by Coach Tina | Feb 21, 2023 | Growth
Should you hire a coach or a consultant? Depends on what you see as the problem.
The terms coach and consultant have become very blurred. BUT for those in the field, WE know the difference! A coach takes you from point A to point B by encouraging you to make the best decision for your outcome. This is usually personal. A consultant is an expert in a particular field. They have analyzed the problem and will provide you with strategies to fix the problem. They provide solutions, not support or guidance. This is usually associated with your business.
As a life strategy coach, I tend to wear both hats at times. But I make it crystal clear without apology that I will coach you as if your life is a business! Your goals are part of a development plan. You are upper management and everyone else is either a partner, an employee, or a client. Every decision you make moving forward must contribute to your bottom line. If it’s not serving you, why are you doing it. That is a consultant mindset. 
I know it can be confusing. If you have been around me long enough, you know I teach on having a life business. Which is where you take on the mindset that your life is in fact a business and you are the CEO running it.
If you don’t like the return of investment that your business is providing, meaning you are not satisfied with your current life situation, it’s up to you to create a new strategy to move it in the right direction. I am here to help you do just that.
My ideal clients are women in executive roles, those seeking to start a business or those currently in an entrepreneurial capacity looking to bring harmony to their lives. If you fit in either of these categories, please reach out I would love to talk with you.
Until Next Time,
by Coach Tina | Jan 18, 2023 | Growth
If you find yourself dealing with anxious thoughts, unexplainable or uncontrollable sadness, moodiness, and frustration because of it, this blog post is for you.
First let me say I AM A STRATEGY COACH NOT A MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONAL
More and more of my clients have expressed how anxious they’ve become over the last couple years. I’m not a betting woman but I’m willing to bet it’s connected to the world being thrown into a pandemic and our inability to control things around us.
Stress is real. There is not a person on this earth that has not experienced some type of stress in their life. And just as many, that have stressors they are unaware of. Women often minimize their stress while men ignore it all together, which is not good for our mental health. But can we dig into the need women have of minimizing stress.
Most women wear multiple hats at the same time. We’ve become desensitized to our body’s gentle signs of stress and need more aggressive signs. The gentle nudges could look like slight tightness in our shoulder or neck, a dull headache that don’t go away quickly
, isolating ourselves from family and friends, not doing the things that normally would make us happy or excited, fatigue, constantly declining social invitations, working long hours to stay busy, inability to concentrate, avoiding phone calls, disruption in our normal routines, clutter, etc. The extremes could look like severe headaches or migraines, body pains, heart palpitations, mood swings, panic attacks, depression, uncontrollable crying, high blood pressure and the list goes on. Even though we experience the extreme, we keep going because that’s what we have conditioned ourselves to do.
Our conditioning has become the backbone that pushes us to perform day to day activities without interruption despite the extreme anxieties our body is screaming at us. The stress of the next performance or activity is pushed away with an overwhelming desire to perform and do well.
Women have this superpower of making it all seem easy, while suffering on the inside. Many of us have been going 1,000 miles a minute for so long, that when the world shut down and forced us to slow down, it disrupted our ability to cope.
As the days continued the anxieties became more apparent and frustration of not being able to shake the anxious feelings made us even more anxious. It’s a vicious cycle. But if I can be honest, much of our anxiety comes from our inability to control what’s happening. We want it stop on demand. We want it to go away by willing it to go away. And when it doesn’t, we panic. We are so accustomed to sweeping our feelings under the rug that not being able to frustrates us.
Well, that frustration only fuels it more. The way to deal with anxiety and depressive thoughts are to face them with professional help. They are NOT going anywhere until you do. Minimizing what your body is experiencing is not helping. Once you are at the height of an attack, it’s a wave you must ride. The key is to prevent it from getting to that point and I will share some tips I’ve learned to cope.
But first what do you do when you are in that attack.
- Reach out to a professional. Your friends are NOT equipped to handle a panic attack. They may have the best intentions but if they are not trained professionals, they are best holding your hand while you speak to someone that is.
- Be Gentle. Don’t beat yourself up because of what you are experiencing. Every woman in this society, experiences some level of stress every day. If there are other factors added to it like being a woman of color, a survivor or victim of domestic abuse, sexual assault or trauma, a mother, a wife, a caregiver, an employee, the level of stress is heightened. So be gentle. Remind yourself baby steps are still steps.
