From Corporate Marketing to Holistic Life Transitions: Meet Barb Haynes, PCC

In our Case Study series, we're diving into the personal journeys, the real-life ups and downs, and the unique paths of Lumia graduates. Discover how real coaches found their way to coaching, built their businesses, and get clients!

Every interview is a window into the life of someone who has embraced coaching as a way to not only change their own lives, but also to impact others. These conversations are about connection, growth, and the diverse ways each coach brings their authentic self to this meaningful and important work. 

From Corporate Marketing to Holistic Life Transitions: Meet Barb Haynes, PCC

Barb Matias Haynes is an ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC), teacher, and business consultant specializing in Transition Coaching. With 20+ years of entrepreneurial success and 15 years in corporate marketing, she has held leadership roles at Activision, Schwab, and Washington Mutual/Chase.

Barbara's approach combines business acumen with wellness advocacy, emphasizing mindfulness through her 20-year practice of yoga and meditation. She draws from personal experiences with career transitions, marriage, motherhood, divorce, and loss to support clients through challenges.

As a trusted leader, Barbara guides clients seeking expert direction for life's next chapter amidst today's challenges, balancing career fulfillment with personal wellbeing. You can connect with Barb here.

Can you tell me about your professional experience before becoming a coach?

I come from a corporate marketing background. I was in consumer marketing for many years, started in entertainment marketing with MTV Networks and then rolled over into entertainment gaming at Activision. I was a traditional packaged goods brand manager. 

From there, I moved into startups – technology product development, and then doing that same role in the financial services world. Creating experiences for customers, being the technology person that would collate all the business requirements.

I managed a lot of people. My staff would come to me, not just for work problems, but for a lot of personal problems. They would come to me because they had broken up with a boyfriend or girlfriend. They came to me when they were going through some type of loss, and came to me for advice on having a first child. I was always that person. 

When I look back on it, I realized that I've been coaching a lot for most of my career. 

What led you to transition into coaching as a career?

On the birth of my third child, I got out of the corporate world and went into wellness. 

I became a personal trainer. I'd been teaching all kinds of fitness and wellness for years. I did it part-time when I was in the corporate world. I always had one big toe in something wellness related. 

Once again, in that role, people came with me for bigger problems. It would be these long standing relationships where I'd be with people for years, and they would come to me and trust me with more information than just how to do a proper push up.

I taught hundreds of people in my community, started this out of my garage and worked with people in parks, etc. I started to get injured. I was realizing, at some point I won't be able to do this physical work, but I want to keep doing coaching. That's when I started seeking out options for how I could really be a professional coach.

How did you start building your coaching business after completing the program?

I call myself the accidental entrepreneur because I didn't plan this. I didn't say, at age 50, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. That was never part of my formula growing up. But, I have always been somebody who takes calculated risks and likes to test and learn. 

As of today, I am a part-time coach for a relationship/matchmaking company. People are going through that process of trying to meet somebody new, and I'm helping them through that journey. I also have a couple other part-time gigs with a couple of small companies. 

The other part of it is a private practice. I get most of my private practice through networking. I did at one point work for John Kim’s TAT Lab, I taught group classes for a little over two years, which was a really awesome experience just from teaching and from the general experience. I run retreats about once a year.

How do you approach marketing and finding clients?

My biggest thing is networking. What was so great about Lumia is people come from so many different backgrounds – corporate people, people in the medical field, therapists, educators, sex therapists. 

The variety of people coming into Lumia is so diverse. It's great to be able to network from that perspective. When I see an opportunity to network with people I test and learn, try it out, see what happens and it goes from there. I network in person a lot too. I teach in person, teach yoga in person so people get to know me. I go to conferences.

I could do advertising. I could push myself more on social media. But for me, and the pace I want to be at, it's more about cultivating meaningful relationships to grow into a business that suits my niche and style of coaching. I don't like just throwing a big blanket out and taking everybody that comes. It's not that kind of practice for me. 

My practice has been growing in a slow burn way. It started with pro bono coaching to friends, then moved into taking on clients in the pandemic that couldn't necessarily afford coaching. Then having more exposure through taking opportunities and networking to show my coaching style. Any time I do public speaking, that's part of how people find me. As a solopreneur, you need to keep an eye on the pipeline. When things get low, you go back and network some more.

For people considering Lumia, what would you say about the return on investment?

My investment in Lumia has paid off like a thousand times. 

It's because I was willing to raise my hand to be a part of things that were available. Lumia says, “Hey, we're looking for people to present at the next retreat,” I raised my hand. When John or Noelle come to me and say, “Hey, we have this opportunity,” I'm like, yes. That piece of it has been really valuable for me.

My approach to learning was very authentic. I knew even if I never coached a single client, I would still feel like I really got a lot out of the experience. 

What would you say are some of the key things that set Lumia apart from other coaching programs?

Lumia has an approach that's really authentic. We're not just trying to push people through requirements. We're actually challenging people to go a little deeper. We're challenging them to really understand themselves, which is so important for your coaching presence. 

Lumia is not a competitive space. Lumia is about learning. Lumia is about igniting what's already inside of you and in a really supportive environment.

