S2 E13 | Kori Linn

Kori Linn:

If you have the belief, “Being busy is how I know I’m worthy and good,” and you also have the belief, “If there’s more work, I should do it,” your brain will literally look for work that’s not even your work to do, because it wants to be able to believe you’re good and you’re worthy. Those thought patterns maybe sound like they’re going to be helpful. You’re like, “Yeah, I’ll be so productive.” But the problem is they get people overworking and burning out. People come to me and they’re craving work–life balance, but they have this internal thought pattern that’s driving them to overwork. When we solve that thought pattern, when we redo the thought pattern, we reprogram it to be something more useful, they’re able to actually prioritize their work better instead of constantly working themselves into exhaustion.

Luke W Russell:

Welcome to Lawful Good: Powerful Partners, a series about interesting and caring folks that we know and trust, whose journey has brought them to collaboration with the legal community. I’m your host, Luke W. Russell. I’m not a journalist. I’m not an attorney. I’m trained as a coach. I love human connection, and that’s what you’re about to hear.

Luke W Russell:

My guest today is Kori Linn, a certified burnout and career coach. Growing up, Kori loved getting lost in books. They were her safe haven, and she’d spend hours reading entire sections of the library. It’s no surprise that she went on to get her undergrad in English and French, followed by Master’s in creative writing. Kori spent her early adult years as a barista and cocktail waitress as she explored where she would ultimately want to go professionally. During this time, she noticed that many people were unhappy in their nine-to-five positions. Intrigued and curious, she decided to conduct her own study by joining corporate America. It was there, in her traditional nine-to-five job, that her passion for career coaching pushed her to quit her job and start her own coaching business. Join me for today’s episode as Kori talks about why she loves Saturdays, the challenges of transitioning from homeschooling to public school, and how coaching has played a powerful role in her own life. Kori, what’s the hardest part about being a human?

Kori Linn:

Let’s start with this. One hard part about being a human is that we’re social animals, but we also have these big, amazing brains that absorb all this socialization in a way that most animals don’t. This is what I talk about in my work a lot, is the beliefs and culture we absorb from around ourselves in childhood especially, but also as adults, and how that informs how we try to behave in the world and how we try to lead our lives. That could make things very complicated for humans. We have all these ideas about how we’re supposed to be, how the world is supposed to be, what family is supposed to be like, what work is supposed to be like, and this socialization, this enculturation that we receive comes from all over the place, especially from authority figures, and a lot of it conflicts. I see people trying to lead their lives based on all these different pieces of socialization, many of which conflict with each other, which makes it very hard to follow all of them, and a lot of which don’t actually align to that person’s values and ideas about who they want to be as a person.

Kori Linn:

One of the things I do with my clients is I help them unpack all of those rules, all of that socialization, all of that enculturation about what it means to be good, what it means to lead a good life, and then we get to examine it and decide if they actually want to keep that. But until someone comes along and informs you that you have all these ideas in your head that aren’t necessarily actually your ideas that you’re trying to live by, it can be a very difficult and confusing experience.

Luke W Russell:

Let’s go back to elementary school. What was Kori like? How did she engage with other people?

Kori Linn:

I didn’t go to the first half of it. Most people start their school career in kindergarten, or even in pre-K. I didn’t go to public school. I was homeschooled. I didn’t go to kindergarten. I didn’t go to first grade. And then my dad got custody of my brother and I, so I did then go to public school, but it turns out, some of the homeschooling I had received, I didn’t actually basically learn as much as I should have to get put into the grade that I would’ve been in age-wise. What happened was I went to public school for the first time at eight years old and stuck out just like a sore thumb very much, and was older than the people in my class also. Coming in, not having been socialized with other children in an academic setting, I just had no idea what was going on. You raise your hand to go to the bathroom. That’s the thing I always think of, because I just remember my little eight-year-old brain being like, “Why would I ever ask someone’s permission to go to the bathroom?” That just didn’t make any sense to me. I think that is a good indication of where my headspace was at.

Kori Linn:

Being able to see that and having gone into public school at an older age where I have a better memory and more of an understanding of how it was different than what I had experienced before, I think that taught me so much. Even though it was honestly a deeply painful experience that I would never wish on anyone, I think I have a lot of gifts from that. I think about things really differently, and I think that is maybe part of… I identify as a highly creative person, and I’ve wondered a lot of times if part of why I’m highly creative is because I was able to have these experiences as a young child that a lot of other kids weren’t getting to have, because they were put into school settings and socialized much earlier, and I didn’t have that.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Did you feel like you had to grow up faster than your peers?

Kori Linn:

No, I felt like I was behind all of my peers. It’s like going to a party where everyone knows the dance moves and you don’t know them. And on the one hand, you’re like, “Why are you all doing the same dance moves?” But on the other hand, there’s this deeply human thing where you’re like, “I just want to be able to be like everyone else,” but I wasn’t.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. When did you discover a love of writing?

Kori Linn:

Well, I think my love of writing actually started as a love of reading. I am a writer. I have a Master’s degree in creative writing, and I’ve written a bunch of poems and short stories and things like that. And not to mention all kinds of other stuff that’s not as much in the creative writing sphere. But that was really secondary to how much I just loved books as a kid, and I still do. I love fiction. Books were my haven as a child.

