Ep #63: How to Make Decisions with Coach Kirsten Parker

You are listening to the Overthinkers Guide to Joy, episode 63. This is the one
where I interview my friend and coaching colleague, Kirsten Parker, and we're going
to talk all about how to make decisions. Let's dive in. This is a podcast for
overthinkers, overdoers, and overachievers who are tired of feeling overanxious and
just want to feel better. I'm your host certified life coach, Jackie de Crinis. So,
hi, and welcome back. Today, I have a very special guest, and her name is Kirsten
Parker. Kirsten is one of my coaching colleagues who I met a long time ago in a
mastermind, and we have been friends ever since. We share best practices, and
sometimes we just get on the phone and gossip. And we talk about coaching and we
talk about life and we talk about travel and we are just good friends and I love
hanging out with her. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about her. So Kirsten
spent over 10 years working in live theater stage management, which was also the
focus of her master's degree, which she attained at Yale. Although she was decisive,
productive and overall successful in her career, much like her clients. She was
indecisive and overthinker when it came to life in general. So because you're
listening to this podcast, I relate to the overthinker part of that, and that's one
of the things Kirsten and I bond on. Her career pivoted from entertainment to life
coaching, and it was kind of rooted in the need to change how she operated. She
wanted to feel more like herself, be more in charge of her life, and stop wasting
so much energy and time angsting through decisions, big and small.
And now she runs the Decision Master's Program, a membership for fellow smarty pants,
high achievers who want to stop overthinking and make faster, easier, aligned
decisions. So with that, I want to welcome Kirsten. Hi,
I'm thrilled to be hanging out with you. I mean, too. This is so for having so
fun. So welcome, welcome, welcome. Tell us a little bit about the type of coaching
you do. I mean, we gave an overview about making decisions and ideal clients being
overthinkers. But tell me a little bit more about you and a little bit more about
your clients. I would love to. My clients are people who come from like creative
background or academic background or sometimes both. And I know that's your people
too. I help people see themselves as they are and let that be separate from maybe
how they have been and how they want to be.
And I help them simplify everything that feels very complicated about all of that so
that they can get to those decisions cleaner, faster? Do you tend to see that it's
the creative mind, the writers, directors, actors, artists, musicians who overthink
things more because their brains are so creative and there are so many thoughts sort
of swirling around their head? Do you find that you're attracting more creative
people as clients to you because those are the people having trouble making
decisions? I think it's both. I work with a fascinating array of people.
A lot of them are creative and a lot of them are in high pressure,
very structured industries like academia and medicine. I think the thing they all
have in common is that they are very ambitious and driven. And I think that
manifests in different ways sometimes for people whose profession is also in the arts
than as opposed to, you know, something not in the arts. But I think that's the
equalizer in my program, at least it's it's not necessarily like,
I think we're all creative and we all have creative brains, whether we like sell
paintings for a living or not. But I think that that ambition and that drive is
very genuine because at the end of the day, my clients are like me and I think
like you, like we want to get the most we can out of life.
- So is it a time management thing for a lot of people? - I think time management
is like surface level. I think really the deeper shoes arise when you don't feel
like you're living up to your potential and that feels difficult and complicated
because you haven't figured out what you really want to do or you haven't given
yourself a chance to really listen to yourself and be honest about it because you've
been like either in go, go, go mode your whole career or if you've been in the
arts, your brain is telling you like, here's the pile of evidence that your life
isn't working and it never has and it probably never will. So it could be personal,
it could be professional, it manifests in all different ways for every different, I
mean, everybody's different in terms of what they struggle with making decisions
about. Yeah, but I think that really, like the kind of people that I work with are
interested in carving their own path And they just probably haven't felt as in
charge of that in the past as they know they want to. If you can without, you
know, giving any personal secrets from your clients, but give me an example of what
that might look like. Well, I think that even whether we're talking about someone in
academia or medicine or the arts, like you might have a career path available to
you that a lot of people around you, say, is very normal. And that might feel like
your only option, or it might feel like the smartest, most responsible way to go.
