Reinventing Yourself After Life's Biggest Disruptions with Christa Skinner

Welcome to Milestone Moments, the show where we explore the journeys that lead to success. I'm Sheila Slick, your host and founder of Five Milestones. In every episode, we will bring you insights from the minds of entrepreneurs, leaders and experts who will share not just their expertise, but the milestone moments that have reshaped their journeys and led to significant achievements. So if you're looking for motivation, you're in the right place.

Subscribe now and discover the milestones that mark the path to success. Welcome to another episode of Milestone Moments in Business and Leadership. I'm your host, Sheila Slick. And today, my special guest is Krista Skinner.

Krista is a certified health, life, and breakup and divorce coach who guides women through midlife identity shifts and life transitions with clarity. confidence, and grounded strength. She is also a co -author of the bestselling book, Emotional Alchemy, and her forthcoming book, Positions Midlife, not as a breakdown, but as a re -anchoring and intentional becoming. Welcome to the show, Krista.

Thank you, Sheila. I'm very happy to be here today. And I am looking forward to learning a little bit more about why you do what you do today. And how do you help women achieve this?

I do what I do today because I guess over the course of my own life experiences, I've just developed a passion for witnessing and seeing the transformation that women can go through in life. I find that women are faced with so many different circumstances, whether it's like my own personal circumstance with being shook to my core with a divorce midlife or different obstacles that they're faced with and how we choose to navigate those. choose to move through them and get to the other side has become something that I'm passionate about.

And so that's why I do what I do today. And it evolved very organically for me in a way that felt very aligned and very true to a later in life purpose for myself. So transitions can sometimes happen in different stages of a woman's life because who we are in our 20s perhaps isn't who we are in our 50s. So tell me a little bit more about who you serve.

What does that look like? I serve women in just a number of capacities. Actually, I have clients who are going through midlife identity shifts for motherhood. and how they have completely lost their way, having lost that sense of self and sense of purpose with the transitions of going into empty nest.

I've definitely worked with women primarily that are going through breakup and divorce, and their whole entire identity has taken a major shift as they've gone from being the wife and a caregiver in that capacity, and only really knowing themselves within the capacity of a marriage. So now they're moving forward into their self, not really knowing who they are and who they want to be. while at the same time struggling from grief. And then we do have some health challenges as well as just in general career challenges and things of that nature that women are definitely faced with at this time and going to work through transitioning through those.

So I'm going to back up a little bit just so that we can understand what an identity shift is in case someone finds themselves questioning, am I going through this? Should I talk to someone? How would you define that? Identity shift is...

when you are encompassed as one person and that's what you know. And then you have to now, due to a life circumstance within or without of your control, evolve and you find yourself in a position where you're now going to be somebody new. In my work, I tend to sort of show it in reference to a butterfly, how the butterfly is starting in its cocoon, it's growing, and then it comes out the other side. And my primary goal in my work is to recognize and show women the beauty in that butterfly when it goes through the stages to come out the other side and that's where my passion is held for sure and so the identity shift just comes back to when we are faced with a major life change in who we are as a woman and I guide women through that life change to come out the other side and then this next chapter of life can be as beautiful as you want to make it So do you only serve women or do men also experience some of these identity shifts?

I've trained with coaches who work with men. For me personally, I'm very passionate about working with women and I do only work with women. And it's just because it's relatable and I feel some sort of deep connection to women. I feel empowered by other women that I meet, by their stories, by what they've been through.

And I just find I can make. the best difference and the best connection with women. So walk us through the before and the after. When someone reaches out to you, they're feeling, like you said, a little bit, maybe confused or lost.

What do I do now? Yeah, the majority of women that I get. reach out when they're in the thick of it when they're in a crisis mode where they feel complete sense of overwhelm and they cannot make sense of what's happening because their emotions are really heightened and so at that time they have a lot of information coming out often it's with the divorce like i said or a breakup so there are like legalities involved there's other people's opinions involved there's children's involved sometimes they're blindsided by something that's happened sometimes they're just coming from a place of shock so we will work right out of the beginning with developing and making sure that they have a proper support system right away.

That's the first thing with me being part of that support system. And then we typically start with what is the imminent need? What is something that we can work on today to make you feel better tomorrow? We always focus in on some sort of a self -care aspect to it because that's where the life and health coaching come in because women have been you know our lineage has sort of taught us at times to put ourselves at the bottom of the list and when something happens that's quite tragic or that we're unexpected we really do put ourselves at the bottom of the list.

