Do you want to make a bold change but don’t know where to start? This episode will surprise you with what this episode’s guest will share today! Dori Fern, a lifelong New Yorker, joyful home cook, marketer, and story shaper, delves into how her gut feeling led her to quit her high-powered job and embark on a transformative sabbatical. You will also find how her unique style and personality helped her connect with others and ultimately find her calling. Learn about Dori’s coaching approach and how she helps clients unlock their potential. Get practical tips on how to quiet the mind and focus on what truly matters. You must join Dori Fern today because this conversation is truly invaluable if you want to embark on a major life change.
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Your Rainbow Reset: A Transformative Sabbatical Journey With Dori Fern
I got to have a conversation with Dori Fern. Dori is a lifelong New Yorker. She’s a joyful home cook, a marketer, and a story shaper. She coaches creative people who are ready to stop feeling bad about how they look, what they eat, and who they are so that they can be confident in their skin and ripe for transformative change at any age. Dori and I got into a little bit about who that might be. Maybe it’s you. Dori is a fantastic coach, a fantastic human, and a fellow Brooklynite. I’ll see you on the other side.
Dori, welcome to the show.
Marc, thanks for having me.
Nice to see you. We got to meet at a coaching event for the International Coach Federation. I forgot what it was called. Was it a summer fest, summer something?
I don’t know. It’s a good question. I don’t remember what it was called, but it was my first coaching event with the ICF, International Coaching Federation. I think it’s funny that we immediately were just like, “You.”
That’s what I was going to say. I cringe, probably like most people, when they’re told, “Come to this networking event.” You’re like, “We’re going to sit around and talk about what you do?” We got right into it. We had a really wide-ranging conversation, which is part of why I invited you to the show. We had such a good talk that I’m like, “We should have recorded this.”
Do you remember where and how it started?
I’m embarrassed to say I don’t.
It was when I was wearing my very brightly colored top. I also noticed that you had crazy pants on. We noticed that we were just standing out in the crowd in terms of how we were dressed.
That’s my people right there. I remember that top. It was like this vintage rainbow, but not with all the colors in the rainbow. It was great. You said you got it that day, I think, or something.
No, I didn’t get it that day. I did get it at a thrift store, though. I paid like $5 for it.
I had this image of you going to the event and grabbing it.
I’ve done that.
Welcome to the show. I’d love to start with you just sharing and I’m going to ask this, knowing that the answer isn’t all right there, who are the kinds of people that you serve or are looking to serve? What are some of the issues that they have that you specifically help with?
About Dori Fern
Thank you for teeing it up that way. As a bit of background, before I get right to the answer to that question, I became a coach while I was at a full-time job, not coaching. I never really thought about that part of it. What exactly am I here to do? I had taken a sabbatical myself prior to becoming a coach, prior to deciding that I wanted to become a coach, a year-long sabbatical. I knew that experience and some other experiences I’ve had with change in my life were key to what I would be doing in serving people.
When the job I was at ended, I used this time to really go deep with myself and figure out what exactly the answer to that question was. I had a bit of a breakthrough in my ability to articulate it. I know my people are, ready to make a big change. They have decided they are going to leave their job and take a sabbatical. They are going to change their career. They are going to stop dieting for good. They want to get their health in good standing. They want to stop listening to all the chatter about how you’re supposed to age, but they don’t exactly know what’s next. I am a coach for someone who wants guidance through that process of change. That is where I’m at. I am for the people who need a hand to hold to help guide them, the people who are ready.
The people who are ready. I’m curious about that. Going back to something you said, you mentioned that it’s funny you had this sabbatical, the job ended, and you had some time. I can think of a number of clients that I’ve worked with, and I can think of my own story, which I think people on this podcast have heard, about how that time can be used not just to find the next thing but to find your next chapter, your next story, like something that’s not just lateral, like, “I need another whatever I was doing before,” but what would somebody create from this place? I’m curious about what specifically, as much as you can say, how you went deep on these ideas of what you’re really here to do and what you’re supposed to do.