- Take deep breaths. You may think this does not help but it does. Take a deep breath through your nose for 5 seconds, hold it for 5 seconds and slowly blow it out of your mouth. The sensation of focusing on your breath and the distraction of doing so in 5 second increments could be enough to calm your heart rate down and release the extreme anxiety.
Let’s avoid them if possible.
There are tools all over the internet that help with dealing with anxiety and depression. But the best way is to identify the triggers that cause your anxiety and how your body reacts to them. Once you have identified what triggers you and your body’s reaction, you can possibly avoid an attack.
One of the major tips I will offer for dealing with triggers and reactions is having a toolbox of things before you need them. My toolbox includes a playlist of songs that make me happy, a coloring box, list of friends that make me laugh, podcast or videos that make me laugh, workout videos, a list of places I want to visit and of course, my therapist’s phone number.
Another tip that helped me was the power of saying NO. Saying No when I wanted to say no was a game changer for me. Doing things I didn’t want to do was a major stressor for me. But when I mastered saying NO, things became a lot less stressful. Please note this as well, NO does not need an explanation. It is a sentence all by itself.
You are not in this alone and you don’t have to fight it alone. There are many support groups that specialize in anxiety and depression. But should you just need a space that allows you to lay down the cape for a moment, where there is no judgement and lots of head nodding as we listen, we offer you a personal invitation to our peer support group, Release, Relate and Breathe.
Stay safe. Stay encourage. And know together we can normalize talking about the things that bother us.
Until Next Time,
by Coach Tina | Jan 10, 2023 | Growth
Over the last few months, I’ve gained some new followers, rebranded myself and my business, and focused my attention on being intentional about what I put out in the atmosphere. Because of that, I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself to some and re-introduce myself to others.
If you are reading this you already know my name is Tina Bailey and I often go by “The Woman for Women” or you may have caught a glimpse of what I call my alter ego that uses the hashtag #shespeaks. You may be following me on social media or stumbled across my podcast, The BOSSUP Podcast. Maybe you read one of my books. Let me drop the links here and here just in case you didn’t know. Maybe someone referred you to me because you are navigating the pain of trauma or abuse or wanting to connect about nonprofit work. However, you came about I am glad you are here.
A little about me. I am nonprofit strategy consultant, master life coach, empowerment speaker, Amazon bestselling author, content creator, serial entrepreneur, nonprofit founder, podcast host, mother, grandmother, friend — wow – who the heck is this woman? I wear several hats, but I work hard to NOT allow the hats to wear me. Most days I’m successful; the days I’m not so successful lands me on the phone with my therapist, drinking a glass of wine (just one) or writing out my frustrations in my journal.
I’m finally at the point where I don’t take life so seriously. I love those moments when I walk past the mirror and catch myself smiling for no reason at all because there was a period when I didn’t have a smiles to share. I was broken, lonely and sad. And that’s being extremely conservative. Y’all I was depressed and taking medication to manage it. Those days it was everything I could just to get out of the bed and take care of my kids. I was addicted to food and considered myself a food addict. I was constantly bingeing and slowly killing myself. I was a people pleaser seeking validation through the eyes of someone incapable of giving it. Few people saw this side of me because I hid all my pain behind a mask. When I went out in public, the smile big and bright. I knew how to play the role and I played it well. That is until I hit rock bottom and almost died because of stress. That was ONE of my wake-up calls. But with a strong support group, therapy, and prayer, I made it through with lots of lessons to share with others.
This blog is a collaboration of all the lessons I learned. My hope is to ALWAYS lead you back to being authentic and making yourself a priority in your own life. One of my favorite quotes is, “A man without a vision is a man without a future. A man without a future will always return to his past.” There is NOTHING in my past that I want, so I had to create a vision. I will do a separate blog about that vision, how I started my businesses and how they work together to build women and keep me moving forward. But for this one I just wanted to say HEY! I just wanted to give you a quick glimpse at the person you see in your inbox or social media or the voice behind the microphone. She’s a force to be reckoned with but committed to the work of building women.
