Kendra Dahlstrom

One is called the Compass Method, which is about coming back to your own core values and looking at what is your own internal compass.

I'll share some of my trauma-informed background, whether it's sexual assault or abuse or it depends, you know, on what's appropriate to help them understand that, look, I've walked through the valley of shadow of death as well and we all have different...

valleys and there's no comparison.

This is not meant to compare mine to yours and there's not one that's better or worse.

It's all relative, but I want you to know that I've been there and I can hold space for that.

And there's a coach I had years ago, Steve Chandler, and I think he even wrote it in a book with Rich Litvin and I loved the quote.

It said, you can only take clients as deep as you've been willing to go yourself.

And I think you've summed that up very nicely in your question.

And, you know, as a Christ follower and somebody who's done a lot of my own healing work, I realized, okay, I know that's not true mentally, but somewhere somatically and in my body, I still...

felt those lies.

And so I really wanted to message to all those leaders out there and really kind of cut the crap and have this conversation around all of these high achievers out there and all of these leaders that I've worked with over my 25 years in corporate, including myself, who underlying have this sense of unworthiness and whether they identify as imposter syndrome or whether just

What is your own internal compass?

Yeah, that's such a great question.

So just to back up, I did therapy when I was 13, 14, 15, and then I stopped.

And then I got into coaching in my 20s.

So I was always very much the coaching methodology of, you know, looking forward, not really looking at causality and always moving forward.

Only in the last year, as my parents start to age and, you know, it became really pressing for me, like, oh, gosh, before they pass on, I really want to heal some of this stuff.

Like, I feel like there's things I'm not going to be able to say once they're gone.

but I need to do some work before I can say them, those kinds of things.

And so I went back to therapy, and I think Abigail's right in what she's saying.

I think it can become keeping you in the victim cycle.

It can keep you kind of beating a dead horse, pardon the analogy, but just really ruminating on something and feeling stuck and giving you an excuse to feel stuck.

I think this is where the power of slowing down really comes in,

And really giving yourself enough space and time to really sit.

And this is where somatics also comes in to feel in your body.

Am I just like, can be like, what am I benefiting from reliving this lie and ruminating on this story?

Because it's benefiting you somehow.

Cause that's why you keep doing it.

Like at the end of the day, even if it's like, oh, I get a, you know, I get a not do as well at work or I get a claim sick all the time or whatever the reason is, there's a benefit.

Um, and unfortunately that's just how things work or is, um, are you at a point where you just really have never addressed it?

Have you, have you stuffed it?

And what happened with me is there has been so much, and then there've been so much dissociation that I just had stuffed so much that I never really even acknowledged it.

And because my parents didn't acknowledge it, everything was swept under the rug.

It, um, and then I got into life, um, and, and met friends that

sometimes had trauma that was, from my point of view, much worse than mine.

So I downplayed mine.

Oh, my friend saw her parents murdered in Bogota, Colombia.

Like, oh my gosh, that's awful.

What happened to me is like, ooh, no big deal.

So I downplayed my own stuff.

So I never really honored myself and my inner child to even grieve the experiences that she had gone through.

So for me, that was the telltale that like, okay,

this really makes sense for me to go back and revisit.

Now, do I ruminate on it?

No.

But what I found through that process was a lot of grief.

A lot of grief in the childhood I wish I had had.

And then a lot of gratitude for the childhood I did have at the same time.

A lot of really mixed emotions.

But I will tell you, I think it's really important to slow down and then obviously work with clinical therapists and somebody who's trained to do this work.

And

That's where it gets really dicey with coaching because sometimes I'll work with clients who have had these things and I'll always say, okay, you know, I advise you go see a therapist because I think as an ethical coach, we just have to be really careful with that.

It's about awareness, reaching that inflection point, making a decision.

selective unworthiness, maybe it's particular scenarios and situations, it's contextual or whether it's pervasive, it can really be all over the place.

Oh, totally.

And that's why, you know, even though I label myself executive advisor or, you know, in my work, I'll be an executive coach or leadership development consultant.

That's really just the nomenclature.

right?

That's just the container that they understand.

What I really offer is a rite of passage.

And so I think that I really wanted to speak to that and have the audience have a very visceral reaction and like, oh, she's talking about the unworthy leadership.