And that can feel very limiting if you're not really sure that's the path you wanna
go down. - Would the example be somebody on their way to medical school, because
that's what they've studied and that's what they do. And they don't think there's
another choice or is there a better example. - I usually work with people who are
more mid -career. So I have clients who are right now, my clients are deciding like,
am I going to stay in the job I'm in or leave it entirely or try to change it?
Because they've reached this point where they know, okay, this isn't totally aligned.
Or I have clients who I've been working with for a chunk of time, so they've
already changed careers, they've left their career that they got all of their degrees
for and they have got all their publications in and now they're starting a new
path. That's one of my most fascinating clients who left academia to pursue a
creative career. And in some ways, I mean, you have a very academic background
because you have a degree from Yale, an MFA in from Yale, and you pursued a career
in the arts and then realized, and I'll let you talk about that. So just talk us
through that whole process. - Yeah. - Where did you go to undergrad? When did you
decide to go to graduate school? How did you end up in stage management? All of
those things. And then walk us through how you became, yeah, all the decisions to
get you to this point of becoming a coach. - Yeah, I studied theater in college
because I studied, like I did theater for fun as a kid. So I was one of those
kids who like did theater and sports all the way up until high school when they
made you pick because you can't do both. And I was like, well, I'm better at this
one than that one. So I'll just do this. Or this is more fun. All the, all the
theater kids were like my friends and family. So I just hung out with them. That's
why I studied it in college. That's literally how I made that decision. It's just
like, I've been doing this. It's familiar. I don't, I wasn't not good at it.
But I was like, I'm just going to keep doing this. Didn't feel super intentional,
didn't feel rooted in anything that I was committed to for my future, which I think
is fine. Because what 18 year old knows what their future holds. Maybe these days,
who knows. But I got into stage management when I realized like,
after taking acting classes, I was like, Oh, no, this is I'm actually bad at this,
and I don't enjoy it at all. But that person making a spreadsheet over there in
the corner who's in charge of everything. Can I be them? So did undergrad at UCSB,
lived in Santa Barbara, which is the University of California at Santa Barbara, which
is a beautiful, beautiful place that I return to frequently now with my husband and
our dogs because they have a great dog beach and great wine country. I lived in
Santa Barbara for two years and worked as a stage manager at their small
professional theater. That's like the category of theater it is, SPT. Just like, you
know, it was professional. Nobody there was doing theater as a hobby, but it was
just a little tiny theater. So I did that for two years, like learned everything I
could, grew as much as I could, and then it was time to go. And the way I made
the decision about grad school was literally an actor who showed up early while I
was sweeping and getting ready for rehearsal. I was talking to him talking to him
about, "I need to do something next." And he was like, "You should go to Yale. I
went to Yale. It was fun." I was like, "All right." And then you spent 10 years
as a stage manager? In total, yeah, before and after grad school. And the whole
time in grad school, where I really started paying attention to the fact that I
didn't feel like I was being intentional with my choices was because I complained to
the whole three years in Yale. I met wonderful people. I had great opportunities. My
program was, you know, great and flawed, like I think most things in life.
