, and I'll show you how. Yeah.

This is more like giving information, right? Yeah. I don't know. What about you? What's your distinction? So somebody asked me this one time, and what I really came down to was where's the responsibility? Am I wearing the responsibility or are they wearing the responsibility? And that key, like I'll ask people a lot of times, are you more interested in doing it for yourself or being led to where it should be? And depending upon which way they say, I can then fork that conversation in a completely different way and not have to because the goals change.

When I wear the responsibility, that's an important thing. So that's kind of why I asked that question because there's a lot of people that do blend in and a lot of people that keep them separate. So it's good to know.

Yeah. But I must also add to it, like you can also not take away the experience that comes with being a person, right? So if I have a certain experience and I know that the person in front of me would be beneficial of that, I'll first ask for permission. But of course I'll share that then, right? Because that comes from having had a life and having had experiences and gone through things.

And there's always like a resonant, like people choose me as their coach because it resonates with me on a certain level. It could be based on what I've done, but also based on my energy. So of course, but I think the main difference is there.

I'll help them if I can with my experience, but the main difference is to draw out what they already know from inside of them. Yeah. So what's next for Adele? Where are you headed? Where are you going? And what's in it for you moving forward? Yeah.

So we didn't mention it, but my company is called By Yourself. And By Yourself, maybe we did it in the beginning, but By Yourself started from a fundamental... It came a lot from pain, a lot of my own pain of conforming only to realize I was living a lie. Yeah.

And By Yourself, the whole thing is that have I bought my life or have I been sold this life? Meaning your values, your stories, your beliefs, the way you're doing things, your dreams, everything that you're building your life on, are they based on what you want or have they been put upon you from someone else? Society, parents, expectations, anything. Or even what you thought was right. Have you ever sat down and asked yourself, what do I want? And am I living a life that's true to me? With that, this is my bigger mission with By Yourself, is to get people aware that there isn't a different way of living life, a life that comes from you, not from expectations, not from must, not from shoulds.

So my mission with By Yourself is to spread this message, to always tap back into yourself and reconnect with yourself and ask yourself, is this what I want? Is this serving me? Am I happy with this decision? Is this making me, getting me closer to what I want or further away? So constantly have this dialogue with yourself. So next step for me would then be to, in order to get this message out to a bigger audience, I am in the process of writing a book. Oh, cool.

Yeah. And it's also going to be in terms of speaking on stages. But I do want to run coaching at the moment.

I can only take as much, you know, I do 10 people at a time. I can't do more. I don't want to do more.

So that's why further than, if I want to spread the message beyond that, I need to do it in a way that gets to people's, like a podcast, for example, a book, speaking on stage. So that's the next step. The next step and my always step will be, how do I get the mission of By Yourself out there? Because I do believe that there's a different way of living life than many people do that is much more connected with who you are and resonates with your soul.

And living from that place, like once you've done it, I, you know, there's no better place. And I don't think anyone's on this planet to live from another place either. Yeah.

Yeah. Good. How would somebody, if they are interested in talking to you, how would they contact you? What's the best way to get ahold of you? I know you're in Sweden.

So that, well, at least I think you are. World traveler that you are. Yeah.

Right now I'm in Sweden, but like you said, we're in different places. We follow the sun. Again, I realized that that's what I love to be.

So right now my website is under construction. So it will have to be through LinkedIn. So it's Adele Camel Whitley, and I'm there every day.

I'm very active there too, spreading the message, getting it out there. So I'm more than happy for you to contact me there. I answer all DMs and yeah, whatever I can do to help.

And if you have questions around, what does it mean to buy yourself or live authentically? Or how is there a different way to living life than the way you're doing it right now? That's good. That's great. I really, you know, I really appreciate your time today.

And I, I like to get this out where people get to see the perspective of what's going on because with, with any kind of a podcast, right? It's usually kind of buried in the background. There's so much, but if you can make a difference in just one person, when they're listening to something, I think that that's so important in seeing different ways of looking at the world. That just is phenomenal.

But you know, I, I really appreciate your time today and in going through, is there anything else that we should know about you? Anything else that, that in the last say four minutes, we can deal with this? No, I appreciate you too, Randy, because it's people like you that also allow this space to talk about this, that gets the message out there. So that's, that's also why I believe we can't do this on our own. We can't be on the mission of making, you know, the world a better place.

If you want to say that on our own. So that's why I love collaborations like this. And so that's all I want to say.

Like, I think it's mother Teresa who says that, like I can do one thing and you can do something else and together we can do great things. And that's, that's why I'm welcoming whoever feel that this is resonating to, to, you know, get in touch and yeah. How, how can we, how can we support each other on this journey of tapping closer into like more into ourselves and living more authentically to who we are and from our values.

Yeah. So, yeah, thank you for your, for your work as well, Randy. Yeah.

Thank you very much. Okay. Thanks so much.

We're done with the interview here. This was a great interview. I had a great time while we were doing it.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. We're going to go ahead and head right out the door here and we're moving into the month of September. So we'll be talking next month about agile leadership.

This has been transformational. Now we're going to be moving into the agile leadership function and learning a little bit about it, sharing a little bit about it and how you might implement something like this into your business for now. That's the end of the podcast.

This is Randy Bridges for The Budding Entrepreneur, wishing you the best in your health, your wealth, your business, your family, everything about you. Take care. Have a great week.

We'll see you back here.