So we work through that right from the beginning to make sure that their mental and physical health is going to be okay and that there's a support system in place. And then we tackle what we need to tackle right away. Usually with my clients, it's a legal aspect. It's getting things to a lawyer because a lawyer can be a little bit demanding to start a process.

And sometimes it's something logistical, like, you know, they have to move out or they have to put a home on the market. And at that time, even putting a home for sale or cleaning it out or meeting with a realtor is just, it's a task that they cannot wrap their head around at that time. So yeah, we just meet in crisis usually and slowly work our way through. to the other side of it.

And that's in divorce. And then when you're talking about motherhood and the children leave the nest, I would assume is when you have also that self -care. You're used to taking care of others and now you need to perhaps have more self -care. Yeah.

And the motherhood one is interesting because it's usually, there's a lot of grief there in the loss. of that stage of life. And there is some guilt. Sometimes the mothers will think back, oh, what could I have done differently?

What didn't I do? And then the whole letting go phase. But it is so fun to see when they start to bloom, when they realize, hey, wait a minute, I did a good job. I got here and now I get to do this.

So in that transition, we'll work on like your bucket list and what couldn't you do before that you can do now. Just light bulb moments, right? Oh, wait a minute. If I really want to go to the gym at six in the morning, I can.

I no longer have to wait until I've taken care and gotten the kids out the door and supervise this. And I can go to bed at nine o 'clock on Friday. I don't have to wait for kids to walk in the door. Things like that.

It's fun when you can start realizing that you get to start creating what you want in life and you've done a good job and now you get to sever that and let go. But you get to show up still for your children in a bit of a different way. And the same can be true in that breakup, in the divorce, even in leaving a job. You've left something behind in all of these cases, potentially lost something, but you also get to find something.

And finding something is yourself. And we're great. And I love women. And I love when they get that moment where they get to find themselves and who they truly are.

I find it to be inspiring and magical and just the best part of the work that I get to do. You establish new routines as well, right? Because you have to let some go. You have that extra time.

And so you find hope, light, excitement, perhaps in finding and discovering yourself again. Absolutely. And for some women, it's really hard, but a lot of women go back to their childhood roots. So for myself, even with the writing, my mom will be one of the first to say that I walked around for a long time with a poetry book that I always read and I would always write poems.

And I always, I worked at a library when I was 15 years old and I had suffered my own loss in my life. And I took solace in the library and in the pages of books and I took comfort in them. And I always felt. Like I loved holding that book.

And so when I had the opportunity then later in life to sit down, what really matters to me. My healing through my life circumstances came through journaling. And that's what I turn to the most. And I find that with women, they'll get back outside and they'll start doing things that they did as a child.

One of them just bought, because it's spring, just bought a bicycle. And she's happy with the fact that she's going to start riding a bike again. Her husband never liked riding bikes. She bought herself a bike.

And she set a plan to ride the bike three times a week. So rediscovering what you loved before. You had that initial identity shift into motherhood or marriage or a career, who you were before and maybe lost along the way when you went into that next role in life. And sometimes then we get to go back to that.

I meet the client where they're at. And wherever they're at is where we try to work through. And some women want to work longer than others. Some just take a few sessions.

I offer what I call becoming series where we actually work through a number of sessions. It can be six sessions or even longer. My own daughters have been with their coach for, oh, I think one of them for three years. I don't know if she can really handle life without her at this point.

So I, yeah, as long as somebody needs me. I'll be there. And I'm always with my clients. I'm always approachable outside of sessions.

Like I do quite a bit of work before each session. And then I'm quite passionate about the work after the session because that's when I send my clients like our key points from our time together and what our action steps are going to be for the next week. I follow up midweek on those action steps to help keep them in track and know that at any time that they can reach out. I can help someone within one session just find clarity even on one topic.

So someone may just be struggling with, say, a parenting plan post -divorce and not really knowing what the right thing is to do. And we can just work through that very specific plan and write that as well. I have one client who just was really, really stuck just with the sale of the home. portion and we can you know we don't need a ton of time to work through something as specific as that if you're looking for full healing through an entire process or potentially have your own past childhood issues or traumas or relationship things if you've had a number of failed relationships then there's a little bit of deeper work but i'm not a therapist so we don't delve into that like deeper side but we do definitely work at moving forward yeah and it's great because you have someone that's helping you Be accountable, giving you the ideas or that space to share, you know, some of these future visions with you.