But I complained the whole time. I hated winter. Nobody told me. I'm like a little
girl from LA who spent six years living on the Santa Barbara coast. Nobody told me
winter lasts for like eight months in the northeast, but it does. New England and I
do not get along. And I was working so hard, like six days a week scheduled,
and then the one day off we got a week, you got to like make up for all your
other work and maybe do laundry once every quarter. It was hard work and I didn't
have a good reason for doing it other than I'm good at this. This is what I
signed up for. And it made it really difficult by the end. The last show I worked
on was so challenging because of a lot of factors, most of them personality and I
almost quit. I got it was like months away from my degree and my program mates had
to talk me into staying because I was like, I don't even know why I'm here. So
you knew you were out of alignment then? I think I knew I wasn't rooted in any of
my decisions. It was the next two years were just me getting further and further
away from myself and feeling less and less intentional about my life, even though I
was objectively like happy and successful. And I know that I hear that from so many
people who have been going down a path. Right. They just stay on the path because
it's comfortable. They stay on the path. And all of a sudden it feels, well, it's
too late to change. I've been here. I've invested so much. This is my whole
identity. What are people going to think if I change anything about my life? It'll
mean a failure. It's probably too late. All the things. Right. And prestigious
graduate school and money and all the stuff. And it's really hard to like jump
ship. So let's fast forward to the last year that you were a professional stage
manager and you're thinking, I don't think This is my life's calling, my life dream,
and I need to do something else. So then what was that decision to get you to
life coaching? - It was working for the most miserable person, and that was the
final straw. It didn't matter how fun the job was or how good I could be at it
or how much money I could make at it. 'Cause my last show was the most lucrative,
it was a Broadway contract. It wasn't a Broadway show, but it was you know,
Broadway contracts that must money you can make. And it didn't matter because every
day was so miserable. The the option of doing the unknown was finally more
attractive than staying in the familiar. And that's like a shitty place to have to
get to. But that's what it did it. And but luckily by then I had had one
experience with with a life coach. I had one five -week pay -what -you -can program
that totally changed my life. That's where I learned like our emotions are created
and driven by our thoughts. Like a dozen years of therapy never taught me that.
I had to learn it in my 30s. So if you're just finding out too,
no shame. But I ended the show, booked a session with that life coach and was
like, "All right, this is going to take a long time to figure out. I don't have
any idea who I am, what I'm good at or what I want to do." And I talked to her
for an hour and she was like, "Yeah, I think you just want to be a life coach."
It couldn't possibly be that easy. And then within two weeks,
she had referred me to someone who was creating a mastermind, was putting people
together, women, entrepreneurs, coaches, she was going to teach me how to coach. She
was like, this program's starting, it's $10 ,000, there's no degree. It's six months,
you'll start your new career. And I was like, I did it. The audience can't see you
because we're not on video, but you literally just pulled up your turtleneck over
your face and was like, ah, she was doing this like silent screen, which was
hilarious. But yeah, you jumped into the deep end. You said, "I'm not going to be
this thing that defines me for the last 10 years, and I'm going to do something
else, and I'm going to go learn this process and see if it's for me." Yeah,
and it was. Well, and the thing is, by then, I had already done something for over
10 years, right? Like, and it didn't end up being the thing I wanted to do
forever, but that doesn't mean it was wasted time. Nothing's ever wasted. Yeah.
And looking at this opportunity, it felt like a really big decision and a really
big investment, but I let myself, I was not an expert at decision -making back then,
but I let myself, I think, I let myself imagine the stakes being a little lower.
I could just decide to go this direction to start carving my path in this way,
and I don't need to know where it's going to go. It could work out, though,
and I could like it. So that's an interesting question. Do you have sort of a
thought checklist, if you will, for people who are afraid to make a decision? Is
there a pattern that You're like, here's the thing. When you're making a decision,
it's super scary. There's always the fear that you could fail or be judged or make
the wrong choice. God forbid. And I deal with a lot of overthinkers and
perfectionists. That tends to be my sweet spot. So I don't handle just, I mean, I
don't coach just creative people. I coach all walks of life, but I do coach a lot
of creative people. And perfectionism is a big theme that comes up with creative
people. People either not wanting to start a project or finish a project because
fear of judgment or getting stuck. - Yeah. - But it's all connected.
Perfectionism is connected to overthinking, which is connected to decision -making.
It's all like one kind of umbrella issue. So what is sort of your,
if you will, and I don't mean for you to button it down to three simple thoughts.
But like, what are kind of your go to thoughts about making a decision?
Yeah, I can't wait to talk about them. I just, I think the perfectionism note just
really quickly. It's so true. It's so pervasive. It mucks up decisions so often.
And I think that it really comes from that genuine desire for us to fulfill our
potential, not even just our potential for like how successful we can be, but our
potential to experience the fullness of life. I really think that because when I
catch myself doing good in a little perfection, it's because I want to be seen as
good and I want this thing to work and I want to feel as good as I can and to
be as good as getting like I and I get it. So I just I I want to validate all
of the perfectionists out there and that's where the compassion comes in so handy.
