In this episode Damian and Elaine continue Chapter 3 — Mindset Is Everything: Developing Your Inner Coach. They explore how our inner conversation either supports or sabotages progress, and Damian shares a personal story about discipline, self-trust, and the habits that built his own inner coach. We dig into Pam McLean’s framework—presence, emotional awareness, boundaries, systems, courage, and embodiment—and practical steps to regulate emotion in a VUCA/BUNNY world (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous → brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible).

The conversation also tackles modern supports: when to seek help, how AI “agents” might augment leadership, and simple daily practices leaders can use to cultivate mindfulness, reflective space, and better decision-making. Tune in for actionable tips on listening to your inner voice, creating nonjudgmental reflective time, and inviting others to help you grow — because leadership starts from the inside out.

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Hi. Welcome to lead with a coaching mindset, a Podcast where we explore how leaders unlock their followers potential. I am Dr Damian Goldvarg, and I am very excited to discuss my new book, lead with a coaching mindset.

Hi everyone. I'm Elaine Padilla. I'm also coach and I will be the host of this podcast. We hope that you find this space inspirational and thought provoking. Let's get into it.

Welcome to lead with a coaching mindset. With Elaine Padilla, we need to discuss my new book, lead with a coaching mindset, and today we are going to continue discussing Chapter number three. Mindset is everything. Hi, Eleni, how are you today?

I'm doing well. Thank you. Good to see you again.

Damien, and this is a one of my favorite chapters in the book, because really create the foundation for for the whole book. And last time, we discussed what means with mental coaching mindset and we talk about the importance of having an attitude, an inclination for looking for opportunities for people to learn and grow and develop, and we talk about the importance of holding the space for people to think versus telling people what to do. So looking forward to continuing the discussion today.

Yeah, well, so something I want to ask you about is a personal story that you you share in the book. Tell us about that.

Well, this is in the context of developing our inner coach. The idea is that we are both professional coaches. Some of part of our work is to provide coaching services, but the idea that we can also develop our inner coach is like what our inner conversation and we develop that with learning through our own coaching, but also it's about paying attention to the conversations we are having with ourselves, and these conversations sometimes can be supportive or not. Sometimes we can be our worst enemy in terms of telling negative messages toward ourselves boycotting what we are trying to accomplish. And many times, when I'm coaching leaders, I have conversation with them, because what is in their way between where they are, where they want to be, is themselves. Sometimes we think it's something external, our boss, the economy, the political issues, but many times was really in our ways, ourselves, our own thoughts, our belief of what is possible and what is not possible. So I shared an experience when I was 16 years old, and I was in high school, and one of the years started, and one of the kids who joined my class had done one year. What it's calling Spanish Libre is like you basically, when you do a year libre or free, you study by yourself instead of coming to class, and then you take some core tests, and then you jump from one year to the next. And I thought, oh, I want to know about that. I want if he jumped a year and he said a year, you know, I want to do the same because I was a good student. I love learning, but I didn't go I didn't like going to school. I didn't like the system, the professors, my co my my classmates. I didn't really enjoy the experience. I know that some kids love their experience. I was not having a great experience. So I thought, what can I do to jump and say one year? And so he told me what to do, and I told myself, I can do this. I can do this. So basically they were like 11 classes that they had, each class with a different professor and with a different book. And what I did is I got all of the books and I started studying by myself. And there were a couple of classes that I needed help. I couldn't do it alone, like, for example, was a chemistry class that I didn't understand anything. I really needed a teacher. So my parents, at the beginning, they were not supportive, because they were telling them, You don't need to do that. There is not any reason for you to do this. You don't need to save a year. But I was really committed, and so I convinced them. So they got me a teacher to learn chemistry and language. I had to do a test in French, so I needed teacher to help me to do that. But everything else, I was able to figure it out myself, and I study that year together. I studied and I prepared for the next year. So then at the end of the year, I took the test, and I had, there were 11 classes. So I took class, I studied for nine classes, for one day at the end of the year, and then I had the summer to study and prepare for the last two and I passed all of the test, and I jumped and finished one year earlier. And so I thought my inner my inner conversation, and my inner coach was telling me, Damian, if you have discipline, you. Work hard, you can do it. So not necessarily because I have the most memory. Of course, you need a lot of memory to be prepared for a lot of big things. But more than memory, I had a lot of time, spending time and effort in reading, highlighting things, preparing summaries, going over that and believing in myself. I think that what really helped me at that time was trusting myself, having the discipline, spending the time, working hard. So I developed my inner conversation, my inner coach telling me, Damian, if you put the time, if you put the discipline, you can accomplish things. And I think that supported me my life, and that's the reason why I have the same approach when I went to the University, like in Argentina, the system is different that in the US and in Europe. So basically, when you finish high school, you just jump into your career. Usually it's like five, six years. And I focus, and I said, I want to do it in four years. And with a couple of other friends, we got together, we had that plan together, so the other pieces to support each other. We were not alone. The same thing when I went to do this in high school, I got another friend of mine, and she was willing to do it with me. So we did together so many times that completely thinks it much more difficult to do it alone, but we did together. So this is another element. So this conversation helped to build my inner coach that is telling me, Damien, you can do it. If you work hard, you can do it. So I will have conversation with myself. We all the time have conversation with ourselves, and then we are not the way we're doing it. We're doing that all the time thinking we were talking to ourselves in our mind, so saying, Okay, so in my inner coach taught me that if I needed something, I needed also at for help, and I also have an element in the chat I talk about getting support and knowing how to do that, and not being afraid of doing that. So I think that's a key element. I don't believe that we can accomplish things by ourselves, or we need not only to have a conversation with ourselves, but we need other people to help us too. It's just professors or friends. So all of these elements help us to build this inner code. So in the chapter of the book, I talk about how you develop that inner code that support us versus being our way accomplish what we need to accomplish.