Kori Linn:

When I went to public school at age eight and I was not at the appropriate academic levels, basically, I went in as a kid who could barely read, so I started the school year in going to reading center, which was where they send kids who need help with reading. I would go sit in this room with this person. I don’t even remember her name, but bless her, because she saved my life, for sure. We would go through books together, and she would point at every word, and I would read the words. Every time I read a book, I think I got a shiny pencil, and who doesn’t like a shiny pencil? I was like, “Yes, I want these shiny pencils.”

Kori Linn:

I was just hooked on reading, and I went from barely being able to read to being able to read chapter books in a school year. I just would read entire sections of the library. I would just read every book in this category and every book in that category and scour the shelves for new things to read all the time. As a kid, in the summer, I would go to the library and check out, I don’t know, seven or 10 books, and they’d all be due in four weeks, and I would read all of them in that time. And I’m not a fast reader, so that’s insane. My siblings actually told me they thought something was wrong with me, because no one should like reading as much as I did.

Luke W Russell:

I love that. I know, in high school, you’re looking ahead, and you have this love of reading. You end up attending Queens University of Charlotte to study English and French. When you were in high school, looking ahead to what you wanted to study, what was Kori thinking she wanted to do with these passions?

Kori Linn:

That’s an interesting question, because I don’t think I was really thinking ahead. Like a lot of people, I was really bought into the idea that school mattered and getting really good grades mattered, but it wasn’t because I was trying to become anything. I think, if anything, I was kind of confused about how careers even work. How do you get a career? What even are careers? I remember, as a kid, being like, “I guess I want to be a teacher,” because that’s the only job I could think of that somebody who liked the things I liked could do. I’m like, “Well, I like books and I like reading, so I guess I have to be a teacher.” Younger Kori had some attitude also. I remember, in college, thinking business majors don’t have souls, which is so funny to me now that I’m an entrepreneur and I love business. But as a 20-year-old, I was like, “Who cares?” I know that there were academic programs and resources trying to help me make that transition, but my brain was not making that transition.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Was it in college, your undergrad, when you worked as a barista?

Kori Linn:

I worked as a barista in undergrad and also some after undergrad, and for four minutes at a place in Seattle when I came to grad school, but I think I only lasted one shift at the place in Seattle.

Luke W Russell:

As a barista, were you that type of person who had to make sure drinks were made to the exact recipe, or was it like, “Throw in the ingredients. The customer should like it”?

Kori Linn:

I honestly tried to never be the person who made the actual drinks. When I worked in the coffee shops I worked in, being the person who made the drinks was seen as like, “This is the good job. This is the serious… This is the artistry.” I did not ever want that part. I was like, “Let me just talk to people. I’m going to try and upsell on this muffin, because muffins are fucking delicious. I’m going to try to just be charming, have fun conversations, get tips.” There were a few times I had to work the bar, and I was always like, “I hate this.” I actually got fired from one of the coffee shops where I was so good at that job, but one time, the boss went in the back room and then I had to take over the bar and the register, and I didn’t know how to make the drink. He came back, and someone had ordered something, and I was trying to make it, and I was doing it wrong, and he was like, “You know I have to fire you.” And I was like, “Do you?” He did fire me. And you know what? That’s okay. I don’t blame him.

Luke W Russell:

You get your undergraduate in English and French. You get your diploma, you’re looking out. What were your next steps?

Kori Linn:

Even before I graduated, I knew I was going to try to move to France, because as part of my undergrad degree, I did a study abroad in Nice, which is in the south of France, the summer between my junior year and senior year, I think it must have been. Being in Nice was just incredibly magical, and I was just like, “I’m moving here.” I was like, “I love French. I’m moving here. I don’t give a fuck what I have to do. Literally any job I can do to get to live in France, I’m doing that.”

Kori Linn:

I went back after that trip, and I talked to my professor, and he was like, “That’s a Google question.” I went and Googled it, and I found this program. They were like, “List three locations you might want.” I think when you apply early and get accepted early, you get the location you want. I don’t remember the three locations I listed, but I know for sure I didn’t get any of them, and the one I got was some place I’d never heard of. When I had gone and decided, “Yes, I’m going to move to France. This is going to be this great plan,” I had been in the south of France in the French Riviera, incredibly beautiful. Where I got put in my position was in the northwest of France, in this town where it was super small and it rained all the time. I just remember my feet were cold and wet that entire time I was there. I just was like, “Oh, I didn’t plan this very well. I got here, but I didn’t totally think it through.”

Kori Linn:

There were a lot of things about living in France at 23 that were really hard. Opening up a French bank account, which I had to do, and figuring out where I was going to live, and being also emotionally volatile 23-year-old who would get overwhelmed with what I was trying to do and just burst into tears a lot, publicly, privately. It was an interesting experience, but I’m so glad I did it, because having that just really… First of all, it opened my eyes up to, “I can do hard things.” There were so many moments living in France where I was just like, “I have no idea how I’m going to sort this out.” But I would get it sorted out. And also, just living in a different place from where I had grown up and a different country and a different culture, I think, was so informative for understanding how much we’re influenced by the culture we grow up with and how other places have totally different socialization that creates totally different stuff. I think that gave me a glimpse of a lot of the stuff that now I spend all my day working and talking about.

Luke W Russell:

You eventually end up getting your Master’s in creative writing. How did you go from France, the northern part of a rainy France, to creative writing?

