Master coach and owner of Frame of Mind Coaching with over 20 years of experience — on her journal-based coaching method, why the story you tell is the story you live, how unconscious beliefs quietly drive every outcome in your life, and what emotional resilience really looks like in high achievers
Kim Ades did not set out to build one of the most distinctive coaching practices in the world. She built it by paying attention to a pattern no one else was naming clearly enough: the story you tell yourself about your life is not a neutral description of reality — it is the actual mechanism that produces your results. Change the story, and everything downstream begins to change too. That is the foundation of Frame of Mind Coaching, the company she has built and led for over two decades.
What makes Kim unusual is her method. Most coaches work through conversation. Kim works through journaling — asking clients to write every day and then reading what they write with the trained eye of someone who knows what unconscious beliefs look like when they surface on paper. The journal becomes a diagnostic tool, a mirror, and eventually a place where transformation happens in real time, not between sessions.
This conversation stood out even by the standards of the Be Yourself Podcast. Serhiy noted it is rare for him to feel truly heard during his own interviews — but Kim's ability to ask precise questions and listen without filling the silence made this one different. They explored her life, her method, the emotional patterns of high achievers, and what it actually takes to help someone change the frame they use to see themselves and the world.
Kim Ades is a master coach with over 20 years of experience working with high-achievers, executives, entrepreneurs, and athletes. She is the founder and owner of Frame of Mind Coaching — a practice built on a method that is genuinely unlike anything else in the coaching industry. Instead of relying on weekly conversations alone, Kim asks her clients to journal every single day. She then reads what they write, responds to it, and uses the patterns she observes to identify the unconscious beliefs quietly driving every decision, reaction, and result in their lives.
Her core insight — that the story you tell is the story you live — is not a metaphor. It is a description of a mechanism. The internal narrative a person holds about themselves, their circumstances, and what is possible for them determines how they perceive events, how they respond, and what outcomes they produce. Coaching at the level of that narrative, Kim argues, is the only kind of coaching that creates durable change rather than short-term motivation.
Kim has coached thousands of people and trained coaches around the world in her method. She is known for her ability to ask the kind of questions that cut directly to what matters — and for the rare capacity to make people feel genuinely heard in a way that opens them rather than defends them. This episode was one of the few where the host himself found the dynamic reversed: Kim's coaching instincts were so strong that Serhiy found himself on the receiving end of exactly the kind of conversation her clients experience.
the version that you tell is the version you live and that will profoundly impact how you experience everything
who hires us usually people who say I'm ready for change I'm ready to take this journey with you I want an extraordinary coach I don't want an average experience I want an excellent experience
people who are very successful have a very high degree of emotional resilience they fall but they get up faster and then they do something to leverage the negative experience the adversity they turn it into an advantage of sorts