Influential Woman · Mindset Coaching
Sarah McAtee
Mindset Coach, Sarah Michelle Coaching
Ventura, CA
Her Story
About Sarah
This work kept finding me throughout my life. When I was 13, a gymnastics teammate told me, 'Sarah, when you grow up, you're going to be a life coach,' and I obviously didn't know what that was. Then in college, people would refer to me indirectly as their life coach. It wasn't until my mid-20s when a coworker who was getting certified by a life coaching company asked to do a practice session on me, and midway through she said, 'Sarah, I just keep feeling like you need to do this - you need to become a life coach.' It was that third time where I thought, okay, it's getting louder. So I got certified and I've been in the coaching space for 10 years now. Before coaching, I wanted to be a marriage and family therapist, so all my work experience in college was with that in mind. I did a semester internship working with young adults who were struggling in school, worked as the milieu coordinator for an eating disorder facility's partial hospitalization program post-college, and worked as an ABA therapist with kids on the autism spectrum right out of college. I was also a nanny for many years, so children have always been a part of my world. It's kind of interesting because I'm now in the field of changing subconscious beliefs, and as a child you are creating those beliefs. I've been on both sides - where they're being formed, and where I'm working with people in their 40s, 50s, 60s who have subconscious programming from their childhood that doesn't serve them, and we're reprogramming all of that. It's a full circle moment for me. I love this work and I love the transformation you get from changing the subconscious mind. I love changing lives - the way people show up after working with me is so drastically different, and because of that, life starts showing up so drastically different for them. I love to celebrate in all of their wins once they get out of their own way.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Sarah
01What do you attribute your success to?
I think a really good outlook, a good attitude, a good mindset around what realistically this really looks like. They say that entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart, and I think why that is, is because there's a lot of trial and error in entrepreneurship. Although there are businesses that sell their five-step strategy or whatever, what's really accurate is that we're all different, and so there are different approaches and different ways of doing things. Every time you try one thing or you throw the spaghetti at the wall and the spaghetti doesn't stick, you either step away from it and come back to it, or you keep going. I think it's the resiliency of entrepreneurship - it's going to knock you down on your ass a few times, and you have to be like, okay, that didn't work, or I'm on the verge of burnout, I need to take a break, let me go camping for the weekend or whatever that looks like. Really making sure that you're taking care of your health - a lot of self-care in this journey is the key to it. I'm pretty proud that I'm still here, I'm still doing this, I'm still persevering. I have failed so many times, I've fallen on my face so many times, and yet I went into this, even at 25, knowing that this was a marathon, not a sprint. I knew that this was something that I would be doing and working towards for the rest of my life because I really love it.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
One thing I have kind of working against me in doing this is subconscious mindset coaching is just not mainstream. If I say I'm a dentist, I don't have to explain that to you, you understand. If I say I'm a subconscious mindset coach, guess what? Now I've got 5 minutes to explain what I do and how I do it, and it gets exhausting. I realized that the more visible that I get, the more people that I meet, the more places I can be, the better, because you say your message once and a bunch of people hear it, rather than saying your message 100 times. That's kind of what I'm interested in - podcasts, speaking gigs, anything where I can just be around the movers and the shakers of the world.
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