Next Up on the Do What You Love to Do Interviews is Beck Hopkins. Becks is a personal coach based in Melbourne, Australia, she coaches women and men going through IVF and beyond to offer support and strategies in untangling the emotional knots that come along creating a family in non-traditional ways.
Becks do what you love story is one that many can relate to – escaping corporate world, spending years trying out lots of different things, and having a that moment of complete clarity when it’s not expected.
Aside: when looking at your own career and when you’re going through the ‘what should I be doing‘ torture – take some time to look at your own story. In my experience, people are very surprised when their love work is something that comes easily to them, or when they have lived a similar story…sometimes the surprise is how close it’s been all along.
Here you go,
Tell us a bit about yourself and what doing what you love to do means to you?
I was born in the north of England and moved with my family to Perth, Australia when I was 6 years old. So I’m technically an English/Australian, which pains my Australian husband when I can’t decide who to support in the Rugby World Cup.
By day, when I’m not being a mother to my beautiful 10-month-old baby girl, I’m a personal coach. Which for me is absolutely doing what I love to do.
As a coach I get paid to listen and ask questions and go into deep conversations to facilitate clarity and shifts in thinking for my clients, which then creates action in their lives.
But for me, doing what I love to do isn’t just about what I do to earn money, although that is a massive plus.
Being a coach means I get to live true to my corest (not a real word) of core values: connection. I’m a connection junkie. So when I’m not coaching, I’m torturing my friends and family by asking them deep questions and challenging their perspectives so we can all be the best version of ourselves we can possibly be.
Seeing people make changes in their lives because of the work we do together or the conversations we have, rocks my frickin world.
What were you doing before that?
I was an IT project manager, workshop facilitator and business process re-engineer-er! Which I also love, but there isn’t a lot of heart in working for banks and insurance companies. I would rather use my powers for good not evil.
How did you make doing what you love to do happen?
I tried everything. It’s all in the doing.
Between the years 2004 and 2012 among my friends I was known as “the course queen” – bag making, jewellery making, life drawing, aerobics instructing, counselling, psychology, sewing, knitting, novel writing, oil painting, short story writing, cooking, wine appreciation, circus skills.
You name it, I tried it. All in the name of getting one step closer to finding what I loved to do.
Can you share the good, the bad and the ugly when you made the decision do what you love to do?
The good for me is definitely being of service to others. Does that sound twee? It’s true.
For me it doesn’t get any better than supporting other people to make changes in their life.
I got a text from my best friend yesterday who lives in Sydney. She had watched my first video blog on how to stop worrying and then gone through the exercise to work through some of her worries. She said it felt like I was sitting in Sydney talking with her and that she slept better that night. That makes what I do totally worth doing.
And the good also includes the incredible tribe of people I am now connected with. Since finding what I love to do, I talk about it all the time (always a sign you have found what you love) which means I have met some incredibly talented, connected, passionate people along the way. I love my tribe.
The bad is how much time I spend on administration. I don’t have the luxury of farming this stuff off to people who know more than I do (yet) so I spend a lot of time learning about SEO and marketing strategies, making social media work for me and building my website. But this is all in the foundation setting part of setting up a business, so it’s short-term pain for me.
And the ugly? Well, it definitely doesn’t pay as well as the world of banking and insurance. But I’m forever hopeful that one day it will.
What were the biggest hurdles, challenges and barriers you had to overcome?
Letting go of my corporate ego in telling people what I do.
Going from the corporate world to the heart-centred coaching world wasn’t easy to explain.
And the term “life coach” often comes with all sorts of hippy connotations. Getting my spiel right when people ask, “what do you do?” was a massive challenge for me.
What led you to this love specifically?
Two key things:
1) During my coach training in the UK I was asked to volunteer for a coaching exercise.
From 7 minutes of coaching, my whole world shifted on its axis.
My coaching topic was “why am I not practicing yoga anymore?” which I thought was an innocent coaching topic that wasn’t going to make me reveal too much of myself. Well, I was wrong.
The coaching unlocked a connection I had unconsciously made in my mind of my yoga and the grief of losing my daughter Ruby when I was 6 months pregnant.
After Ruby was born, my husband and I moved to Bali to practice yoga every day and work through our grief.
After we left Bali I lost my love of yoga. 7 minutes of awesome coaching unlocked the connection that had stuck my yoga and my grief together, which meant that I couldn’t practice yoga without revisiting the grief. I couldn’t see this obvious connection myself. That’s when my love and respect for coaching was solidified.
2) Looking at my own personal story for my coaching niche.
Who knew 7 heartbreaking years of IVF would become the foundations of what I do?
What would be your top 5 pieces of advice, or suggestions, words of wisdom you would like to share?
Lean into the discomfort and have the crucial conversations (yes, those ones with your parents that you’ve been letting rule your life for the last however many years).
Do, do, do. You don’t learn without doing.
Nothing is so hard that you can’t figure it out.
Lead with your heart. Always.
Don’t take criticism or judgement personally. It’s never about you.
What has been your biggest learning in your journey so far?
The shortest distance between two people is a story.
Not sure who originally said this, but it has been huge for me. Share something of you that matters, it creates connection and trust.
What was the biggest piece of learning you picked up and ran with?
How to listen. I have no idea why this isn’t one of the first things you learn at school. How to listen actively, including how to shut off your internal chatter that makes you wish the person in front of you would finish what they were saying so you could tell your super relevant and more interesting story. How we listen changes how people feel.
Pick a quote for life, and explain why it matters to you.
I discovered this quote from Theodore Roosevelt given in a speech he gave in 1910 via the work of Brene Brown. If you haven’t heard of her, Google her TED talks. She’s AMAZING!
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”
What this means to me is that the learning is in the doing. Trying things, failing, trying something else. You can’t think your way to loving what you do, you have to do something, anything, just get started. See you in the arena!
And lastly, leave a little bio where people can reach you…
Okay, I will write it in the third person if that’s okay:
Rebecca Hopkins is a personal coach and the mother of a beautiful baby girl conceived using an anonymous egg donor in Spain. Learn more about Rebecca at her website or connect with her on twitter or linkedin.
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