And for me, it's that ability to where I look at it is where they're able to cross that threshold.

They're able to either acknowledge or become aware of, okay, yeah, you're right.

There's this thing that's not, I've outgrown this life I built.

It worked for me 20 years ago or 10 years ago, but guess what?

I've outgrown it and I need a new fish tank.

I need a bigger fish tank.

And so

I help them create the bigger fish tank and then also figure out how can they live in alignment with who they are and their vision and their values without all the things they've lost along the way trying to stuff that vision, that old vision.

And so a lot of times they'll come to me and they hit an inflection point where they're like, okay, oh crap, I get to make a choice.

And then they get to make a decision at that point.

And guess what?

Some of them decide, like the board game, back to start.

Right?

And that's okay.

They're just not ready.

But the others, I call it the threshold.

They're ready to cross that threshold.

And that's the rite of passage.

And that whole rite of passage is about undoing, unsubscribing.

You know, uncorporating, I call it.

It's kind of like unschooling for kids.

And I've been going through this process myself and it's been fascinating because it's been everything from like the tactical things to, you know, oh no, I'm not going to do meetings after this time or before this time, to small things like

I can't be at a call five minutes late.

I was like, sure you can.

Like, it may not be the best thing to do, but you have agency, you're sovereign, you can.

I can relate to that.

And the other day I was held up doing something else more important and I was feeling so bad about it.

And then I decided to honor myself and just do it.

And I showed up five minutes late and the executive was thankful because he got five minutes to do his thing and it totally worked out.

And I just was like, well, gosh, you know, isn't it interesting?

So there's just things that seem little, but they're actually pretty monumental in how we think

What I realized through my own journey of launching and then

as we've been programmed into this corporate and business mentality that have to be undone and as you undo those then when you're at the other side of the threshold then that is obviously the embodiment phase that's when you decide okay this is who i am now and it sounds like you kind of went through that yourself when you came to your own corporate and so that's really what i walk people through

publishing 26 episodes in my first season of my podcast since last February was that I felt unworthy having a podcast because I felt everyone out there has one.

What do I want to do about it?

There's so many to choose from.

Why me?

I'm not famous.

I haven't written a book.

I'm sort of always been known as the ghost in the boardroom because I work behind all these really successful executives, but I'm not really a huge known name.

That's right.

Yeah.

Well, and a quick story on that.

So last year I, we went river rafting and

I ended up getting bacterial pneumonia and it turned into sepsis.

And so I ended up in septic shock with respiratory failure and the beginning of liver failure.

And I'm very healthy and almost died.

And I had some really interesting conversations with God while I was in the hospital.

And one of them was actually, I believe I was having a near-death experience with a life review.

And I sort of saw all these things.

I felt that I was like, I just remember myself talking in my sleep and keep waking up and I was just sweating and

Just please forgive me for this and this and all these things I had done.

And what was so interesting was that the passage, Luke 12, 25, came forward for me.

And he said, you know what your biggest sin is?

And I was like, no.

And he goes, worry.

He said, did you not live an hour more of your life because of all your worry?

Oh, my gosh.

Like if I counted all the hours I worried, fear, worry, concern, however you want to frame it.

That was way more, I guess, than all these, you know, like lying to my teacher in second grade or whatever, all these things I was thinking about.

I was struggling with my own feelings of unworthiness.

And I thought, wow.

And so the reason I shared that with you is I came out of that experience a different person and realized because of my experience that how grateful I am for each breath.

I mean, literally at that level of like second to second.

And we take so much of that for granted, Ryan.

And I think that's why it's so important to have these conversations because

When you start to talk with leaders, they're just doing the job.

And so as that's evolved, I realized that what I'm really looking to do is help high achievers and really circumvent the root cause that's driving high achievers to still feel so unfulfilled.

They're just doing that thing.

And there's nothing wrong with what you're doing.

It's how we live our life.

But they take it all for granted that they can walk and that they can breathe and all these things.

And when you realize that without that breath, you're not even here, your vitality is number one.

And if you don't have that, you're nothing.

And guess what?

You can't help your kids.

You can't help your wife, your husband, your spouse, your partner.

Then you move through the transformation, that rite of passage, the undoing process.

So I try to kind of bring them back to that.

And like how they can best honor themselves in their most authentic way.