Kori Linn:

Well, after seven months in France, I was like, “I’m pretty good. I think I’m good on this.” When I was coming back from France, I reached out to some families I knew from the coffee shop I had worked at before I went to France, and I set it up that I would nanny for them, for these two families who lived across the street from each other. I did that for a couple years, and I think maybe a year and a half in, I was just like, “This has been fun, and it’s fine, and I can pay my bills, but there’s got to be something else for me.”

Kori Linn:

I had a little meltdown, sort of, I remember, of trying to figure out what I was going to do and what interesting jobs were and how a person even got these interesting jobs. I did what I think a lot of people do. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to go back to school,” because school was a place I felt safe and comfortable, and a place that I felt like, “Oh, I know how to succeed there,” versus the whole trying to succeed in a career thing was confusing to me at that point. It’s interesting, because now, with hindsight, I’m like, “Okay, so I was confused about getting a career.” My solution to that was to go get a Master’s degree in poetry, which was probably not going to help me get a career, but that is what I did.

Kori Linn:

I applied for MFAs. I got into one in Seattle, so I moved from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Seattle, Washington. I had two cousins who lived there, so I was excited. I already knew some people. And one of my best friends from North Carolina had moved there, and that was wonderful. But it turns out I did not enjoy getting my Master’s degree in creative writing, so that was a bit of a sad surprise for me at that time.

Luke W Russell:

Mm-hmm. After you graduate with your MFA, what’s next? You’ve graduated, you got your Master’s. Where does Kori go?

Kori Linn:

One of the things I was doing when I was in grad school was cocktail waitressing and bartending. When I was finishing up with grad school, I was very tired, and I think physically tired, emotionally tired, all kinds of tired. I just didn’t want to do you anything. I didn’t want to do anything effortful. I was just like, “I’m not. I’m not going to do anything effortful. I’m going to keep my job cocktail waitressing and bartending.” I pretty quickly was like, “I don’t want to bartend and cocktail waitress forever.”

Kori Linn:

This woman I knew at the time, who also was cocktail waitressing and a hairdresser, she was like, “What are you doing?” She was like, “You have a Master’s degree. You could work at Amazon or Google. What are you doing?” Basically. And I was just like, “What?” It was so interesting. It had never occurred to me, I don’t think, really, that I could work at Amazon or Google. And then I think there was this part of me, too, that was like, “Oh, I could never have nine-to-five. I’m too much of a free spirit,” which I’m saying in kind of a funny voice, because then, I did go on to have a nine-to-five and actually have a great time there. But I think I had all these opinions and attitudes like, “Oh, I couldn’t do that.” And I think younger me saw it like I was selling out or giving up. I don’t know where that idea came from. Probably something from my youth, and probably from listening to too much punk rock music or something. Who knows?

Kori Linn:

But the further into doing the bartending and all of that, I was like, “I don’t know. Maybe I do want to do that. That sounds kind of nice to have a stable job where you go and you work from 9:00 to 5:00 and you have the good health insurance and all this stuff. And then I think this other thing was happening where I was also like, “Why are people who have nine-to-five jobs unhappy?” Because I knew many of them, and I knew that many of them were unhappy, and I knew I had this idea that, if I tried to do that, I would be unhappy. I was like, “Okay, this could be something interesting to dig into.”

Kori Linn:

I kind of did this thing where I was like, “Let me go get a job to understand what’s going on over there. What is that world actually like? The people who are unhappy with that, why are they unhappy?” Like a research assignment, almost, like a detective. I’d been dabbling in that kind of world of thinking, and I’d been reading a lot of personal growth books and a lot of books about what makes people happy when they’re happy, and specifically what is required to have a satisfying career.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. You end up getting your Master’s, and then you find yourself in tech, doing communications. I know you spent a few years at Expedia. Do I have that right?

Kori Linn:

Yeah. After dabbling in some freelance, and I had a little job at a boutique marketing company, where I ended up in my nine-to-five life was at Expedia doing internal communications for the IT department, which is so interesting, because I remember reading the job description and thinking, “I don’t even understand half of what the job description says. There’s no way I’m qualified for this.” But I was working with an agency that helps get contractors into roles, like a staffing agency. The woman I talked to, she was like, “No, no, you’re totally qualified for this.” She basically had to explain to me why I was qualified. This experience has never left me, and I think about it all the time with my own clients. We don’t even know what we’re qualified for sometimes.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. You eventually left your corporate job, where you were adored by your colleagues. Today, you have a podcast called ‎Love Your Job Before You Leave It. Did you love your job at Expedia before you quit?

Kori Linn:

100% yes and no. There was so much I did love about that job that shocked and delighted me in all these amazing ways. Working in that job, I made more money than I’d ever made and had really amazing coworkers, and I had great mentors, and I had such a wonderful community, and I got to do interesting things, and I got to learn so much. I think that my time there was actually really healing. That might sound like a weird word to use, but I think it really helped me see that some of those biases and mindsets I had had as a younger person were full of shit, and in a beautiful way, in a way where I was like, “Look at these amazing humans. These are also just humans trying to live their lives and trying to create something beautiful and trying to have a good experience, and they’re not that different than me.” I think I had thought that they were really different than me somehow.

Kori Linn:

And on the other hand, once I gained the coaching tools that I use in my business now, no, I did not try to use those tools to love my job before I left it. I knew I could’ve, and I knew that a lot of people would say I should, but honestly, I just didn’t want to, so I didn’t. That being said, all the things that I didn’t coach myself on before I left, guess what? I had to coach myself on them in my business without my corporate paycheck, and that was educational, also. I don’t regret that I chose to do things that way, but I also want to use the knowledge that I gained to help other people make an educated choice, whether they want to choose to do what I did, which is quit your job and fucking figure it out, or whether they want to maybe take more time with it and not be in a rush to leave.