Okay, but to answer your actual question, yes, what I, in a nutshell, what I teach
people to do is start with their vision goals and values because it's something that
I never ever felt until my mid 30s was like any kind of deep connection to myself.
I knew what I was good at, I knew how I saw myself through other people's eyes.
But I didn't feel like I had an open line of communication with myself, like I
could hear myself clearly with what's my vision for who I want to be, and letting
the need for that to like have a job title attached to it, or, you know,
anything that will end up being true, any accurate predictions, just like the vision
of like, how do you want to feel? Who do you want to be? How is you six months
from now slightly different than you now? And like, can we start moving in that
direction intentionally? Let me stop you there for a second. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Before
you get to the second one, because it's a super important one to talk about. So we
do a lot of this work as coaches. We ask people to imagine their future self,
whether it's a month from now, six months from now, a year from now, it really
depends on what the agenda is. But usually six months is kind of the sweet spot
because that's not too far in the future, but a lot could get done in six months.
So we generally say, like, imagine yourself six months in the future. Yeah. There
are a lot of people that that in and of itself is too daunting. Yeah.
They can't even imagine six months from now because either they're so stuck in their
story or their path. So they can't imagine anything being different or they wouldn't
even know what to dream of because they haven't allowed themselves to dream because
they are so broken. So it's like one end of the spectrum or the other. I was such
a doer as a corporate executive, as a former television executive that the only time
I ever saw six months ahead was like a promotion or a bigger office or more shows
on the air, you know, like, it was so literal, it was so like, almost like working
in a factory. Like, I'll increase productivity by 10 % or I'll be vice president or
I'll be executive vice president or I'll be in it hadn't like very little to do
with the vision of my being. Like, how do I want to feel? Yeah,
what if anything was possible. I couldn't even think beyond that. And then I have
met other people where like the rug has been pulled out from them. They've lost
their relationship, they've lost their job, they've lost their maybe a parent or a
child, God forbid. And everything is so bleak, they can't imagine feeling even normal
again. So they can't put themselves in. So anyway, that's the two ends of the
spectrum is like do or who's just like, "Next thing, next achievement," or the
person who's literally scorched us. Like, yeah, like day -to -day, like survival mode.
Do you run across that with your clients in terms of setting the vision six months
or now? Do you ever find people going, "I have no idea." That's too hard. It's one
of the, I literally created a whole separate workshop called the Clarity Workshop,
so people would have like a way to work through this because it is the hardest
thing. I also tell people to start with the values because our values are usually
less confusing and complicated than like the future and the goals. - So let's go to
that when you're ready, yeah. - And I also always tell people, like if you have a
question, you do have a goal. I'm usually of the mind before I was usually of the
mind before I retrained my thinking that I can't set a goal until I know what I
want. I can't have a vision until I know exactly what my plan is, but wanting a
plan is a goal. And that's why I encourage people to just think about the subtle
differences between, well, six months from now, maybe you are more confident.
Maybe you're nicer to yourself. Maybe you just feel like you have enough time.
That's enough. That's fine. That's a great vision it. We're done. We don't have to
make it more complicated. Because I think it's easy to put the pressure on ourselves
to like need to know all of the life's answers. And that's so scary. And it sounds
like impossible that it's just easier to just keep the status quo going, go back to
normal life, we'll change things later. And that's how we lose years. Okay,
so that's really thank you for taking a pause on the vision piece, because I just
I I didn't want to get ahead of ourselves because I do know that that can be a
barrier to entry for so many people. They're like, "Yeah, I don't have it, so I
can't do this work." Okay, let's move on to the second one. Really, all that comes
down to vision goals and values is a fancy way of saying, "Start from what you
want." So many people skip over entirely when they have a decision they're making.
They skip over what they want and they go immediately to, well, what are all the
options that I could do? What should I do? What is my boss gonna get mad at? What
would my mentor advise? Like, what are people gonna get judged? How's my family
gonna react? They do not consider what do I genuinely want. And if they do,
they don't prioritize it. So that's my number one. I start, we don't have to end
up deciding exactly what we want, but we have to answer that question ideally first.