And then they sort of start to see, oh, maybe this thing I'm doing in my life isn't really honoring myself.

And maybe I just need to renegotiate it.

Maybe it doesn't mean I have to leave.

You know what I mean?

Maybe it's like I just have to renegotiate things.

So I always, I coin it as that you're showing up DOA, whether you know it or not, because of my

my near-death experience, and that's how I was living.

And the acronym obviously stands for dead on arrival, but for me, it also stands for you're doing, just to do, just to keep busy, because that's how we're trained and how we're rewarded in society.

You've outgrown the life that you're living in, and you might not even know it.

And the last one is you're achieving just for the sake of chronic achievement, because you're trying to prove your way out of emptiness.

And you think that achieving equals fulfillment,

And busyness is productivity.

And self-sacrifice equals leadership.

And external validation is the measure of success.

And you think that you can outperform this unworthiness.

So I just wanted to share that quick story with you because I think that's what I try to bring people back to.

And I think that that's what's often missing is they just get caught up in the busyness.

Well, it's not, I mean, so there's not like a one solution for all because I know I was there probably even 15 years ago.

And I remember a coach asking me, what do you want?

And I was like, I just started crying.

I'm like, I don't know.

And everything I'd answer is like, well, I want my kids, my husband.

No, what do you want?

Everything was about everyone else, which isn't a bad thing to want, but you also have to be clear on what you want.

you know, for my own personal story, this doesn't have to be true for listeners, but it sometimes can be.

So just a heads up is that, you know, I had realized that I'd lived a very codependent life where like with a codependent parent.

And so everything was always about somebody else and taking care of others.

And in order to stay away from acknowledging my pain and trauma, I was just always focused on everyone else.

And so that was, it took me years to kind of really get to the bottom of it.

But

I think it depends on the person, but I think a great place to start with someone who's very cerebral, Ryan, is let's start with what you don't want.

You know, let's get real clear on like, what are the non-negotiables that you don't want?

And then, and then let's go back to the non-negotiables, the things that are important to you, because if you can, because you're never going to get them away from their values, right?

If their values are family and faith and, um, community, then that's a great place to start.

And so, um,

Sometimes I'll have a values conversation with them.

And then I often tell them to visualize the values like a tree and kind of play with putting each one as the trunk of the tree and the roots of the tree.

And so what you'll find over time is most people, even though family and community and prosperity or wealth or a career, things are on their list, there's always something that's the roots of the tree.

And so for me, it's spiritual connectedness.

For me, it's

I want to feel that everything is being done through the purity of a spiritual connection.

And that doesn't mean my family is not important, but if I do it through that lens, it's so much more rich for me.

And so that's kind of an exercise I'll do to help people visually kind of see like, okay, I can have all these values, but there's really one that's a core driver that without it, the other things don't light me up as much.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I agree.

So first, I also want to tie it back to what we just talked about, because I think a lot of people are afraid to even admit that that's what they want.

So that's step one, right?

So someone's like, they're afraid to admit, well, I want to have a million dollar company because they think it's selfish, greedy, whatever, you know, so they put all these

constraints on themselves right and so they're afraid to even admit what they really want which also gets in the way of them knowing what they want right because they feel guilt or shame around it so that's a whole nother topic we could dive into but I definitely have felt that because when you start to think about the power and I mean that from a impactful way not a manipulative way that one can have when they actually are at their best and can achieve anything they want

we are really powerful human beings and we can do a lot and be really impactful.

And so I think that can be overwhelming for our nervous system and for us to kind of put our heads around.

And so we self-sabotage, which is a very well studied topic and whatnot.

And so I've caught myself getting in that over the years as well.

And I think even with the podcast, I had to be really careful with the name change.

Like, okay, is this another form of doing that?

Because it was starting to

get some good traction, get some YouTube traffic and Spotify traffic.

And then I really just settled in and did some meditation and prayer on it and realized, no, this is the direction I want to move in.

It feels more aligned with where I want to be.

So I think it's really, in my practice, I think it's really hard because a lot of

people, first of all, they don't necessarily know what they want outside of what they're told they want.

Well, no, I want this job.

And then they're afraid to admit it.

And so oftentimes we just have to have conversations around, well, you know, who are you outside of work?

What makes you happy?

