My Story of Courage: How I Became a Life Coach | ep 121
We are at the end of our Courageous Conversation series on Wholehearted Coaching: The Podcast and I’m telling you, interviewing these amazing women was such a privilege, an honor, and a joy.
In case you’re brand new here, welcome! I recently interviewed 5 inspiring women I’ve had the privilege of knowing in this life on how they trusted their intuition, how they switched careers, and how they released their life plan for their dream life. I learned so much from them and I hope you feel the same way, too.
To listen to their episodes, tune into episodes 116 to 120 of Wholehearted Coaching: The Podcast (you can also find each of these episode linked below).
Now, I’m sharing my story all about my journey with courage and my life journey to becoming a life coach and living my dream life. I’m sharing all the mistakes I made, the failures, the fears, and more because, like I always say, I am just like you, on this journey just as you are.
Before we dive in, I need to share a few updates with you:
I’ll be taking a break from the podcast for the summer. A well rested Shirin is a happy Shirin!
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Alright, love. Let's dive on in.
Let me tell you about little Shirin Eskandani
I was born in Tehran, Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. At the time, Iran had gone through a lot of upheaval. There was a revolution a few years before the war, so my family decided to immigrate to Canada. While this immigration was really great because it afforded my sister and I more opportunities in life, it was really difficult.
In Iran, I grew up very much loved and taken care of surrounded by all of our family and friends. Then all of a sudden, we moved to Canada where we literally had one set of family & friends. We moved with just a couple suitcases and left behind everything we knew to a new, unknown city that was predominantly white. We were one of the very few brown families that lived in our neighborhood.
All of these things combined — the trauma of moving, the trauma of war, the trauma of a revolution, and now coming to this new place that was so foreign and different for us — I believe everyone in my family just figured out a way to cope with it all. My parents obviously had PTSD which was something that was not talked about then. They were going through their own stuff and they couldn't really be there for me and my sister.
So, a coping mechanism that I adopted early on was to be “The Easy One.” The one that didn't have a lot of problems or issues. I really leaned into people pleasing, making people laugh, and making people like me by being funny and charming. I really created this persona of being “the best.”
This obviously got me really, really far. I got lots of friends throughout school and in high school, I was on all of the committees and president all of the things.
But, deep down, I really felt like I didn't belong and that if I didn't do all of these things, if I wasn't perfect, if I wasn't the best, if I wasn't a people pleaser, then I would be found out and no one would wanna be friends with me.
I feared I would have no one and I would have nothing. That's obviously a lot of pressure for a kid, but it was a coping mechanism that really worked. At this time, something that I found that became a light for me was music and singing.
My Introduction to Music & Singing
I come from a very musical family. My grandmother is a famous singer in Iran and I have lots of musicians on my mom's side of the family. So, when I moved to Canada, one of the teachers very early on realized that I had this gift of singing and she really encouraged me to sing and join this professional children's choir in Vancouver.
And love, singing was like finding myself. Finding my joy, finding my true essence. Singing was where I felt the most free, the most myself. I loved singing.
I really threw myself into my passion and I was very fortunate that everyone in my family was very supportive of this dream, which is not always the case with many families when it comes to an artistic pursuit. There can be a lot of resistance there (like we heard through Layla Saad’s childhood), but because of our history, my family was really on board with me.
So, I spent all this time on my music and combining this gift for singing with the support that I had, my perfectionist tendencies, and my hard working tendencies. I became a really great singer and decided this is going to be my job.
Early on, I thought, “Wow… I'm 15 and I already know I’m gonna be an opera singer and sing at The Metropolitan Opera.” Your girl had big ass dreams.
The Journey to The Metropolitan Opera
I got accepted into a great undergraduate music program in Vancouver. It was a Big Fish-Little Pond situation. I had this great gift, my voice, and combining that with this hard working nature, perfectionism, and people pleasing — I got really, really far at that school. I became one of the best.
With that, I decided to apply to the best music schools, like Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music. When I got accepted into the Manhattan School of Music, that was it. I was moving to New York. I was going to be singing at The Met in no time! I just had to keep doing more of the same: being the best, practicing, doing everything that had gotten me here.
But y'all, I got to New York and reality hit hard. I realized… I wasn’t the shit.
Everyone at my school was the best. Everyone was amazing at what they did. Everyone was a hard worker. This whole identity that I had built around being “the best” started to crumble around me.
Instead of looking inward and trying to heal some things, I just doubled down on what had worked before.
At the time, I didn’t have access to the kind of wisdom and insight I share now. Instead, I had overachieving, perfectionism, and people pleasing. I doubled down on coping mechanisms that were really rewarded by society and felt in line with the capitalistic, colonialist culture we live in: always doing, always improving, always striving.