Kori Linn:

One of my basic tenets of what I teach is I don’t ever think I know when it’s the right time for anyone else to quit their job, because I think they know. Something I like to instill in my clients, or I try to instill in my clients, is the idea that they are their own agency, they are their own authority, and they get to make that choice for whatever reason they want to, at whatever point they want to. If they’re like, “I absolutely do not want to love this job, but I would like your support in leaving this job, and then loving the next one,” I’m like, “Hell yes. Let’s do that.” And if they’re like, “I hate this job and I absolutely do not want to leave for these reasons that I’ve decided are good, beautiful reasons, and I want your help because I want to be able to have a better experience of it while I’m here,” I am a hell yes. And if they’re somewhere in the middle where they’re like, “I want to last another year here,” I’m also going to help with that.

Luke W Russell:

When did you know? Was there a moment in which you were like, “Yes, I’m going to start my own practice, my own business”?

Kori Linn:

I was in coach program, her six-month coaching program. I was getting coached about work, I was getting coached about how I didn’t even want to do that job, because I wanted to start my own business. Kara said to me, she was like, “I want you to go all in on staying and loving the job, or go all in on quitting and launching this business you keep talking about.” What she rightly identified was that I was ping-ponging back and forth and using that ping-ponging to not have to make a decision and do the hard work, and it didn’t matter which hard work it was. In that moment, I was like, “I’m going to quit the job.” And I did think it through and I talked about it a lot with my partner. It was an educated, thoughtful choice in a lot of ways, but it was also like, “I just want to, and I’m just going to, and no one can stop me.” That’s also true.

Kori Linn:

But then I did it. I was pretty miserable about my choice, even though I had left corporate to launch my dream business. I was pretty miserable most of the time for the next nine to 18 months, because then it wasn’t a fantasy anymore. It wasn’t the fantasy of like, “Ooh, when I quit my day job and have my coaching business.” It was the reality of like, “I have quit my day job. I no longer have my day job paycheck. I no longer have my day job 401(k), blah, blah, blah. I need to get some clients and make this business work, because I have bills.” Right? And I have money saved up and I have a supportive partner, so I was able to make it through that time, but it was very intense, and a really good lesson in the difference between fantasy and reality.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. In the U.S., we have this fantasy around starting our own business. There’s a book called E-Myth by Michael Gerber, and he talks about… The E-Myth is the entrepreneurial myth, this idea that, if you love doing something… And he uses the example, oh, this person loves making pies, and then people’s friends are like, “Oh, you should open up a pie shop.” A person opens up a pie shop only discover that, out of the 12 things that demand their time, only one of them is making pies, and that so many people go out with a passion for something, and then end up just getting crushed under the weight of all these different things that are part of starting, running a business. In other words, it’s this idea that, if you love something, you should just go start your own business, and then this American dream ends up suffocating so many people, wiping out their savings, and leaving them with a sense of frustration, hopelessness, and more.

Kori Linn:

Not to mention, even if you like making pie, sometimes you like making pie because it’s not your job. When you make making pie your job, it can totally change your relationship to the activity, not to mention those 11 other things. That’s something I think a lot about. When you change your life to have more of what you want in it, sometimes, doing that does not create what you thought it would, and there’s a lot more tinkering that is involved to get it to a place where you like it.

Kori Linn:

This is kind of like what happened with studying poetry, right? I took this thing that I had really liked in undergrad, and I thought, “I know. I’ll go get a Master’s degree in that,” which isn’t exactly like starting a business, but in a way, it kind of was very similar, because I was like, “Oh, I’m going to focus a bunch of my energy and attention on this, and then also, here are these other 11 things I have to do to make it work.” In a lot of ways, that experience for me, through nobody’s fault but just the way it worked out for me, I ended up liking writing a lot less, even now not wanting to do the same kind of writing that I used to do and having to reconfigure my relationship to writing to make it enjoyable for myself again. I had put so much pressure on it to be the thing for me, and didn’t work out the way I thought it would, and I didn’t love it as much as I expected to. That was really painful for me, and I think that can happen with business, too.

Kori Linn:

A lot of us, kind of like I didn’t use to know how to get into a career, and then I got into a career and kind of figured that out, a lot of us don’t actually know how to run a business. And that’s okay, because we can learn, obviously. I’m still all about doing it. I did quit my job to start my business. But it involves so much figuring out, and I think so much investment into the business of our time and energy, and often also our money, to create a business that can feel really good and sustainable, but it’s not always like, “Oh, if you love this thing, you should make a business doing that thing.” I don’t think that idea is always helpful to people.

Luke W Russell:

You’re in 2018, you’ve invested in this program, you’ve decided you want to start your own coaching business. Your girlfriend, Alex, tells you something along the lines of, “Why don’t you just…” And I’m quoting her. “Why don’t you just suck it up, quit your job, and make a goal of making this business happen?”

Kori Linn:

It’s so funny, because she never would’ve said it in those words to me back then. We’d been dating for one year, so we were very much… She was like, “You can do it,” and I was like, “I don’t know.” But yeah, she was like, “I support you.”