- Got it. And then the second thing you do is anticipate fears and questions.
Fears and questions. On your vision or on your goals? In the decision -making
process. In like the one, two, three. Oh, okay. I just wanted... Yeah, I was just
trying to get through these three categories. So vision, goals, and values. Okay. Oh,
vision, goals, and values. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Did we do it? No. I want to go to
the goals. Oh, yeah, yeah. So do you have people do one goal,
two goals, three goals, what is your recommendation when people are doing this
exercise? There's no wrong answer. Less is more.
Because I work with people who are pursuing professional and personal goals.
So it's an interesting arena to set goals, because it's not just thinking,
"Okay, inside my business, These are my exact goals of like, what do I want to
accomplish this quarter? It's really, what do I want to accomplish this quarter? What
do I want to experience in my life? What do I want to get done with like the
house renovation? It's like anything that is going to take your resources, we want
named because that's a decision filter. Like you give your resources away all day
long, your time, your energy, your attention, your money. And then by the end of a
month, by the end of three months, we want to see, has anything that matters to
you progressed? Has anything that matters to you been tended to? And that doesn't
happen if you haven't named what matters to you officially, right?
So that's why I like working with people in this kind of general, let's talk about
all the things way, because I've worked with clients who their primary goal that
they're working hard at every single day isn't their relationship with their mom. But
a really important goal for them is I want to have a more open,
honest relationship with my mom. Like, it's important that three months from now, our
relationship looks different. So we have to put that on paper so it gets any
airtime, any of the resources. You know what I mean? Right. 100%. Okay. So that's
the goal category. Now we're in values. Talk about that. Values. Understanding really
what people's being in touch with. They're values. They're specific values. Your core
values right now. It's always really good news to people that values are seasonal
and they don't have to be like... Oh, I love that way. Wait, I want to sit in
that for a second. Yeah. Values are seasonal. Yeah. That's so good.
Yeah. Because you're right, depending on the circumstance, that may be more important,
something may be more important at a different time than it used to be. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. You really want your core values to be helpful information to you. And again,
it's another way for you to feel more and more connected to yourself. But for
instance, for me, there was a time when love, not on my top five core values,
didn't really, didn't eat it, wasn't interested. I was like building my business,
financial security. And I think the way I talked about it was like mastery in what
I did. Like I really just wanted to get really good at coaching. And I wanted to
learn how to make money so that that I could actually have a viable business. And
those were valuable to me in a way that influenced my decisions. And as soon as I
got wind of this internal season change where I was like,
I think finding my life partner might be important to me right now, my core values
like shifted. And it doesn't mean this is no longer important because this is, but
it's like, oh, I get to pay attention to things and make decisions considering
different things. That make sense? Yeah. And you have a great love story on that
because the pandemic hit, which everybody was in lockdown and feeling very isolated.
And a lot of people thought they couldn't make a living during the pandemic. A lot
of people thought they couldn't connect to other people during the pandemic. A lot
of So if they couldn't date during the pandemic and you miraculously, and I will
let you tell the version, your version, because it's your story to tell what
happened to you during the pandemic. They had me, a husband, crazy. And I made the
most money I've ever made. Like it was a win -win year, not to diminish the year,
but yeah. I, and I was, it was because I was getting coaching. It was because I
was holding myself accountable to paying attention to what mattered to me. And I was
communicating with myself and being honest, like I think that finding my life partner
is actually quite important to me. And I don't see it happening on its own. I feel
like I'm gonna have to do some stuff. And my coach was like, I agree. - People
will want to know, like finding a partner is difficult at any time. And it's
particularly difficult when you're locked down in a pandemic and all the things and
starting a new career. So just tell the audience just really quickly, like, how did
you meet and what was the romance and talk about, like, how fast you actually got
engaged and married and eloped and all the things. Got on hinge on a Tuesday,
dating out, needed a lot of coaching, felt really bad about it, felt really weird,
got coaching, got encouraged to like validate those feelings, keep going anyway, got
overwhelmed. Then I got more coaching on how to create some decision filters about
like, who am I gonna say yes to? What am I gonna, like, what am I doing here?