Until Next Time,
by Coach Tina | Jan 6, 2023 | Empowerment, Encouragement, Growth
I recently facilitated a class in the BOSS UP Society. We discussed the four pillars of being a BOSS. The first pillar is BOLD. As a BOSS, you must make bold choices and take bold risk to achieve the goals you’ve set for yourself and your business. Being timid and unsure of yourself can cost you money, clients, and time. Although opportunity is frequent, the window of execution is small. You don’t have a lot of time to decide on how to move forward when building your empire. Waiting too long could cost you a major contract or client. Any sales or marketing course will tell you must strike while the fire is hot. People change their minds quickly if you don’t. It’s very similar in life. If you wait too long, you lose momentum and confidence in your own abilities. You can also talk yourself out of going after the things you desire.
When I asked the group to look at the list of characteristics and choose one area, they need to show more boldness, it amazed me that many of the ladies stated they struggled with “celebrating their accomplishments”. Bold women celebrate their accomplishments!
How often do you take the time to celebrate your accomplishments? 
Probably not often! We tend to dwell on our challenges instead of our successes. We often look at what we don’t have instead of what we do have. We penalize ourselves for what we didn’t accomplish instead of rewarding what we did accomplish.
Think about your highly coveted to-do list. If feels good to cross an item off as completed but after it’s completed, you never think about it again. BUT you do focus your attention on the things left on the list, often moving them to the next day’s to-do list. It’s never ending!
I need you to stop doing that! Instead of try these tips:
- Celebrate the things you marked off. I mean really celebrate them. You did more than the average person. You accomplished a goal you set for yourself. Many will set a goal and never attempt to accomplish it. But you did!
- Reframe from adding the remaining items to a new list. Unless you just didn’t have time to do them, they probably weren’t as important as you though they were, or you would have prioritized them in the first place.
- Prioritize your list. When you create your to-do list, start with the things you know you NEED to do, then tackle the things you don’t want to do but need to do, then remove everything else! When those removed items become something you NEED to do, you will do them. Until then, they are only causing you stress and anxiety.
Being Bold and showing up in your boldness requires you to make intentional steps with your time, your energy and your mental capacity. You have been living life at warp speed and it’s catching up with you. It’s not about how much you get done but the quality of being able to enjoy what you are doing. Over the last couple of months, many of my clients have been struggling with anxiety and feelings of being overwhelmed. It’s not because their lives have become more hectic, it’s because they have been forced to slow down and they don’t know how to deal with the new pace of life.
You don’t have to be superwoman all the time. You can take your cape off without feeling as if you have done something wrong. You can take a moment to exhale and enjoy the fruit of your labor. We have been told, “You are only as good as your last accomplishment”. Well if you are not enjoying the things you have accomplished, what is the point in doing them?
For me 2023 is all about doing things that make me happy. It’s all about being intentional about what and who gets my time, energy and money. It’s all about things that make me feel good about me. It’s about things that excite me. It’s about things that remind me of how amazing I am. It’s all about things that allow me to show up in my own life as a BOSS. If you don’t take the time to celebrate who you are, don’t get mad when others don’t either.
Until Next Time,
by Coach Tina | Sep 1, 2022 | Encouragement, Focus, Gratitude, Growth, Healing
We are often told “embrace the skin you are in, and you will begin to love the skin you are in!” Okay maybe that’s just my philosophy.
For years I struggled trying to fit in. I even spoke about it in my first book “What You’re Hiding is Hindering Your Blessing”. I felt like a square trying to enter a round world. Regardless how much I tried, I was either too big and parts of me didn’t fit or too small and parts of me weren’t enough.
Today, I can honestly say whether I fit in the circle or not, I enjoy who I see in the mirror and that’s what really matters. Do I feel comfortable in my skin every day? No, I DO NOT! There are days I compare myself to the woman that appear to have the perfect work/life balance. I compare myself to the woman that seems very organized in her business endeavors and can land the ideal client without much effort. I compare myself to the woman that can lose weight and keep it off. I compare myself to the woman that don’t question herself all the time. I compare myself to the woman that can grow flowers.
But I NEVER dismiss the work I’ve done. I NEVER forget how far I have come. When I think of the person I was, I get depressed and wonder, “how did I live such a docile and unproductive life”. How could I have always seen the glass as half empty. How could I have never thought what I did was enough. I use the word NEVER and ALWAYS because that was exactly how I viewed the situation – absolute. I was NEVER enough. The only time I look back is to see how far I have come. Because sitting in that depressive scenario is a sure-fire way of returning.
By now you all know one of my favorite quotes is by PK Bernard. “A man without a vision is a man without a future. A man without a future will always return to his past. Returning to my past is not an option. My past represents everything I no longer desire to be so, I must keep my vision in front of me.