I think it became clear in a message I got this last week from someone who found an article I had written about the planning necessary to take a break. People talk about taking a break and living your purpose, and we talked a lot about this at that gathering, the platitudes of self-improvement that create this enormous gap for people between knowing they need something and understanding how they themselves are going to get it done. That article I wrote was about my planning to make that break happen, the financials of what I had to do to have the money to take that break I wanted, and the steps that I took.
This woman had not even interacted with this post. She just saw that article from that post and was like, “I need to talk to that woman,” because it was her last day at a job. She’s really psyched. She has 2 to 3 months of this sabbatical, but she doesn’t really know what she’s doing next. She knew that she needed to take a break. She has this feeling of excitement, but there’s also a lot at stake here. When she reached out to me, she was eager to talk, and it really was. It reaffirmed, just getting the message, that this is it. It’s in that process. It’s in forming the path because, especially for those of us who come from corporate backgrounds, I’m certainly a creative person, but I’m very brain-led or have been very brain-led in a lot of the decision-making.
I learned during my sabbatical that exercising intuition and listening to your gut is just as important as exercising any muscles you have. This is what coaching is for. We help guide people, but we believe that they have the answers. It’s about supporting them to get through and around the blocks and barriers set up for external and internal reasons that prevent them from seeing, believing in that gut, or listening to what their intuition is telling them.
We talk about having skills and resources, and all of that is really important, but you can’t just get a bunch of technology and think you’re going to succeed because you have a lot of tools. You have to know what to do with them. You have to have a certain clarity about that seed, and then to grow it, what do you need to water? How much do you water it? What’s the amount of sunlight it needs? What are the other resources that are necessary to really bring it to life?
I’m glad you said that. It brings to mind a study that, if I can remember to find it and link it, I will. A study was done at Harvard on decision-making, specifically in the corporate environment. While we would love to think that decisions are brain-led, based on numbers and data, what they found, though I don’t remember the details of the study, is that almost all, if not all, decisions are, in whole or in part, emotionally driven.
In my marketing job, we had, as part of our brand strategy workshops, these Northstar brand strategy sessions, and it was something like 94% of decisions are heart-led. This was in pharma, where we’re talking about healthcare professionals and people who are very intellectual.
I think that’s where people get a little stuck. They feel like there should be a clear answer. The truth is, in the work that I think we both do, there’s often not a clear or right answer. It’s one of the things that confuses people. I’m also working with someone who’s just given notice, and we’re in the process of designing that time off to be productive, grounding, and healthy and to improve relationships. It’s not just one thing that we do. Having left various jobs at different times in my long and varied career, I understand the real fear of not making the best use of this time or panicking and taking the wrong job.
I’m curious about what you might say to someone who says, “I’m leaving my job or I want to leave my job. It’s so unclear. I have this feeling of panic and fear, and I’m afraid that I might make a decision based on that.” Where would you coach somebody like that to start getting themselves in the right frame of mind for a truly fulfilling break?
That’s a really good question. I would probably start with some gut work, so to speak. I would have them close their eyes, take a deep breath, and really imagine, number one, who they are or who they imagine themselves to be so that the steps they take are towards something they can see. This is work that I have been doing myself as well.
I’m not a big dreamer by nature. I feel a little embarrassed as a coach saying that, but it’s hard work for me to think about who is the dream. Who am I at my most fulfilled? What does that look like? Paint that picture because whether it’s in it for a three-month break or for the rest of one’s life, if you don’t have that end in mind, how do you know the right steps to take to get there? I think we might’ve talked about that. I did something similar inadvertently when I quit smoking weed. Did I talk about that?
We may have talked about it, but we have not.
We haven’t talked about it here.
In the last fifteen minutes, we haven’t.