I started to work full time as a singer as soon as I graduated, which was not the case for many of my colleagues. I was working across Europe in Italy and France, Carnegie Hall, and all over the US. If you’d been looking from the outside, I was living my dream.
How my “dream come true” really felt
My life as an opera singer looked like a dream from the outside, but it felt like an absolute nightmare.
I hated my life. I was so miserable, so exhausted and it wasn't the singing that was making me feel that way. It was how I was doing it. But, I didn't know that at the time. I was just constantly trying to be the best. I was constantly comparing myself, constantly fixated on what I wasn't doing well as opposed to what I was doing well. I was focused on the jobs everyone else was getting as opposed to the jobs that I was getting. I was making myself miserable and I got to the point where I started to really resent singing. This one thing that used to be my one joy, this place where I used to feel the most myself now was the space and the place in which I felt the most insecurity, worry, and misery.
My dream life had become a total nightmare. I really started to question, “Is this what you wanna do? I don't think you should be singing anymore. This is not healthy for you. This is not okay.” It was in that moment that I got the call that I'd been waiting for forever. My agent called me up and said, “Shirin, The Metropolitan Opera wants you to sing in Carmen next season.”
Now, this was my literal dream come true. Carmen, my dream opera. Mercedes, my dream role. All in my dream opera house, the goddamn Metropolitan Opera. This was the dream y'all. When I was a young girl, I would imagine this moment so many times. I would imagine myself feeling all this joy, happiness, and just jumping for excitement.
When I was a young woman who had just moved to New York, I would say to myself, “If you ever get this job, if you ever sing at The Met, you will know that you are good enough. You will know that you made it.”
I remember hanging up the phone and realizing that I did not feel any of those feelings. All I felt was insecurity. Fear. Doubt. All I could think was “You are not good enough and this is not enough to prove to you that you are good enough, that you are worthy, that you are deserving, that you are successful.” In that moment, I woke up and realized I'd become so fixated on my dream, on what I wanted to do that I'd forgotten all about the “how.”
My “how” left no space for joy or ease or kindness. My “how” was all about proving doing and striving. I also learned that what makes us happy and fulfilled isn't what's happening on the outside. I thought my joy, my happiness, and my success were just one achievement away, singing at The Met. But I got that and realized I didn't feel any of those feelings.
I realized something that I now preach, teach, and practice:
Our happiness and joy and success are not contingent on what is happening outside of us. It's all about what's going on inside of us.
In that moment, I knew I needed to get my shit together. And when I say shit, I meant my spiritual, emotional, and mental health. I needed to get it together.
The Path to Rediscovering Myself
I had a year and a half to prepare for the role of my dreams. In the first 6 months, I worked on my singing, but I also really worked on my mental, emotional, and spiritual health. I got into mindfulness, mindset work, and I started working with a coach and that shifted everything for me. (I’ll talk more on my experience with the coach soon!)
To this day, my greatest accomplishment in life isn't singing at The Metropolitan Opera House. It’s singing at The Met and enjoying every part of the process.
I had done so much inner work in that year and a half that I could find my joy even in the hardest moments I could find my resilience. I could find my strength. I could find my groundedness even when everything was going wrong around me.
I was able to take a bow on that stage every night and feel like I deserved to be there, that I was worthy of being there. I could take a bow and look out into that audience and just take it all in. Before doing the mindset work, I would've taken a bow and been fixated on some mistake I made or something that went wrong, but I had created such an inner resilience, such inner peace, and such groundedness for myself that I could stand on that stage and believe that I was amazing and I deserved this goddamn bow.
Related: If you’re loving this story, you’ll love my podcast episode 70 | Are you creating ease or just avoiding?
3 Things I Learned on my Journey to Singing at The Metropolitan Opera House
My journey to singing at The Metropolitan Opera House and my experience singing there shifted so much for me. In the year and a half I had to work on not only my craft but on my mindset, I had some really big insights from that experience.
1) I found my love for singing again
I found that same joy that I had when I was a young girl. I found the ability to exist in the world, not basing my worth and my value on how perfect I was or how good I was.
2) I learned how to exist in the world as myself
I learned how to make decisions for myself instead of decisions based on people pleasing and perfectionism. I learned to prioritize my ease and my joy navigating the difficult moments with grace and with a really healthy mindset.
3) I realized I no longer wanted to be an opera singer
Yes, I found my love for singing. I also realized that I no longer wanted to pursue the career that I was pursuing. I was only able to come to that realization when I found my love for singing again. I could then see my career with really clear eyes.
Before I went to The Met, I had been playing around with the idea of quitting my career. But this was before I did all of this inner work. If I had acted on that thought, I would’ve been quitting from a place of anger, insecurity, and doubt. Looking back, I realized had I made that decision, I would've always regretted stopping singing. I would've always had this feeling of “I didn't try hard enough” or that I wasn't good enough. Finding my love again for singing allowed me to really realize that even though I loved to sing, I didn’t love being an opera singer and everything that career entailed.