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. You set out to create a substantial coaching practice. You’ve done that over the last few years. When you look back at the years, especially whether… I don’t know whether it’s childhood or maybe undergrad. You look at maybe some of those experiences at the time where they didn’t make sense, it didn’t feel like… Maybe, at the time… Another way my father likes to look at things, he talks about how he’ll feel like his life’s going in a zigzag, but when he looks backwards, it seems like it’s in a straight line. When you look at your career today and where you are as a coach, do you ever… Can you relate to that experience?

Kori Linn:

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like so much of my life, I was like, “What’s going on? I don’t know what’s going on. Where is this going? How am I going to figure it out? How am I going to create something for myself that makes sense and feels good to me in so many areas, not just career?” And then looking back, I’m like, “Oh, yeah. This makes total sense.”

Kori Linn:

I can see how so many seemingly disparate pieces of my past really come together, and I think reading and my love of books and my love of story is actually a really key one, because one of the first ways I thought about coaching before I have the full toolkit that I have now is this idea of, “How would I tell the story of what’s happening in my life if I were the protagonist in a book? How would I see the things I’m struggling against differently if they were the things a character in a book is struggling with?” In a book, it’s never just like, “Everything is peachy.” You’re like, “Yeah, this is the part where the character’s really struggling, and this is the part where everything goes to shit, and this is the part where they have to defeat this nemesis or whatever.” That was one of the things that first gave me the ability to think about perspective and to think about, “Oh, there are different ways to look at the same facts, and when look at the same facts through these different lenses, they’re going to feel different.”

Kori Linn:

And then, I think, also, there are books where you’re like, “This is the protagonist and this is the antagonist. This is the person that we’re siding with as the reader and this is the person we’re siding against.” And then someone else will come along, and they’ll write the book from the opposite point of view, where the “villain” is now the main character, and now they’re not the bad… I think that also has given me so much information to think about the way humans tend to put people into categories, like you’re the good one and you’re the bad one, and the way humans do things like othering. There’s so much data on that, about how humans include certain people and exclude certain people.

Kori Linn:

That kind of framing is really interesting, so I think it’s given me more of an ability to be flexible in how I’m choosing to think about myself and helping my clients be flexible and find ways of thinking about themselves that feels good and helps them do whatever is they’re trying to do. It also gives me so much more compassion for other people that I wouldn’t normally maybe be able to understand, or I’m like, “Why are they doing that?” Or I’m like, “Oh, they’re assholes.” Having this ability with books to see everyone is acting out their thought patterns and their ways of being, and everyone has this internal narrative. They might think I’m the other, they might think I’m the villain. Can I see that pattern, but without being in the pattern? Can I see the pattern of how humans other each other without me othering the person who’s othering me? That’s some advanced-level math right there, but it allows me to be more with my own values, even when people are doing things that I don’t agree with, and I find that to be really, really valuable.

Luke W Russell:

When we come back, Kori will share thoughts on some of her specialties, like impostor syndrome and burnout. Stay with us. I’m Luke W. Russell, and you are listening to Lawful Good.

Luke W Russell:

Season two is about Powerful Partners, interesting and caring folks that we know and trust, whose journeys brought them to collaboration with the legal community. In our next episode, a Business Spotlight, Kori and I discuss what her company has to offer and if it’s something that would benefit you or someone you know. As you can probably imagine, Lawful Good requires an enormous amount of resources to make happen. One way we make this show possible is by featuring folks like Kori that we know, like, and trust, many of whom we have a referral relationship with. So, after you listen to this episode, check out our Business Spotlight to learn more about Kori’s coaching offerings and how she helps attorneys transform their lives and make a massive impact in their businesses.

Luke W Russell:

When we left off, Kori was sharing how her misconceptions about a nine-to-five career ironically led to a passion for helping working professionals be happier in their jobs. As we continue, Kori explains the benefits of consciously thinking about our unconscious thoughts and how the process has changed the lives of her clients and even her own girlfriend. Kori, what exactly is thought work?

Kori Linn:

Thought work is one of the basics of the kind of coaching that I do. Basically, what it is, is helping people see the thought patterns they have, what those thought patterns are creating, where they came from, because spoiler alert, you didn’t just come up with most of them. You learned them and absorbed them from culture and authority figures. And then learning how to think differently to create different results in your life.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Just a quick note to our listeners. I’ve worked with Kori for almost exactly a year and a half now and spent close to six figures with Kori at this point. The reason I say that is because I want to clarify that, when you talk about thought work… Sometimes, I think people have a lot of resistance to coaching, because they just think it’s just this feel-good thing, or it’s just like, “Whatever. I don’t need someone to help me figure that out.” But what you’re talking about here is an extremely practical reworking of thought pattern. You work with my wife, you work with my whole team. Everybody has had extremely practical ramifications from this.

Kori Linn:

Let me say it this way. I’ve talked a lot in this interview about socialization. Socialization is patterns of thinking that your brain has absorbed, and they are how you will think about the world. You’ll think about the world using those same frameworks that you’ve always learned, and they’ll feel very natural and normal to you, and in that way, it’s almost invisible. But when you work with a coach, what you realize is that all those frameworks are there, that they’re optional, and that there are different frameworks available to you that can actually help you get more of what you want in life. While it may sound nebulous, it’s actually very practical, because we only change the thought patterns so that we can then change what we’re doing and what we’re creating in our lives. It’s not about just sitting around thinking differently.