Correct. A couple of years ago, I just had decided that after a lifetime of being a very regular marijuana smoker, it just was not feeling good for me. I’ve never been like a big user, but my body wasn’t metabolizing it. I wasn’t really enjoying it. The first time I tried to quit was during the pandemic. That worked until I was around all my friends who smoke weed, and then I was like, “I’ll just have a little bit here and there.” It wasn’t good. I was just like, “No, I’m done. I am done.” What does that look like?
I’m not going to give up my friends. I was just like, how am I going to do this? Sure, immediately, you go to, you just need willpower. For whatever reason, I said to myself, “Okay, so now you’re just that person in the friend group who doesn’t smoke.” We all know somebody in our group who doesn’t drink or doesn’t smoke or is different or whatever. I just had to see myself that way and claim that, and then taking the steps and not smoking was a whole different process.
I’m a normal human being. I’ve gone through rounds of trying to do things, trying to have the willpower, trying to have the discipline, and then trying, trying, trying. I’m just finding over and again that the more you try to get back to where we started this without seeing the end in mind, the harder you’re making it for yourself.
First of all, I think that brings us also back to this idea of dreaming and what you said at the very beginning about getting support. Something that I absolutely do not believe is this myth that I think is thankfully no longer as prevalent, but this myth that things like therapy or coaching are for people who have problems or are not.
As if anybody doesn’t have problems.
Second of all, it’s funny because when I decided I was actually, I applied to and got into school for arts therapy, and I was really pulled towards coaching. I just remember having this conversation with my wife about, “Is this just some sort of like ego? Is this a real thing? What does the world think about this?” She moved in important circles and said, “Everybody has a coach, like every executive, every leader, all kinds of people.”
In fact, I imagine in your story, you were professional and doing well, you could probably have continued doing that. There was nothing wrong. There was an area where you were like, “I’d like this to be a little bit, not better, but just more aligned with who I am.” Getting back to what you said you do with people, really getting people the support that they need to remember that as they go through a process that may or may not be difficult. So much change, obviously, but I like how this ties it all together.
You have to own the process, too. It doesn’t mean you have to do it by yourself. You do have to figure out what really is working for you. That is when we talk about things like authenticity, that overused word. It’s getting to that part of yourself, that kernel of yourself, that is really true and valuable. That connects. It’s a practice to just show up for that.
It’s in the connections with other people, extending who you are into the larger community or universe around you, that authenticity truly becomes valuable.
Actually, it’s a good segue, speaking of doing this work in community, doing it with other people, connecting with other people. You have a podcast where you do some of this work. Before I ask a lot of questions, can you tell us a little bit about what you do on that and tell us the name and what you do?
Life Changing With Dori Fern
My podcast is called Life Changing with Dori Fern, and I did a season of it. It’s been a couple of years. I did it to chronicle this sabbatical that I took that ended in early fall 2022. It was my own little podcast. It took me quite a time. I knew I wanted to do a podcast for whatever reasons. I hadn’t done one. I knew I wanted to do one. I like to talk. As a creative person, I’ve always wanted one. Anyway, it took me quite a while to figure out, was I going to interview life changers. What was I going to do? I just realized, no, I really want this experience of the messiness of change. I want to share that. I want to chronicle that. I want to tell stories about that. It ended, and I was like, I think I’m done. I’m not sure that I just didn’t know what to do after that. I didn’t have a clear picture of where I wanted to go with it because I was sick of talking about myself by that point. I wasn’t really sure if the podcast really worked.
When this last job that I was at ended, which I was grateful for because it was going to give me time to really shape this coaching business, it dawned on me that I really wanted to talk on my podcast to the incredibly diverse group of people in my world. I wanted to connect with them, and I wanted to go deep with them. I’m always really interested in the deepest, the puzzle of who we all are as people just fascinates me.
I see people like Matryoshka dolls, is that what they’re called? You are this, and in the center is just you. You are that only person who is in the center, but then you have your family, your immediate family, and maybe your larger family, and your community, and then your multiple communities, and the world around you. In all of those ways, who are you? How does all of that, again, connect with that singular person connecting with the larger world?