So and you highlight Pam, McLean, and so I'm wondering, you know, so you shared your example, but are there other elements that maybe you you didn't have to like touch on, but that others, people may may may encounter or may have to lean into in order to, I don't know, successfully, listen to their inner voice.

Well, Pam McNee talk about developing our inner voice and our inner coach. And she used a framework that I really like, that I explained in the book. And there are different elements, so let me tell you briefly about them. One is presence. Is mindfulness, being present when we're feeling insecure and when we are feeling whatever we are feeling is paying attention to what's happening, what's being mindfulness is about attention and how we're paying attention to ourselves, to our world around us. So the idea that she took our presence as a key element to build that inner coach, knowing ourselves, paying attention to our thoughts, what we're thinking, what we're feeling, what we are experiencing in the body. So being attuned to all of these messages, because many times we're not paying attention. Many times we do not pay attention to our limiting beliefs or our intuition that is telling us positive things about that can be accomplished, or our body that is telling us stop, or our emotions that make us afraid and we don't do things that we are not sure why we are not doing them. We're not paying attention to all of these messages. And the other one is about being everywhere of emotions and working with emotions. And this is about emotional intelligence, and that's a key element in building our inner coach, because our ability to manage ourselves, if related to paying attention to how we relate to our emotions. Are we leading our emotions to manage us, or are we paying attention to what's happening to us? And working with that and that requires to stop pay attention and sometimes articulate in language or name, what is the emotion that we are experiencing? And then asking ourselves, what do we do when? What do we want to do with it? So when we do that, we do not react. So maybe if we are feeling angry, instead of jumping and being angry, and same thing we regret later. When we aware that we are being angry, just and we feel it in our body most of the time, paying attention to that and tell ourselves, okay, I'm feeling angry. What do I want to do with this versus just reacting? So it's being less reactive in our lives. So our linear coach allow us to be less reactive and communicate and be relationship with others better so by connecting to ourselves and relating to ourselves more effectively, we can connect and relate to others more effectively.

Yeah, I know you. I know you touch on on there are some other elements that that she touches on you. So you know, presence, empathy, emotions and feelings, boundaries and systems, courage and embodiment, but you touched on something that I want to go into a little bit deeper, which to me, is really interesting, which is the ability to regulate emotions. And how is that tied to, you know, VUCA and and Bonnie,