Connected with him on Friday, chatted, set up a Zoom date for Friday night,
Zoom dated Friday night, got along, set up an in -person date for Sunday, met on
Day, took the dogs to the Americana. It's this little like shopping mall in Glendale
near where we live now. We're official in a couple by Wednesday and deleted the
app. So I think it took seven to eight days total from getting on the app to
like, okay, I'm in a relationship now. Great. Unbelievable. And fast forward to what
happened. And then we got married one year later to the day that that we went down
to the courthouse, the only open one because it was the pandemic. So we had to
drive to Orange County and a couple months later. Yeah, we had a trip of vacation
already planned for Bora Bora that we turned into our own private wedding. It was
great and and honeymoon and honeymoon. Yeah, amazing with like the most gorgeous
pictures ever. And yeah, just so romantic. So anyway, but again,
you decided, yeah, fast, clear decisions. Yeah. You decided to figure out a social
media app. You decided to have a safe date on Zoom. You decided to go out in the
world and meet outside. You decided to be a couple because probably you needed to
be in, I mean, either in or out, right? It was a pandemic. You're not going to be
like dating. It was like a pod situation. It was a pod situation. Either I like
you and I want to spend time with you or I don't and we'll move on. Yeah. And
then is the very beginning. Like it was, it was things weren't fully, it was April
26. We met the common theme here is deciding,
deciding that you were worth it, deciding that you were open to it, deciding that
you could, in spite of the circumstances of pandemic and limitations, you could maybe
meet somebody. kismet or chemistry or serendipity of you both finding each other,
that's just being open to it. - That's the universe being on our side, yeah? - Yeah,
100%. - But I think it's just because I was so, so clear on what I wanted and was
living my life in a new way where that came first. And it sounds very sterile
selfish to a lot of my clients who have not lived their lives in that way before,
but I get it, I've been there. That's why it's my number one step in making
decisions easier. It's like you have to start with what you want. 'Cause otherwise
you'll just lose decades. - And to a greater or lesser degree, that is also what
happened in your career. You're like, the career that I got the fancy MFA from
isn't working for me and great education, great contacts, great ego boost,
all the things. Yeah, great chapter. Great chapter. And I need to find something
that feels more in alignment with what I want and need and incapable of.
And that led you to your coaching career, which also has served you very,
very well because you're great at it and you love it and you've helped tons of
people. And I'm still changing it based on what I find out I want. Like, it's nice
to feel so less attached to things needing to be perfect from the get -go.
Like, it's just nice to know, oh, there's no such thing. We just get to stay in
charge and make double decisions. We're not like thrown decisions around really nilly.
- Yeah. - But rooted in what you want. Those vision goals balance, man. - Love
Yeah. So with that, we're going to wrap up and I'm going to say thank you. Thank
you for telling us your story. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for
sharing your personal story, your professional story, and basically what you do.
How can our listeners get in touch with you if they want help coaching and making
decisions? Yum would love. You can follow me on Instagram Kirsten Parker,
or my initials, KP Coaching, and kirstenparker .com has the next free thing that I'm
doing. I always have some fun free thing going on right now. Right now it's the
Decidathon, which is going to be so great. So check for what I'm doing next there,
and then you can buy the Clarity Workshop for instant access. If you want to work
through vision goals and values, super useful. And then the Decision Masters program,
you can hop in the membership if you want, like, to really go for the coaching. So
much fun. I love it. So I'll have that in the show notes so that in case they
didn't have a pen and paper when they were listening, they can look it up. And
thank you. And I just wish you all the best. And you've got a big trip planned
for the holiday, so I wish you a wonderful trip to Italy. Thank you. We will talk
all about it when I'm back. So fun, so fun. All right, and I will talk to you
soon. Thank you. Thank you so much.
my website at jackiedecrinis.com. That's J -A -C -K -I -E -D -E -C -R -I -N -I -S .com.