OM3: Marla Tabaka | Super-Charge Your Confidence to Master Success

Meet today’s guest: Marla Tabaka Marla Tabaka is a small-business coach and adviser who helps entrepreneurs around the globe grow their businesses well into the millions. She has more than 25 years of experience in corporate and startup ventures and speaks widely on combining strategic and creative thinking for optimum success and happiness. Marla is a leading author at Inc.com, has appeared on Fox Business News and noteworthy publications such as American Express Open, The NY Times, TIME Business, The Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, and The Business Intelligence Report. Marla, you are a master business coach and you've been doing that for a long time. I've heard some of your success stories, how you've helped your clients. But you didn't just stumble into this career. Let the audience know how you became intertwined in the whole coaching world. It was the farthest thing from my mind. Honestly, I had a corporate career, I worked for NBC television and I really climbed the ladder there. And one day, I just decided enough. Things changed, television changed, news media changed. And I just wasn't happy anymore. I spent six months figuring out what I wanted to do when I grew up, and I didn't figure it out. So I left aimlessly without a job without a plan or anything. I did get a job pretty quickly working with a middle-market company. And I launched a new division for them doing web and kiosks development for some large clients like Sears and what was at the time of Claire's boutique. But you know what? I hated it. Here I was a year and a half into a very high paying job. And I learned a lot and did a lot but I hated it. And one day I was in this lovely, independent coffee house. And I was like, wow, I don't feel connected with my community. I've lived here in Naperville 30 some miles outside of the city of Chicago for at that point, probably 15 years. And I didn't have a sense of community and I didn't realize how much I was missing it. And so I bought the coffee house. I wanted community and so I created the community, little darling coffeehouse where musicians from literally all over the world came and artists came and people connected. And it turned into this really beautiful, wonderful space and experience. I was talking to one of my customers and he said why don’t you hire a business coach. So he introduced me to Steve and I hired him and magic happened. I felt like I wasn't in this alone anymore. Yeah, someone else invested in my success. I said to him I think I want to become a coach, but I want to do something different than what you do. And I told him people need the mindset and the emotional support to and he said I couldn't agree more and you'd make an amazing coach. So I'd like to mentor you. I sold the coffee house. And I went to school and he mentored me through school sent me pro bono clients and did all that great stuff for me. My practice took off very well and I’m going on my 18th year of coaching. When I was reading your bio, you had a little snippet about the endless chatter, that goes through our minds. And how true is that? When I first started coaching, I was ready to partner with these amazing women and help them grow their businesses, but I wasn't ready for the extraordinary amount of doubt and self-confidence that they lacked, and fear of success or failure. And really, even after going through all my coaching training, I was shocked to find that because these women, by all rights were very successful, educated women, and I just didn't expect it. And so that's when I decided within my first year of coaching, I decided that I really wanted to specialize in mindset before most people even knew what the word was. When we have a negative experience in our life our nervous system actually ingrains that into itself. And so when we're up against another challenge, where self-doubt rises, then neural pathway starts...