And that was a really scary realization.
What Working with a Coach Showed Me
In the first 6 months of preparing for The Met, I started working with a coach and I realized how much I loved coaching! I actually wondered if this was what I wanted to do with my life. While I was considering quitting singing, I thought of going back to school (you know, I’ll just get a Master’s in psychology or social work, right?). I knew I wanted to work with people. I wanted to be in service of people, bettering their lives, and changing their lives. So, when I started working with my coach (who I actually interviewed in episode 116), I was like… holy crap, I love this! I love all the possibilities of being a coach.
With that, I started looking into coaching certification programs. I found one I really loved, I told my family about it, I told some close friends, but I did not tell anyone in my singing profession. It was pretty taboo, you know, to be doing anything other than singing. It was a sign that you were failing, that you weren’t good enough.
While I was training to become a certified coach, I was doing rehearsals at The Met and it was this beautiful overlap. Everyone in my coaching program knew about my singing job and so many of them came to support me during my performances. But of course, I still wasn’t saying anything to my singing colleagues.
So, I finished singing at The Met and a couple months later, I graduated from my certification program. And things got really real. Before graduating, being a life coach was really this idea. And now that I had graduated and had all these skills, the reality was now, “What are you gonna do with this?”
I knew I wanted to pursue it, but I also had no idea what the heck I was doing.
Starting a Coaching Business
Listen, I had no idea how to run a business. This had to be the biggest learning curve. I felt pretty confident about my coaching skills, but I honestly didn’t realize I had to start a business. For the first 3 years of starting my coaching business, I was coaching AND singing. I was doing both! In the beginning, it was about 60% singing, 40% coaching. Then, it slowly shifted to about 55% and 45%. Over time, the singing portion became less and less.
I really wanted to take my time creating this business. I didn't want to throw myself out there. When I knew it was time, it still felt a little bit scary, and I also felt secure enough, I knew it was time to let go of my other career.
For me, the way I created this coaching business, it was just taking the next step that always felt right.
When you have a big dream, one of the biggest blocks to going towards that dream is “How” — How the hell am I gonna build a coaching business? I'm a goddamn opera singer. You don't know anything about business? You don't know anything about marketing, you don't know about anything. How the heck are you gonna do this?
So, I practiced what I preach. Everything I talk about on Wholehearted Coaching: The Podcast is also what I need to hear, the things that I practice, my own lessons. Taking this big leap was all about just taking the next step that felt good, trusting myself, making mistakes and learning from them, doing scary things and seeing what happened on the other side.
When I first started Wholehearted Coaching, I was working one-on-one with clients. I can't even tell you how much I was charging and how many people I was working with, but it was not much, okay?
I also remember a lot of people at that time were like, “You gotta figure out your niche as a coach.” But, I couldn't really figure out what my niche was and honestly, I'm so glad I didn't at the beginning because I learned so much by simply coaching.
I learned what kind of things I like to talk about, who I like to work with, what things made me really come alive.
In the first year of coaching, it was full of understanding who I was as a coach. I learned on the job. I could have never understood that if I came out of the gates just declaring a specific niche. And I had incredible clients who allowed me to really evolve into the coach that I am today.
About a year or a year-and-a-half into starting my coaching business, I launched my 1:1 coaching program Wholehearted Woman. And y’all, I didn’t charge a lot for that either. I remember having to just ask people to please just join the group. Like you’re really gonna like it. I promise you’re gonna like it!
I just was building the plane as I flew it and I still do that to this day. In those first days, it was terrifying and that taught me so much about trusting myself and knowing that actually did know what I was doing.
One of the very first things I did that literally changed the trajectory of Wholehearted Coaching was teaming up with a friend who is a jewelry designer. Together, we started a workshop called Wear Your Mantra. I would lead a workshop where people would come up with a one-word mantra and my friend would create a piece of jewelry with their word on it. Since she was a really great marketer, she had connections and with this workshop that I created (and actually ran for free), we went around New York City and I made so many amazing connections as well. I wasn’t getting paid and I met some amazing people who ended up working with me and someone who invited me on The Today Show (which you can watch here).
*Related: Interested in learning more about my feature on The Today Show? Learn all about it here and my story of “imposter syndrome” in 112 | Imposter Syndrome 101.
So, putting myself out there, scaring myself, trusting myself shifted so much for me.
Wholehearted Coaching has been such a beautiful journey. Now, I’m a full-time life coach and sometimes, I can’t even believe it. I always dreamed of this. And here I am now, talking with you and I get to share with you the things that have changed my life, the things that I now get to teach to others, and those thoughts and ideas that have shifted and transformed their lives, as well.