During some of these changes, there's a lot of outside things coming at women, especially with like social media being out there and friends and peers and family. And so I'm able to disconnect from your personal life and look at it with a different lens and help from that perspective. And it really works because there's no judgment. I don't have, I'm not an insider in your life.

So I can see things a little bit differently. And I also know where the outcomes can go. So, you know, a lot of women, they want to start dating right away after they've lost a relationship because they want to be in a relationship. They feel like they're in a healthy place and they would like to date.

Their friends and family are opposed to it. You need a certain amount of time to heal and things like that. So I can look at it without judgment and just get you into your becoming phase as quickly as possible. And that's where intentional becoming comes in.

So tell us a little bit about your book that you are in the process of writing. So the book that I'm in the process of writing right now, it is about midlife becoming, and I have sort of framed it a little bit on motherhood. And I guess my biggest inspiration from the book was recognizing the patterns in life that shape us into who we are. And I was very fortunate because I had a very strong grandmother and a very strong mother.

My grandmother was a war bride, and my mother was widowed before the age of 40, unexpectedly, with three children. And so I watched those women from a young age be strong. And I watched and saw what they did and how they just knew naturally how to cope when something happened in their life. And my grandmother went on to lose a child in a car accident at a young age, too.

So she just constantly had to just pick up and move forward. And so for me, when my own life was faced with something that was unexpected for me and something that shook me to my core, I just knew. And I was able to draw on everything that they had taught me to do and move forward in my life. And now I recognize that in the choices that I make, that I role model for my three daughters, because I don't know what their journeys are going to hold.

I mean, they all have wonderful lives right now, but we never know what we're going to be faced with. And I want to make sure that they recognize that their lineage is what brings them to this point to have the strength to move forward. Because we all can and it's where it comes from. So that's the main premise.

And then like the soul of the book would be is picked from something that really mattered to my family and just brings in that sense of self, sense of security, sense of identity and the shifts that we have through life. And being a mother, it is a challenge in itself, especially with children that are, they're very different and they're very strong -willed. My daughters are. And knowing how to teach my children that I'm learning alongside of you.

And so I want to give them the grace that they deserve. And I want that same grace in return. And it's working in my life. And I just felt quite passionate about writing it.

So where can we learn more about you or the book? My website would be probably the biggest source of where to find out about me. And that is KristaSkinnerCoaching .com.

And then with the book coming out, I was told to create an Instagram page. So that was with the first book. And so I did that in January. And I don't know what happened to that page, but I get so much interaction from women and so much support from women.

of just amazing women. And so I'm able to put out daily inspiration posts for women. I always look at it from a positive lens of how we can move forward to this and be the best versions of ourselves. And so that's kind of the two areas that I'm at the most.

Yeah, I'm out there and I'm always willing to listen and help for sure. What would be one key takeaway? that you can share so that anyone listening to today's episode can apply that and perhaps have a more intentional or becoming life? Key takeaway would definitely be that life happens and things happen to us and we get to decide how we move through those and how we feel about the decisions that we make moving through them.

And we get to decide who we're going to be on the other side of that. And there is life after transitions. There is life after some of the unfortunate things that happen. And that life can be created.

It can be discovered. It can be beautiful. It can be brilliant. It can be all of those things.

And I'm there to help women discover that. And I live authentically and happily as somebody who I never thought that I would be in this phase of life at all. And I just want other women to know that because I know what it's like to not. feel like you can get out of bed to not feel like you can face another day to feel like you're just broken.

And I know what it's like to move forward from that. And I would like women to just be guided to that space in life, for sure. Because it's, I mean, life's amazing. And we're so fortunate.

And I live every day with gratitude for my life. And I want other women to feel that there is everything out there that they want there to be. What's one question or thought that you can leave us with that we should be asking or telling ourselves if we find ourselves in that position? I think I would just say that the one thought would just be is who do you truly want to be?

If you could make one decision for yourself today to put you where you might want to be in five years, what would that decision be? And for some women that will be to stay exactly where they are in their marriage. Maybe it would be to, you know, have that other child or change their career or something like that. But just who do you want to be?

Take out, get rid of the noise, the distractions, all of that. And what is your inner voice telling you? Thank you so much for joining me today, Krista. You're very welcome.

Thank you for having me. And thank you all for tuning in to another episode of Milestone Moments in Business and Leadership. Until next time.