well, the idea that regulating emotions and emotional intelligence is one of the key competencies for leaders today. Why? Because of what's happening in the world, and there are different ways to articulate how we explain the experience. And for a long time, people were talking about the VUCA world, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. So let me talk briefly about that. So this VUCA world is a work that is volatile, that is changing all the time, so you don't know what to expect, because things are changing so fast that you don't know what is next. So this volatility bring uncertainty. For uncertainty is uncertain. You don't know you don't it's entirely challenging planning, because you may wonder what is going to happen. So this uncertainty create anxiety and create a lot of emotions that we need to navigate. See, for complexity, we get a lot of information. We open the emails in the morning, sometimes overwhelming the amount of request information we need to manage, and the experience is overwhelming. It's how do I do with all of this? And then after complexity, we say volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous is not linear ambiguity. Sometimes there are is like paradoxical thinking. There are two ideas that contradict each other. So this ambiguity and lack of clarity, or it's ambiguous, because we do not have all of the information, and sometimes we need to make decisions even we do not have all of the information, all of the information that we have sometimes is not consistent. So how do we deal with all of this? So by understanding that we live in this VUCA world, we can normalize and validate all of these emotions we are experiencing. And we can develop strategies to deal with them. Now, recently, there are new acronyms coming up, you know, like, Okay, who guys getting old, there is a new one now. And in the book, I talk about bunny. And Bunny was developed by Germans Cassio, and he talked about the brittle, anxious, non linear and incomprehensible. So this vanity, let's talk about brittle. B is brittle for fragile, like everything is feel very fragile. It's easy to break. So that brings fear for people, okay, what if I make a wrong decision here? Anxious, that fragility create a lot of anxiety and create a lot of fear. And sometimes we don't even know what is the fear about, but sometimes that fear is about the unknown, then non linear before we're thinking about causing effect. Okay, this happened, and then it will come up. But now it's not linear anymore, because so many things are happening that it's difficult to think in a linear way. And the last one incomprehensible. It's like sometimes we feel we don't understand. And they say, What is wrong with me? I cannot understand what's going on. Well, we are not alone. You know this experience of not understanding what happening or feeling behind it also anxiety provoking. I was at the conference Elaine at ICF conference last year in San Diego, and I went to an AI session, and the instructor asked, okay, who has an agent? Raise your hand, and a third of the session of the people raise their hand. What is an agent? Do you know? I learned, you know, what is an agent?

I do, but I haven't utilized one or even. Know how to create one, but I I understand what it is. Only recently,

I said, Okay, how come I don't know that. How come I have not have one? Like, a third of the room here have an agent, and I don't, I'm not, right? You know, stay behind, you know, for five minutes. It's kind of okay. So the deal with agent is that, and we're talking about agent for coaches, but they do believe, in the future, they're going to agent for leaders. And the idea that the agent you a you can use different systems. But for example, one way to do it with Judge GPT, you put all of the information about you. For example, in my case, for my agent, I had all of my books, all of my articles, all of my experience, all you have way now, and that is my agent. So if I'm not available, and people want to reach me, they can talk to my agent instead of talking to me. Who knows, Elaine, maybe my agent will have a better answer than me, because even these data about all of my experience, everything that I have wrote over the years, plus everything that already know for all of our conversations over the years. So so leaders in the future may have one too, where there is a nation about that that may not replace them, but if somebody have a question for them, they may have a conversation with the agent that may be thinking as their leader, and maybe to answer some questions,

yeah, what? What's your agent's name? Damien Jr?

Yeah, well, I didn't have a name yet.

Yeah. Well, to wrap up, the second part of of this chapter, you know you you mentioned, like, seeking help and moving on. How is this related to to what we've just spent our time talking about, like, what makes it important to seek help and move on?

Well, the VA that sometimes we are stuck. Sometimes we may have all of the skills, and still, we feel like we feel paralyzed. So it's important to get help, and the help come from different ways, in different formats. These days, we do have assistance from AI and whatever system people are using, the GPT Gemini, there are so many these days that people are using like there is one new every day it sounds and so get help. Don't try to figure a thing by yourself. It's like if you're stuck, sometimes having a coach, sometimes talking to colleagues, but I believe that to be the best version of ourselves, we cannot do it alone. We need to know what, when, how to get support. Yeah, I do all the time talking to colleagues. I have my own supervisor, so we need to know when to afford help. We need to be humble enough knowing that many times we may not have the answer.

That's true. That's true. We are all works in progress. That's what I like to say. We are all works in progress. We're humans, and we make mistakes, and sometimes we just don't know everything, and we don't know what we don't know. So yeah,

yeah, thank you, Lane. One more time. Great spending this time with you. I hope that people benefit from our conversation and looking forward to our next episode.

All right. Sounds good. See you next time. Bye, next time you.