Again, going back to that values conversation, I think when it comes to working with clients and in the practice around the scariness, we have to explore

And I think you said this even in your talk, like, what's the worst thing that could happen if it did happen?

You know what I mean?

And kind of play with that mindset trick of like, okay, what's the best thing that could happen?

And how might that scare you?

And that kind of does that pattern interrupt where they're like, well, the best thing that could happen, usually I would want that to happen.

But then the fact that there's actually something there that may be holding them back is usually a big awareness for them.

Does that answer your question?

Yeah, so there's three things I'll offer.

So one is I'm actually an emotional intelligence advisor as well.

So I am a huge fan of the emotional intelligence assessment for those that want data and are very cerebral.

It's not super expensive.

And what it shows by and large is it shows not just how intelligent you would be on a scale, but we're usually less concerned with that.

What we're looking at more is how aware are you of your emotions and how much are they getting in the way of your self-regulation?

And the thing I love about it is that unlike other psychometric assessments, it's not behavior, which typically doesn't change.

It takes a lot of work to change it over time.

It's skills.

So you can actually take the assessment and then decide, oh, I want to work on my emotional expression.

And then in 30 days, take it again and see that number improve, which I think is super empowering and great.

So that's a great place to start.

And what you'll find on that assessment is by and large, most people have a pretty low

emotional awareness number in comparison to their emotional expression and assertiveness number, which means that they're speaking and acting before they really understand what's going on.

So that's like a huge aha and a great tool just to generate that awareness.

And then you can work with a coach or somebody to work through that.

The second piece is I created my two methods.

One is called the Compass Method, which is really about coming back to your own core values.

and looking at what is your own internal compass, not the one that you think you need to live by because the world tells you, but what is your own true north?

What is your own internal compass?

And then I walk you through that method as part of what I call my aim true method, which I alluded to earlier, but it's really about awareness, reaching that inflection point, making a decision like, okay, now I really see where this one thing in my life, or maybe it's more than one, aren't working.

What do I want to do about it?

And then you start to move through the transformation.

You start to move through that rite of passage.

And then you go through the undoing process as you cross that threshold.

And then you move into embodiment.

And so I walked them through that in 90 days.

That's the process I've seen that's worked for me personally over and over again.

So that's the one I use.

But as you said, it's very contextual.

Maybe eating vegan is the right answer.

Maybe Miracle Morning is the right answer.

I think all these things help.

However, they're not going to get to the root cause.

And I think to get to the root cause, the number one strategy that my methods allow is giving yourself the grace of space and time, like you said, to have some reflection and really ask yourself the tough questions like, what is it that I'm afraid to see?

What is it that I'm afraid to say out loud?

And acknowledge what is the one truth that I'm

afraid to admit, you know, like what's not working for me anymore in my life and make a list.

And it doesn't have to mean it's cast in stone.

If you make a list, you may realize that, okay, next week, this one went off the list.

You know, it's just start learning to have that relationship with yourself where you're taking time to reflect and have that mental processing time.

Like you talked about, we're really good at talking, but we're not really good at listening, especially to ourselves.

Yes.

Yeah.

I love that question.

So first of all, there's one core question I ask myself every day.

Yeah, definitely ego is a huge part of it.

And now I ask myself probably hundreds of times a day.

I'm not always perfect at it, but it's, will this bring me closer to peace?

And what I find is if the answer is no, then the answer is no.

Now, if it's like a business decision, let's say there's like a contract or something I'm in, right?

And I'm like starting to realize I'm halfway through the contract and it's not bringing me closer to peace anymore.

It's bringing me closer to fear.

Then that's when you start to negotiate and start to bifurcate and say, okay, what part of it is fear?

And, um,

And maybe I exercise a 30-day rule and find another advertiser.

What are the options here?

And then you've honored your integrity, right?

I think the ego is what drives the need to get at that external validation that unfortunately we have a society today that is largely driven on external validation.

You've honored that peace.

And then you get a sense of peace because you've done the thing that you know you needed.

Your soul knows you needed to do, if that makes sense.

So I just wanted to share because that's my one question I ask myself about everything.

Does this bring me closer or further away from peace?

Because I believe that's our natural state.

That's how God wants us.

And that's how we need to operate.

And then we can save those amygdala moments for when we really need them, not be firing on it all day long like most of us do, myself included, up until now.

So that's step one.