Did you look at any other coaching programs before choosing Lumia? What made you ultimately decide on Lumia?

I wanted something within a reasonable time frame – not too short, not too long. I considered Martha Beck's ICF-accredited program. 

Lumia has real humans behind it. Meeting the founders isn't impossible. Noelle Cordeaux and John Kim were accessible, real people. I've seen them in person multiple times since I started the program.

There's a sense of community I didn't find in other programs I researched. 

What would you say are some of the most important skills or lessons you took away from your Lumia training?

Active listening. The biggest lesson I learned was the importance of not talking. This is my personal challenge – I don't always like silence. I want to fill in the blanks. It goes hand in hand with mindfulness, but became obvious when I had my sessions recorded for feedback. I watched myself on video and noticed I almost couldn't stop moving. I was nodding my head constantly.

The key skill to practice is an active listening presence that is calm, secure and patient for the client to express all their thoughts. I realized during evaluations that I wasn't allowing them enough space. In Signature advanced coach training, we learned that your client should speak 80 percent of the time in your session and you should speak 20 percent. If you keep this rule in mind, you'll be quiet and let them unpack. The power of just listening is profound.

Can you share a success story from your coaching practice?

I had a private client that I worked with for years. When I first met her, she was in a really tough place. She'd just broken up with her boyfriend and was in a really toxic work environment. 

Through the coaching sessions with her, I helped her find a new job through the interview process. I coached her through the grief and loss for her breakup. I coached her through helping her make her home a place that she could be happy with.

I coached her through all the life containers to a point where she's great and she's thriving. I told her, congratulations, you don't need my coaching right now. 

It was years of work together that got us there. I see that as a success. She got to a place with the help of my coaching where she felt she had moved through her grief and loss, she had a brand new job, she's now applying to be the president of one of her organizations. 

My sessions with her helped build confidence, build self-awareness, and moved her through a pretty significant phase of her life.

How has your Lumia experience impacted you personally and professionally?

The Lumia coaching experience has made me far more curious and inquisitive than I've ever been in my life. I was already a good listener, but now it sparks so much curiosity in me and creates really good connections with people and good conversations in general. 

I'm so curious about other humans at this point and curious about how the brain works, through all of this, really dove deep personally into much more neuroscience, just to understand more.

How has your view of empathy changed since you started coaching?

I think empathy is far more important now than it was when I started. The world has really changed and the whole world has gone through so much grief and loss that empathy is a requirement now. Back when I started, empathy wasn't a requirement of working in the world. Empathy was reserved for the empathetic ones. The rest of the world was just off striving for the next thing and pushing hard and being competitive.

Since the pandemic and because of grief and loss, it's turned a little bit. Empathy is now regarded as we've talked about this as a real skill. I like to call it a human skill that becomes more and more important in leadership, in business, in our communities in general. We need to come together to actually build and grow our communities, our worlds, our businesses.

How does Lumia help develop empathy in its coaches?

Empathy is now coming up as the skill that everybody has a little bit of, but not everybody practices. Lumia gives you space to practice that. Coaching forces you to practice empathy.  You cannot coach without practicing what it's like to be like in somebody else's shoes.

How has coaching impacted your sense of purpose?

The ICF mission is to do good in this world. You really start feeling it when you're in these roles where you're teaching a course or facilitating a group. That's been personally one of the most rewarding things for me – feeling the kind of impact that doing good can do.

I will never run for public office. I will never be at that level. But I do feel that I will change the world one person at a time.

How do you avoid burnout in your coaching practice?

If you're just coaching the whole time, you'll get burnt out. Doing other things, facilitating, teaching something, going into one of your niches in addition to what you're doing primarily in coaching, it just diversifies and makes it a little bit more interesting and fun for you, too. 

If you just coach 40 hours a week, client after client after client, and there's no downtime, you start to lose a little bit of our creativity. It's good to have other parts of your coaching practice – partnerships with people, podcasts, writing books, diversifying your opportunities. 

Diversifying your own business is not just important for the financial possibilities, but also the creative possibilities.

What would you say is one of the most valuable aspects of the Lumia experience?

Coming together in a cohort of fellow coaching students and talking to people from all these different walks of life, you really are participating in a way of up-leveling humanity. 

You see your cohort week after week, and you get to know people in this intimate way, we're learning how other people live just by participating in a training cohort. 

When you only see somebody on screen, you might create a perception of “Oh, they’re not really sensitive.” But then that person may share something very deep and will show you a different side of them. Each person in the cohort could be representative of somebody that could be a client of yours. 

Lumia is an empathetic, supportive, and nurturing environment. Lumia has more civic-mindedness, more of this idea of bettering humanity. We all align on that same goal.

Thinking of Becoming a Coach?

A lot of talented people like you dream of having a coaching career, but aren’t quite sure how to get there. We train and certify adventurous coaches, making sure you’ve got all you need to build a career you love and transform lives, on your terms.

If you're ready to learn more, come check out Lumia Life Coach Training!

‍Lumia Coaching: Vibrant community. Evidence-based life coach training. Lifetime support.