Society will have you constantly comparing yourself to those around you. Remember your only competition is the person you see in the mirror. If you don’t like what you see, you can always change it. It’s when you embrace who you are that you can begin to love the person you see. And when you love the person you see, you will not allow anyone to put you in a position that causes you to doubt who you are again.
Loving others require you to start with loving yourself! Because until you love the person you see in the mirror, you will always be looking for someone else to tell you the things you need to tell yourself.
You are beautiful. You are enough. You are worthy. You are valuable. You are victorious.
You are a BOSS!
Until Next Time,
by Coach Tina | Jul 25, 2022 | Growth
They say innocent until proven guilty. BUT that is NOT how it works in the mind of a trauma survivor or anyone that has been involved in any type of toxic relationship. Everybody else is innocent but to her, she’s always guilty!
It’s time to re-evaluate how you see the issue. It’s time to allow others to carry their own load. It’s time to stop allowing guilt to keep you stuck and cause you to miss your goals, neglect your desires or still your dreams.
This week’s challenge is all about GUILT. We’ve talked about FEAR, and OBLIGATION well now the final topic in the matter is GUILT. I see more and more women remain in situations because they feel guilty about leaving. They struggle with saying no because they have this uncanny obligation to correct some wrong usually a wrong that is NOT theirs.
Trust me I get it. I am not exempt. For years, I lived life trying to mend things I was not responsible for breaking. I saw this post on social media – “why are you worrying about a table that Jesus would have turned over!” I felt that in my sha-na-na and it helped bring some clarity to my situation.
- I was guilty of preparing a table for unappreciative people.
- I was bringing out the good China for people that didn’t deserve paper plates.
- I was creating space at my table for people that wouldn’t even allow me to step in the room where theirs was.
- I was walking on eggshells for years trying not to offend others while falling apart on the inside because of their mistreatment of me.
- I said yes to things that required me to constantly say no to myself.
- I put their wants before my own needs.
- I was preparing a table that many did not deserve to sit at.
But check this – I was afraid that if I didn’t allow them at the table, I would be at the table alone. Well, when you learn and accept your worth, you realize it is better to sit at the table alone than to sit at a table with people that don’t appreciate you or those that don’t want you there. 
Your willingness to accept this truth, requires you to let go of the GUILT. You must allow people to be who they are. You must accept what happened. You must give space for yourself to grieve the old way. You must put it to rest. But how? Well, that’s what this week’s challenge is all about.
Think about where you are. What are you allowing to guilty you into staying in the same space? Are you staying on a job because 5 years ago they took a chance on you? Or maybe you feel they need you? Or maybe you believe no one can do the job but you? Well, if something was to happen to you, they would find someone else to do the work.
Maybe you are feeling guilty because you stood up to a friend about how they treated you. They have always been there for you, so why are you so angry about their current actions? Maybe they have always mistreated you, but you felt you needed that friendship to avoid loneliness, so you allowed it. Maybe you’ve been friends for a long time and guilt has told you, you aren’t being appreciative to the connection.
You get the picture. Find what is causing you to feel guilty. Ask yourself the following questions.
What are your charges? What are your true feelings about the situation? What is causing you to feel that way? What lie are you telling yourself that is keeping you stuck in the situation?
Who are your accusers? Who told you it was YOUR responsibility to fix this situation? Who told you it was your responsibility to stay in the situation? Are these your voices or societal lies? Is it family? Is it circumstances?
When did the alleged crime occur? Are you really upset about what’s happening now or is this the residual effect of something that has “always” been going and now you are tired of it? Or you are finally seeing your worth and how this is affecting you?
What is your defense? Defend your guilt if you want to but it will hold you hostage. It will keep you from accomplishing your goals. It will keep you from doing the things you want to do. It will keep you walking on eggshells. There is NO need to defend the guilt. The only thing you need to defend is your desire to be free of the guilt. Defend that!
You are innocent until proven guilty. And even if they can prove you are guilty, you are responsible for providing a space in your own life where you can find peace, harmony, and joy. I hope as you allow yourself to let go of the FOG, you realize just how wonderful you are and what you deserve in this life. But in case you aren’t aware: You deserve happiness. You deserve to stand up for yourself. You deserve to see things with a clear understanding of who you are and who’s you are. You don’t owe anyone anything but a life that you can be proud of.
Until Next Time,