Kori Linn:

It’s called thought work, because that’s where the work starts, but where the work ends up is very practically building a relationship if you’ve been dating and not being able to build a relationship, or starting a business if you’ve been wanting to start a business for five years, but you haven’t been doing it, or changing your actual spending habits. A lot of people are trying to do these things by changing their actions, but what thought work helps us do is see the invisible patterns that are at play in our life, get out from under those patterns, and get into patterns that are actually going to help us create those tangible changes we want so badly that we’ve struggled to create usually for years and years and years. Nebulous in description, very tangible in outcome.

Luke W Russell:

What you do today as a coach is thought work. If I understand right, Martha Beck was, I believe you said, one of the pioneers of modern life coaching. Is that accurate?

Kori Linn:

I think by a lot of people, Martha Beck is seen as one of the original life coaches. It’s interesting, because way back in the day, I always thought that, when I got my coach training, I would get it from Martha Beck, but I actually ended up getting it from the Life Coach School. Part of the reason for that is because, in 2018, back when I was still in corporate, before I started my business, I started working with Kara Loewentheil.

Kori Linn:

I actually heard about Kara from another coach who also used to work with Martha Beck, whose name is Susan Hyatt, who’s also amazing. But she said, “If you want to focus on thought work, go listen to Kara Loewentheil’s podcast, which is called ‎UnF*ck Your Brain, which is a great podcast. I listened to it a bunch, and then I signed up to work with her. When I worked with her, I learned her tools, and I also learned a lot of the tools she had learned from the Life Coach School. I really loved some of those tools, and that’s why I ended up doing my certification with them, even though Martha Beck is the first one who taught me about thought work and about so many elements of coaching.

Kori Linn:

What I loved specifically about Kara is Kara brings an intersectional feminist lens to coaching that I find to be really unique. She’s also extremely intellectual. She has her J.D. from Harvard. I think she also went to Yale. I really liked her approach, and I really liked that she was one of the few people I saw talking about the experiences of people with marginalized identities, whether it’s women or people of color. Thought work and the kind of coaching I do can be used to disentangle people from internalized oppression.

Kori Linn:

I was lucky to study under Kara and to learn how to educate people on the ways in which working on our internalized oppression can help us deal with the structures external to us, because a lot of times, when people work on externalized oppression, if they still have the internalized oppression, if they still have that socialization, it actually can block them from creating the changes they want to see. I think that’s just important to point out, because I want everyone to know that that matters to me and that I’m interested in serving people who have really different lived experiences from me, if want to be served. If they wonder if these tools will work for their experiences, they absolutely can. It’s not about denying the external oppression that you’re facing. It’s just about understanding that this is one more tool you can use in your toolkit to create more of what you want in life. The coaching industry, I think sometimes, it can seem like it’s only here to help one kind of person, and that’s not at all my vision.

Luke W Russell:

You’ve talked fairly openly and regularly about the fact that you are queer. What’s that mean for you?

Kori Linn:

To get the full download, I have a whole podcast episode on this, also. Basically, I identified as straight for a really long time, which I think is an example of those internalized narratives and internalized heteronormativity, which I go into in more detail in that podcast I just mentioned. But when I first came out as queer, I didn’t know what to call myself, because I didn’t know what I was, but I knew what I wasn’t. I was like, “I know I’m not straight.” I just identified as not straight for a long time, which is interesting, because I was identifying by what I’m not versus what I am. But I think, after having thought I was straight and then being wrong about that, I was a little hesitant to take on a new identity. I was like, “I don’t know.” But I like queer, because it can mean a lot of different things, and it’s inclusive, and I feel like it’s spacious enough for me and my sexuality that I’m still exploring. I also like queer, because often, the people who use the word queer, it indicates more than just sexuality. It also indicates the values I have in the groups I stand for and the things that matter to me.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Okay, Kori. We’re going to do what we call high-velocity round.

Kori Linn:

Okay.

Luke W Russell:

This is where I’m going to ask you a series of yes–no questions. The rule is you’re not allowed to answer just yes or no. You can say yes or no, but then you got to say something else.

Kori Linn:

Okay.

Luke W Russell:

Are you ready?

Kori Linn:

Yes.

Luke W Russell:

Are you good at home renovations?

Kori Linn:

No, I am not. Well, I don’t know if I’m good at them. I don’t do them. My girlfriend does home renovations. I’m like, “No, I’m not good,” but who knows? Maybe I’m secretly excellent at home renovations, but we’ll just never find out.

Luke W Russell:

Is anything better than a perfect bottle of rose?

Kori Linn:

A perfect bottle of sparkle rose.

Luke W Russell:

Is human potential unlimited?

Kori Linn:

I don’t think I’m qualified to answer that, but I think the people I work with… When I say the people I work with, let’s be honest, I mean the whole world, because I have a free podcast, and I see… Anyone who wants to come learn from me, you are my client now. Congratulations and welcome. The way I see it is, if the way we think about things controls what we do, then I prefer to think that our potential is unlimited, because I would rather start with that premise. If we start with the premise of unlimited potential and then we try to create this really cool thing and we get 75% of the way there, that’s pretty fucking cool. Whereas if we’re like, “I’m going to assume my potential is limited,” and then we don’t try as hard, maybe we get 25% of the way there. We think that’s because our potential is limited, when really it’s because our premise about our capability was limited.

Luke W Russell:

Love it. Is sitting cross-legged better than straight-legged?

Kori Linn:

I like to sit neither. I do cross-legged a lot, but right now, I’m sitting on one foot, and then I have the other leg tucked up under me. But yeah, I definitely sit in a cramped position. It’s because my feet are always cold, and I’m trying to put them somewhere where they’re going to be warm.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Is it possible to not dance when T-Pain’s song Low comes on?