Step two is I'm a huge, I love journaling, but I'm also, because I'm a mom on the go and doing things, I'm a huge fan of, I do voice notes.

So I'll do memos on the phone or I'll even do the notepad and then I'll just voice to text in there.

And I'll just say, insights from walk on Friday, October 3rd.

And I'll just start talking.

I find that I like writing, but things come out me a little more prophetically if I speak it.

So I tend to do it with my speaking.

And that's how I kind of anchor it.

And then if I want to take that further, I'll come back and journal.

And then if I want to take it even further, I'll copy and paste it into like ChatGPT and kind of say like in my own little private chat that I've created with my own rules and guidelines.

So it sounds like me and saying, okay, like how might this work into my current method or into my coaching methodology to get ideas on how to actually bring it out into the world?

Because I really feel strongly when I get those clarity and insight that there are things that need to be shared.

think of it and I mean even from corporate standard what's your market share you know how are you marketing are you dressing appropriately are you you know everything I mean you you play a sport my sons are both in sports okay the scoreboard gives you direct feedback how are you doing you know so everything is external validation and that's why for me I find it so important to be rooted in my my faith so I have a bigger mission and picture of sort of what my purpose is here and

My mission really hasn't changed.

No, I love that because I, as a ruminator and a thinker, I have spent a lot of my life overthinking on things.

I think for me, the way I do it now, at least at this season, is my body.

So for instance, if I am like really tired and just feeling like I'm hitting a point of like a day or two where I'm really just exhausted, kind of out of nowhere, but my brain is like, no, you need to do all these things.

I listen to my body.

Like my body's like, nope, like trust the process, take your time, you know,

if my body is energy but my head is like, no, stop, this and that.

So I find that my body tends to be more the truth teller than my head a lot because of the conversation we had earlier around voice.

So just getting really clear on that voice and whose it is.

Is it yours?

Is it God's?

Is it a higher self?

Is it your angry stepdad?

Whose voice are you hearing and what are their intentions for you?

So I think that's really...

an important part of it.

I think, I think, you know, for me, this may not work for everybody, but I get, I usually have like, it's usually like a 24 hour rule.

Sometimes it can be 48 or 12.

It kind of, it has a standard deviation there a little bit, depending on what it is.

But like, for instance, if like something bad happens, like let's say I lose a client or something, I'll give myself 24 hours to feel bad about it.

and how I can live my life and that my worth is identified in being a child of God and Christ.

And then say, after that, Kendra, you're done.

So here's your 24 hours, you know?

It's actually quite comical.

And so I try to kind of put rules on it.

Obviously, if it's like a death of a friend or a family member or something, you need more time than that.

But what I do is try to give myself time to grieve each day, you know?

So like you're going to be grieving throughout the whole day, but like deliberate grieving time.

Like these two hours, I'm going to go on a walk.

And if I cry, I'm just going to cry.

And actually build that space into your life for these things so that you can move through and move on.

And so...

For me, those tools and tips work for me.

What's worked for you, Ryan?

I'm curious.

And that is my worth.

And it took me a long time to get there.

I'm 51.

So it took me a long time to get there.

But I think that ego plays a huge part of it.

And I think there's a lot of good things that ego can do too.

There is a protective mechanism.

There's a very long conversation we can have around all the good things it can do.

If you look at sort of the movement of entrepreneurship and how we roll, some of what I help clients with, I needed obviously to do my own work as well and realized that the Unworthy Leader podcast meant so much to me.

However, I think there are a lot of lies that we end up telling ourselves in our society today

around it, I think we think that proving will finally make us free.

Yeah.

Um, what's funny, I kind of joke that I'm the hitch of executive coaching because it's always been like secret and word of mouth kind of, you know, so now I'm doing podcasts.

Like, oh, if I can just get this next promotion, I'll finally feel better.

So putting myself out there a little more, but they can find me at KendraDahlstrom.com.

They can find my podcast, which will be, um, the high achieving leader podcast, um, .com.

They can find it on that alias as well as on Spotify or on YouTube, a YouTube channel and reach out to me.

I do work

like with only five or six clients a year.

So I work with, you know, it's very curated, cultivated, very high touch experiences as I work through the year just to keep it the quality.

Well, guess what, Ryan, when you got that next promotion, did you finally feel better?