I have done quite a number of interviews, but I knew I needed someone to help me with the production. I found a producer. She had produced her podcast back in the day. What was amazing was that she suggested that they were very long interviews. I was like, I think they’re too long, and I’m not exactly sure what holds them all together. She listened to them and suggested a way forward using narration, using my voice to knit all the different pieces, chapters of this together. This is what we’re working on. We’re putting this together. At one point, she gave me this feedback and told me what she liked about what we were doing and how she thought it could be better. I just started getting teary because nobody had given me feedback on my work, just my personal creative work.
You were getting, in a way, the kind of support that we’re talking about this whole time.
Exactly.
It was so powerful that things start to become clear.
Yes, things become clear. Also, just like, I’m someone who does a lot of giving to other people in an almost maybe aggressive way sometimes. I’m not amazing at being soft.
If they’re reading to this, what can they take from this? I’m seeing a thread in the stories that you’ve told so far about that support. It’s something that I believe about creativity and transformation. I could talk for hours about this, but it is not created in a vacuum. It is done in community. It is done in collaboration.
I have a background career as an artist. A lot of that was done here or in a studio on my own, but “on my own” is in the context of being in a family, of being in a community of artists, and being in a community of non-artists who are also incredibly creative, being in a community of coaches. All of these things are there to help inform, guide, and support my work.
When I’m thinking like, “If somebody’s reading this and they’re thinking about a career transformation, something that I’m taking from this is that it’s okay.” In fact, it should be totally normalized to get some support. That could be coming to you, hiring you as a coach. I also think if you have the right friends who can have a conversation that’s safe, nonjudgmental and supportive, that’s good too.
The point for me is really about, I think, a lot of the people who do these career transformations, they will do them. They’re going to do them. It’s going to be fine. It will go faster and probably better with that support, that sounding board, to generate a better set of ideas. That better set of ideas might not be about your authentic self. That’s not the way I think about it, but more about who you want to become and how you create your aligned self. How do you create the decisions and habits that align with that idea of who you want to be? If you can do those things, then you’re basically, as James Clear would say, you’re casting votes every day for the person you want to be.
Exactly. Just one additional point in that I think for a lot of people who are in that moment, they think a lot more about the external factors of their life that have happened to them as being more influential than they need to be in their life. There are really, truly important external factors, money and privilege of all sorts, family, and those kinds of things, which are very real. Oftentimes, especially around work that we need to do, that we can do, not that we need to do, that we can do, for ourselves, we should feel empowered to do where those external factors don’t matter anymore. They’re not a barrier to getting what you want, if that makes sense.
External factors don’t matter. They’re not a barrier to getting what you want.
If you were to say, maybe this is a final question. We’ll see where it goes. We’ll edit it later if it’s not. If you were to say, in your experience, from your own experience, and from your years of working in corporate and coaching people, and I know you a little bit, I know that you’ve always been doing a little bit of that along the way. I know it’s part of the job. Other than the external factors you mentioned, obviously, finance, time, and obligation, these are all things that are external, and we need to make a plan for them because we have to pay rent and taxes or whatever else. If you could point to one, it doesn’t have to be the most important, but what is one common internal obstacle that gets in the way of somebody as they’re going through that transition?
Overthinking.
Say more about that. Or say less about it. Maybe we should say less about it.
Overthinking And Mindfulness
You are always thinking and machinating about what is happening to you and what you don’t want to happen. You get in this mode of thinking about things before they need to be thought about, like you talking to a woman about a job interview that she hasn’t even set up yet. She’s worried because she’s consulting on this other thing, but then she’s not really sure. That’s a little more speculative, but she’s into it. She’s so worried that maybe she’ll get offered this job and would then disappoint these other people. Anyway, all to say, she’s created this entire narrative in her head about a problem that doesn’t exist.