Kori Linn:

Even though country music’s not my favorite music, I love to country dance, so I’m most likely to dance when country music comes on. Let me just not answer your question at all. Answer my own question. Good.

Luke W Russell:

You a mood reader?

Kori Linn:

I think I’m a mood carer. If I perceive someone may be having a feeling, I will make a bid probably to connect about that, like, “Do you want to talk about it?” I do offer my friends, sometimes, some of my coachy insights, but I also like to just let people be people and have their feelings, because I think we have such a belief culturally that feelings are to be solved, but they’re to be felt. Creating a safe space for people to do that and talk about them if they want to, but not if they don’t, is a beautiful thing.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Is there a value in the “fake it until you make it” saying?

Kori Linn:

I think the question is for people to ask themselves, “Could this be a useful tool for me? Could this be a way that I can grow into the kind of skillset and abilities I want to have, or does it feel yucky to me? And if it feels yucky, is there a different way?” I just don’t think everything is one-size-fits-all. I think the biggest thing is being able to, again, come back to our own agency and authority to decide for ourselves and design things that work for us, not things that other people say should work for us.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. What’s impostor syndrome?

Kori Linn:

I have a whole podcast about impostor syndrome, so if anyone wants my deep dive on it, they can go listen to that. But there is also really interesting data about how, sometimes, impostor syndrome can also be people’s socialization, which I do say in my podcast, also. But specifically, there was this article, I think it’s in Harvard Business Review, about… I think it’s called Stop Saying Women Have Impostor Syndrome, because I think basically, the idea is that we enculturate women and lots of people with marginalized identities to see themselves in a certain way, and then we punish them for seeing themselves that way, because we’re like, “Oh, you have impostor syndrome.” The way I talk about it a lot in my work is, “You have internalized patriarchy.” Impostor syndrome, calling it that makes it seem like it’s the person’s problem, like they’ve done something bad, or like they’re believing incorrectly about themselves, versus seeing it as problematic thought patterns that culture has offered you and your brain absorbed because it didn’t necessarily know better. But now that we can see them for what they are, we can deprogram them and reprogram them with something that’s more useful for you.

Luke W Russell:

Could you give us an example of something where you’ve been able to identify, “Oh, wow, this is really unhelpful. Let me replace it with something empowering”?

Kori Linn:

A lot of my clients struggle with overworking, which is basically working more than the agreed-to amount. This could be anything from working additional hours to working in our evening time or just not giving themselves permission to rest until they have worked themselves into exhaustion. One of the beliefs that can be below that, that can drive that, is the idea that, as long as there’s work to do, they should be working. The problem is that belief doesn’t work, because especially in our era, there’s just always more work we could be doing. There’s always more housework we could be doing, there’s always more stuff we could be doing for our businesses, those of us who own businesses. For people who work in corporate, there’s almost always more stuff they could be doing.

Kori Linn:

Another thing tied in there is this idea that being busy is how I know I’m worthy and good. The thing is, if you have the belief, “Being busy is how I know I’m worthy and good,” and you also have the belief, “If there’s more work, I should do it,” your brain will literally look for work that’s not even your work to do, because it wants to be doing work, because it wants to be able to believe you’re good and you’re worthy. Those thought patterns maybe sound like they’re going to be helpful. You’re like, “Yeah, I’ll be so productive.”

Kori Linn:

But the problem is they get people overworking and burning out, and then people have to take big, long breaks, and then they feel terrible, and then they’re not able to work, and then they feel less worthy. It’s this very problematic cycle, versus being able to come in and change that belief to, “It’s okay to a preselected amount of work and then rest, even if we still have energy.” That is a wild idea for so many people, but that’s also what they’re craving. People come to me and they’re craving work–life balance, but they have this internal thought pattern that’s driving them to overwork. It’s their internal thought pattern often that won’t let them have that work–life balance. When we solve that thought pattern, when we redo the thought pattern, we reprogram it to be something more useful, they’re able to actually prioritize their work better and stop overworking and tell other people, “I would love to do that for you, but you need to add to our head count,” instead of constantly working themselves into exhaustion.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Talk to me about burnout. Is burnout a means of complaining about a circumstance rather than working to change it?

Kori Linn:

I see it as a side effect of trying to create success with a lot of those belief systems that I was talking about earlier that cause problems that we can’t necessarily see, because they’re invisible to us, usually because we’ve been socialized into them for so long. As an example, a lot of us as children learned to work from a headspace of anxiety. Just for everyone listening, I mean emotional anxiety, not clinical anxiety. But it’s like we learned how to… I know this is true for me. I learned how to pep myself up like, “If I don’t do this, I’m going to get a bad grade, I’m going to get in trouble,” and I would create anxiety on purpose and use that anxiety as energy to get my schoolwork done. And listen, it did work. I did get my schoolwork done that way. But the problem is, then, you associate that work and you associate those outcomes with anxiety, so then feel a lot of anxiety. Also, using anxiety as energy, to quote Kara Loewentheil, is like burning coal. You can create energy that way, but it’s got side effects, and they’re not super yummy ones.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. How did burnout become a focus of your coaching work?