Quality is really important to me.

So I want to have quality and attention to detail.

And a lot of what these people are going through, as you've mentioned, are intense moments and life transformations.

So whether it's career or personal

It's just important that they have the support they need.

And to your earlier point, I need to be at my best self in order to do that.

So that means I only can take so many people a year.

So that's how they reach out to me.

And it's been a pleasure talking to you.

I think you and I are aligned on so many things.

And I love reading your sub stack and following your work.

Most, maybe for a little bit, right?

Thank you.

It's been a pleasure.

Yeah.

And I find it to be almost like, it's very similar to addictions.

So you get that serotonin and dopamine rush every time you achieve and approve that next thing.

But just like that,

addict that needs the video game or more alcohol or more drugs, you need more of that achieving to actually get that same high, right?

We can talk more about it coming out of the hospital.

Well, for me, it was a tipping point where it became too uncomfortable to not address it.

Right.

So, you know, I kind of hit rock bottom and have had a lot of abuse and trauma through childhood and then kind of on and off through my teens and then into college.

It really resonated with me and I wanted to strike like a visceral chord with people.

And then I got into some drug use for a few years.

and just really realized this is not who I am.

This is, I'm not even, I didn't even recognize this person.

Like this is not who I want to be, but at work I would show up as a high performer.

Nobody knew like it was this closet life.

Right.

And, um, as I got that all together and, you know, found Jesus, met my husband, had kids, I started to really just go into that deep healing work.

I've, I've done all of the, you know, esoteric sort of new age stuff as well as, um,

now I'm doing some, um, some really deep reparenting therapy that deals with like inner child traumas and stuff, where it gives you a chance as an adult self to go back and actually reparent the child the way in which you felt it would, it needed in the moment that it didn't get.

At the same time, I was branding the lie.

And that's been incredibly liberating.

And so I really just had to get, do the work.

Like there was no clean way to do it.

Ryan had to roll up my sleeves and just go in and do the work and then really reconcile with myself.

Um,

you know, how can I get this out of the way so I can actually live and feel free and not feel like I'm a victim or I'm triggered by everything or I'm doing fine and suddenly I'm triggered by this random thing.

I just was tired of that.

And so I really went in and did the work and that's why I got into this work is because it actually keeps me in the work.

not the truth, which is that they're really, people that feel unworthy are really just high achievers that are just in the continuous pattern of chronic success and achievements.

It keeps me honest and grounded and I kind of feel like a professor who's out there doing field work but also is teaching in the classroom and I think that's why my clients

feel so safe with me and can open up and there's something in me and I don't, it's just a gift from God, I guess, that when they get in the room with me or we're together virtually, I'm not asking really provocative questions or anything.

I'm just having conversations with them, asking open-ended, insightful questions, but there's something in them where suddenly they give themselves permission to not, to put the peacock feathers down and to just be seen as a human being

and to finally admit to themselves maybe that one lie that they've been telling themselves that they can feel free from.

And a lot of times it ends up being they resign, you know, and that's not my intention, but a lot of times they resign and they realize, oh my gosh, this role is not for me.

Like I'm actually going to give myself permission to not beat myself up over this, but I need to move on to that next thing.

Not the one that you think you need to live by because the world tells you, but what is your own true north?

And so that's kind of how I got into the work.

Myself was just doing it.

And then I've just found that

I truly believe that God only put me through everything he put me through in life, that I could help liberate others from it too.

And a lot of it really aligns with your TEDx talks.

I'm super excited to talk with you.

Yeah.

Yeah, such a great question.

Well, I'm a big fan of vulnerability.

It needs to be selective, and I'm a big fan of it in service of.

right?

Well, what I came out of from my trauma-informed background and then some lived experiences was this idea that I was unworthy.

So I would only share something with you that I felt would really be in service of you, not to make myself, not to fill that ego.

So that's a learned skill, and it takes time to really feel into that and make sure that you're not doing it for the wrong reasons.

But I often will share within context that, you know, stories from other executives, if I'm meeting in the corporate context, so that they feel like, okay, she's

she's worked with executives that have felt down and out or have felt like they're in over their skis or they're not ready for this promotion or they signed up for this job and now they're realizing it's everything they didn't want.

And they've got families to feed and all these things.

So, you know, in that context, I share it with my private clients in my practice.