Reading: From Wall Street to Uber-Coach with Tanya Ezekiel

Tanya Ezekiel fell in love with the energy on the trading floor; it led her to Salomon Brothers as a Bond Options Trader and a Managing Director at Bank of America. When she left, she found her way into a coaching certification class. “What made me a success at my [former] job was getting people to do what they needed to do,” Ezekiel says. “I saw an opportunity to help people.” Before she even had her certification, Ezekiel was working 80-100 hours per week coaching 30 clients. Not wanting to be limited by her physical capacity, she opened Conductive, which allowed her to scale coaching with staff. Post-Covid, Ezekiel believes consumers will need more coaching than ever. “It’s hard to embrace the unknown,” she says. “But that is where the magic is. It will unfold and…let the reveal of the reinvention happen.”

Tanya’s Top Tips for Reinvention in the Time of Corona
The place to start is to know that things are changing. So this idea that I’m going to go back to this or back to that — I don’t know what I’m going to, frankly. There are a lot of things I might not go back to. So things are changing, and as hard as it is to embrace the unknown, that’s where the magic is.

So my reinvention — because right now I’m reinventing too; I can’t help it, we’re all going through it — my reinvention will emerge, unfold, reveal. I’m not going to make it happen. My job is to position myself in the flow that will ease that reinvention. And so there are ways to do that and there are ways not to do that.

A big thing that interferes with flow is self-judgement. The “I didn’t do enough,” the “I should have walked,” “I wanted to do this,” “I shouldn’t have eaten that.” And this idea that in one day, in just 16 hours or 18 hours, all the things I wanted to happen should’ve happened. I should’ve done all my work, and I should have been present with my kids.

So make yourself a crazy wishlist. Like, in one day, I want to accomplish all these things. I want to read, I want to listen to a podcast, I want to workout, whatever. Write your wishlist, and then spread it out over three days. I did this for myself, and I can’t tell you how powerful it was. Because at the end of the day I was counting all the things I didn’t accomplish. And then it shifted to “Wow, I did everything I wanted to do twice this week. That’s amazing.”

Another thing to do is give yourself one non-negotiable, and only one non-negotiable at a time. Which means there’s only one thing I absolutely insist on doing today. So I’ll give a personal example: I discovered Dr. Joe Dispenza’s meditations four months ago. I have not missed a day. So when I discovered something that really made me feel good, I immediately made it my non-negotiable. I will give up a lot of things, but I never give up my meditation. Now, I’ve been doing it for four months, so it can’t be my non-negotiable anymore, because it’s not a stretch for me anymore. So I have to pick one more new thing.

And here’s the real cherry on top: it’s all about others. Giving opens your flow. If we don’t see people, it’s hard to do things for people. We’re not having dinner with them or going to birthday parties. There’s a lot of things we’re not naturally doing for others right now. But giving opens that flow and it creates a circuitry and connection between all of us. One of my clients, we were talking about his mood and his energy, and I gave him an objective that week to text 10 people every morning. Not elaborate, just how are you feeling, how are you managing, I was thinking about you, things like that. He did it five days in a row. The next session, he said, “Wow that totally changed my day. I got into conversations with people I care about, and with people I hadn’t talked to in a long time.” What that evolved into was really powerful. He said, “I want to do this in a 3-2-1. I connect with three people, I get two things off my to-do list, I have one non-negotiable.” This builds momentum.