Kori Linn:

Burnout was one of the very first focuses of my coaching work. I remember talking… I was working with Kara then, and I remember talking to her about what I wanted to focus on. She was actually the one who was like, “Oh, you’re a burnout coach,” and I was like, “I’m a burnout coach.” My niche has evolved since then. I don’t think it’s the only one, because I want to help people also who aren’t to the point of burnout, who are like, “I’m not burnt out, but I’m not having a spectacular time in my career, and maybe I could be having a better time.”

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Will you be doing career coaching for the rest of your life?

Kori Linn:

I don’t know, but probably not. I love working on career, because work is such a big part of most people’s lives, and I think we could generally be having a more yummy experience of that, and I’m interested in making an impact in that way. I also would love to change the face of what even work looks like. I would love to see four-day work weeks or shorter work weeks, because I’m a firm believer that we can do the same amount of work in less time, which sounds like it doesn’t make any sense, but there’s actually great studies and data on this where people have done the tests to see what happens if we compress. A lot of times, the people are as productive. Sometimes, they’re more productive. I just would love to see humans living their lives by their own design and having a great time and putting value into the world and getting value back out. Yeah. But I don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t know if I’ll do coaching in a different topic or move to the woods and start writing YA fantasy novels. Who knows? I don’t know.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Do you have a story of a time that you’d be willing to share where you had an idea about someone and who they were, but then you were delightfully surprised by how wrong you were?

Kori Linn:

The interesting answer to that is the person I’m the most delightfully wrong about is actually myself. I think that’s really interesting, because I’m inside my own head, and I’m still so wrong about this person who I also am being. That’s weird. That’s some next-level awareness. But that’s one of the things coaching has taught me about. And when I was younger, I was so not about being wrong. I was so resistant to the idea of being wrong. I was so stubborn. But with coaching, I’ve gained the flexibility to be able to be wrong about myself and just to be able to be wrong. But the things I’m wrong about most are myself in the most delicious, delightful ways. That’s really fun. That’s just really taught me that maybe being wrong is amazing. Maybe the willingness to be wrong is really fun, which totally flies in the face, I think, of what we’re taught culturally. Coaches will all tell you it could be super fun to be wrong, but culturally, that’s not usually what we’re teaching people.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Yeah. What are you proud of about yourself for something you’ve done that maybe other people might not find impressive, but that you’re like, “I’m really proud of this”?

Kori Linn:

This is, I think, going to sound so minor to most people, but how to feed my body foods that it likes, that taste good also. Several times a week, I make myself a pan of roasted broccoli and cauliflower, and it’s always in the fridge. I eat these foods that taste really delicious to me and feel really good in my body, and it is such a success to me and such a big deal, because so much of our lives is those little tiny moments and the little day-to-day things that are happening all the time versus these big, conceptual wins that are true and matter, but we don’t necessarily feel them in the day-to-day.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. Alex said that, “Kori really inspired me to be the person who champions big swings for myself.” let me give you one more thing she said. She said, “Kori has inspired me to dismantle my own perfectionist fantasy and put myself in the driver’s seat.”

Kori Linn:

It’s been really interesting to be on the journey of building my business and developing my particular coaching teachings in addition to the general thought work teachings, while also being in a relationship. I’ve been very blessed to have this wonderful person that I love and admire there with me to talk about all of my stuff, and then it’s also been really interesting to see how she’s benefited from that. She’s told me that, so I’m not just making it up, that she has seen real changes in herself and in her career based on the stuff that we talk about, that I am developing for my podcast and my clients. That’s really humbling, because as much as I have a lot of faith in my ideas and my teachings, it’s really interesting to watch someone who isn’t my client and who’s in this different, other kind of relationship with me, like a partnership, romantic relationship, take these things that I’m saying professionally and use them to create more of what she wants in her career as well. It’s really cool.

Luke W Russell:

Yeah. That’s really beautiful. Okay, Kori. It’s your 80th birthday celebration. People from all throughout your life are present. A gentle clinking on glass can be heard and a hush washes over the room. People raise their glasses to toast to you. What are three things you would want them to say about you?

Kori Linn:

I knew this question was coming, technically, because I’ve listened to your podcast, and I forgot about this question, and I think that was really rude of my brain. I’m just going to say that first. I think it would be nice if they said, “Kori always invited me to think about what was possible for me and what I could do if I wanted to. Not because I had to live my life a certain way or achieve any kind of goals in particular, not because that part mattered so much to her, but just because she wanted me to be able to live according to my own design, whatever that was, and inviting me to believe in myself was a key component of that.”

Kori Linn:

I think I’d also want them to say, “I love how she creates interesting spaces for interesting conversations full of creativity and insight and mystery and so much more, and just spaces where people can play intellectually and be silly, but also change their lives.” And then I think I would also just want them to be like, “She’s hilarious. I love being around her.” Making people laugh is so satisfying and such a good time. I can be a very earnest person and very focused on what I’m trying to offer, but I think it’s so valuable, too, to just be able to be a human with other humans and have a really good time and be the other kind of silly, the fun silly of just laughing and having a good time.

Luke W Russell:

To learn more about Kori, visit korilinn.com, that’s korilinn.com, and be sure to check out her podcast, Love Your Job Before You Leave It. Thanks so much for listening to us this week. This podcast is produced by Kirsten Stock, edited by Kendall Perkinson, and mastered by Guido Bertolini. A special thanks to the companies that make this project possible, Russell Media and the SEO Police. You can learn more about these groups by visiting our website, lawfulgoodpodcast.com. I’m your host, Luke W. Russell, and you’ve been listening to Lawful Good.