I didn’t know that I was going to be taking this path to get here. I just want to let you know that there was so much fear. There is so much fear. There is so much doubt. There are so many insecurity points. There are still moments where I look at other people doing other things and I think, “Am I doing the right thing? Is this right? Should I be doing that?”
And right now, I can tell you that I am so incredibly content and at peace with the life that I have. I really truly love the life that I get to live. And this life is because of big decisions I made and still make.
I could have just kept on singing. I could’ve chosen to not switch careers. It would've been “easier,” but it would've led to a much more difficult life. In 70 | Are you creating ease or just avoiding?, I talk more about this through an metaphor about salmon. Yes, I know, but hear me out.
When salmon are swimming upstream, they know that if there’s no resistance in their path, they’re going to face some obstruction — a big rock or a tree trunk that’s fallen in the water. Since there is no resistance in that water, it means they’re avoiding something and they’re going to have to face it. And, when they get to that rock or tree, they’re done. There’s nothing they can do. Salmon realize there has to be a little bit of resistance, a little bit of difficulty.
Y’all, we gotta be like salmon. Had I not made some really big, hard decisions and navigated some really challenging moments, I wouldn't be where I am today. I could have just kept on that path of singing that no longer was right for me. I'm so glad I didn't.
Even though I had worked so hard for that career. I realized it was no longer the path, the career, the journey for me, and now, getting to do this work with you all is just the most fulfilling thing ever. Will I be doing this forever? I don't know, but right now it feels so incredibly good.
So that's my story of how I got here. I hope you took away something useful and helpful. If anything, just the fact that I'm just as scared and insecure as you feel. I still have those moments today. When I launch something new or I'm about to try something different, I still get worried, but I've just done those things so much more and more over the years that I've realized that I can always trust myself to figure things out. More often than not, things work out the way that they're supposed to. Those hard decisions and difficult moments lead to some of the most beautiful things in my life.
If you loved this episode, you’ll love the rest of the Courageous Conversation series where I interview 5 amazing women about their stories of courage!
116 | Knowing when to let go with Cyndie Spiegel
How do you know when something isn’t for you anymore? What do you do when it’s time to move on from the career, the dream, or the passion you always wanted? In this episode, I’m interviewing (yes, interviewing!) one of my favorite human beings - Cyndie Spiegel – who truly embodies what trusting your intuition and following your compass looks like when it’s time to shift and pivot in life.
117 | Surrendering to your Intuition with Liana Naima
Deciding not to do something isn’t a failure. It’s not a mistake and there’s a strong chance that what it really means is you know yourself so well that deep down you truly know what’s best for you.
118 | Shifting from “The Plan” to “The Dream” with Chrissy King
In this week’s Courageous Conversation, I’m interviewing my bestie - Chrissy King - who fully embodies what it means to stop shrinking yourself and to start taking up space. Before graduating college, Chrissy had a full-time job offer and was engaged to be married. She was basically “set for life.” But, she eventually realized that “the plan” she’d so proudly achieved was no longer the dream she had for her life.
119 | Trusting your Timeline with April Kayganich
Often with our dreams, our timelines can keep getting pushed back. When the things we really want get delayed, it may feel harder to keep your eyes on your dream. That’s what’s so powerful about April Kayganich’s story: she always knew there would be pivots and shifts in the journey, but that she would one day reach her dream. Her story is one of patience and resilience and doing the damn thing in a way that feels best for you.
120 | Letting your Dreams Lead the Way with Layla Saad
There are hundreds of dreams within each of us to explore. We can also get locked into a dream just because it’s doing so well or because we’re so good at it. But, love, dreams evolve just as you do and you can even grow out of dreams. It doesn’t mean the dream was wrong, that it was a waste of time, or that you’re wishy-washy. It just means it’s time to release it and allow another dream to take root and grow.
A quote to take with you:
“It was all about just taking the next step that felt good. Trusting myself, making mistakes and learning from them, doing scary things and seeing what happened on the other side.”
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About your host, Shirin Eskandani
Hi, love! I’m Shirin.
Coach, speaker, writer, and life alchemist.
I teach you how to listen to your intuition again, tune out all the BS, and let your heart lead the way.
Because once you strengthen your inner GPS, decisions become easier, boundaries become clearer, and belly laughs become a daily thing.
A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME:
I’m a certified life coach (accredited through the International Coach Federation)
My husband and I met on Instagram and we live in Brooklyn, NY with our plant babies
I have a masters degree in Music and was a professional opera singer for twelve years. I worked all over the world singing on stage at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera (more on that later…).
I believe in the woo just as much as I do the work (internal and external). No amount of crystals and affirmations will make up for a lack of a healthy mindset and aligned action.
I love all the Real Housewives franchises. Don’t make me choose one… seriously, don’t.