We do that all the time. I think the more you are in these conventional constructs, conventional multi-layered constructs, and your job is to think, you just get real. Some of us are just in our heads a lot. I think learning how to just stop and pause, take a deep breath, let it go, and ask yourself, as if you were coaching yourself, do I need to be thinking about those things? If those things happened, what might I do? If I don’t know them, what are ways in which I can get the answers I need to these things? Just let it go for the time being and be okay with the fact that there are always going to be things in life that you don’t know until you know them, but it doesn’t have to be a source of stress. Anyway, overthinking is really, I think, the number one reason why people get tied up in narratives that aren’t helping them in any way and are only keeping them back.
Overthinking makes people get tied up in narratives that aren’t helping them and are only keeping them back.
What you said makes me think about how we can, and I’ve seen it too, overthinking. I’m going to say this, and then I’m going to, I’m wondering if it’s true, but this is how we do it. I find that so much of overthinking, as you said, comes from maybe something as simple as a lack of information. I can think about a few things that are on my mind and bothering me that I’m thinking through. I remember talking to my wife earlier, she’s like, “There’s nothing to really do. You don’t have the information, and the way you can get the information is this. Why don’t you just wait until you have the information before you start the huge decision tree of what ifs based on a bunch of things that not all of them are going to be true.”
I like that encouragement, that call to action of inaction, which is not to say, like, don’t do anything ever, but to say really, if you find yourself looping on one of these decisions, first of all, the support of a coach is always a good thing, but taking that space and coming back to it and seeing what’s the real issue, what’s really important. Maybe I need some information. It could be something as simple as that.
If anybody’s ever meditated at all, poorly or well, that idea of letting things in and breathing them away, you have to come back.
They will.
Also, have confidence that you can find the answers you need. You are competent. If it’s important, it will come. You may need to take steps to get the answers. You may need to just let go of the expectation of when the answer is going to come, but trust that you can figure out whether you want to be in a state of panic about it or whether you want to be more open, not freaking out, and just happier and more satisfied. It is possible. It’s a practice, but it’s possible.
Have confidence that you can find the answers you need. You may need to let go of that expectation of when the answer will come. But trust that you can figure it out.
If people are listening and feel ready to find some answers and be in that practice, what is the best way for them to find out more about you? We will, of course, post links. If you’re watching on any of the platforms, we’ll post those links, but let us know one or two good ways that people can find you.
The best way to find me is to find me on my website, DoriFern.com. I’m Dori Fern on most social media, including LinkedIn. You can always connect with me there or on Instagram. I don’t have the most exciting presence, but you can find me. I’m very easy to find, and you can schedule a 30-minute call just to talk.
Great. Very generous.
Just get on a call, no strings attached, and I would love to meet anyone who’s curious.
I can vouch that if you book a call with Dori, there’s not going to be high pressure. It’s an exploration. Am I right?
Correct.
Take that first step. Book a call with Dori. For everyone reading, thank you. Our next episode, I can’t tell you anything about it in part because I’ve totally forgotten who I’m talking to next. Dori, we’re about transparency here. I don’t always have it all together, but I’m glad that we got together to talk. I really appreciate the time and the wisdom that you brought. I’m looking forward to releasing the episode. Thank you so much.
Thank you. It’s a pleasure.
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Thanks again for reading. If you liked this episode, please do all the things. Share it with a friend and follow. If you really liked it, please rate it, leave a comment, leave a review, and share it. All of those help me defeat the algorithm. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.
Important Links
- Dori Fern
- Life Changing With Dori Fern
- Instagram – Dori Fern
- LinkedIn – Dori Fern
About Dori Fern
Dori Fern is a lifelong New Yorker, joyful home cook, marketer and story shaper. She coaches creative people ready to stop feeling bad about how they look, what they eat, and who they are so they can be confident in their skin and ripe for transformative change, at any age.
