The Coaching Corner Weekly Digest - Kelly and the scary questions
24 March, 2026
Hey coaches, hey. Pipe down back there, Theresa, it’s newsletter time.
Kelly’s wheels have been turning.
After spending a few weeks traveling (including to Antarctica, which is the #1 destination spot on my wishlist), she’s been rolling out a stream of subtle and enticing updates. There’s a new channel in the neighborhood (#10-learnings-and-experiments), there’s a request for new event hosts, and subtitles lavishly adorned to the upcoming Scary Jar and Real Talk.
As any glaciologist will tell you, changes on the surface often reflect movement on a deeper level; I was curious (read: nosy) what’s underneath all these shifts.
So I asked.
The following dialogue is a reinterpretation of voice memos that Kelly and I have been exchanging, lightly edited by a real-life human person named me:
MJ: Where’s all this shifting energy coming from?
Kelly: Definitely from my own recent experience with enrollment for CC Growth Cohort. For that offering, I decided to take a prosperous coach approach to enrollment – which meant a lot of 1:1 conversations where I really slowed down and got curious about people’s yeses and nos.
So when I noticed that the number of people coming to Coaching Corner events has been feeling a lot less than before, I knew that I needed to start talking to the community about events and getting curious.
Having these sorts of conversations always feels scary at first! But I realized that if I continue to be nervous about what people’s answers might be – whether they’re a yes or a no – then I’m gonna miss what I can learn from all of the wisdom that lies in the in-between. What people are really needing, what people’s stories are, where people’s journeys are at this moment.
And with Kaylin’s encouragement, I decided to ask first with a public thread. And WOW, it wound up being such a rewarding thing to witness. People who I haven’t heard from in months or maybe ever were willing to come out of their virtual space to share behind the scenes. It gave way more color than I ever would have expected.
Coaching Corner showed me that they were ready to meet the moment and share their truth, which was such a gift.
MJ: What did you learn?
Kelly: Between the responses to that thread and the learnings in the Growth Cohort, it’s clear that people come here to be deeply supported, to find belonging, and to learn from the vast perspectives and stories we have here.
Our community is filled with brilliant and curious people. There are obviously much more polished resources available out there, but they come from people we don’t know personally. There’s something so special about learning from peers who are trying things in all different ways, and who are willing to share all the nitty gritty details underneath.
MJ. Why did you start the new #10-learnings-and-experiments channel?
Kelly: Deep sharing about our biz dev processes has, up to now, really only occurred during the Behind the Scenes (BTS) talks, which our events team only has capacity to run maybe once a month.
Meanwhile, a lot of our members are only able to engage with Coaching Corner asynchronously and on Slack, which means they haven’t really been getting that exposure.
This new channel is a space where people can start sharing their processes more freely, and nominate each other to share too. People here have far more genius than they even realize. I hope that with this channel, folks will be able to release worries about the quality of their share, and that we’ll get more perspectives out there.
MJ: You recently added subtitles to two of our upcoming recurring events. On March 27th we’re having Real Talk: Practice the Art of Revealing – and on April 9th we’ll have The Scary Jar: Come Get Shit Done. Divisive language, perhaps. Can you tell us about what these mean to you?
Kelly: I realized that they were feeling similar and that I needed to differentiate them. Asha B. shared that the Scary Jar didn’t feel applicable to practical work and problem-solving – but that was what it originally was supposed to be! The next Scary Jar will trust people to show up ready to do scary work together for an hour.
That changes expectations: now it’s about coming in with a task in mind, versus brainstorming something during the session. And don’t worry – it won’t be just grindy serious work – we’ll definitely be taking time to share and gripe and let it allllll out, because that’s what lets the scary work start flowing.
As for Real Talk, I wanted people to know that this hour is about more than just sharing our feelings for our own sake. Getting good at sharing your feelings and revealing what you normally hide is a critical skill for our clients to creates lives of deep alignment! Because surprise surprise, working on yourself is also doing work for your business :P We just sometimes need a more obvious reminder of the connection between life and business.
MJ: I know the Growth Cohort is a private space and an experiential offering, but can you give us a delicious morsel?
Kelly: During the first session, I shared an audio clip from Steve Chandler about the difference between expectations and agreements.
Expectations are sort of secret. They’re things we bring in with us, ways we think things are going to be, that are almost never said out loud. We wait for others to meet/not meet them, we sit in the passenger seat. Chandler’s whole thing is that expectations actually are super toxic because you either feel neutral when they’re met – or resentful when they’re not. It’s never a positive experience.
But when we commit to agreements together, we create a shared sense of responsibility and ownership of the thing we’re creating. We can revisit agreements over time, add more, let some go.
With that in mind, we opened our growth cohort with a process of identifying agreements we want to hold in our space together, so that we can really create a powerful container for transformation and for deeply holding each other – both in terms of our business and also in terms of our life.
The agreements that we created were really quite expansive for us. They were things like: a commitment to revealing. A commitment to sharing how we feel. To be in moments of discomfort that come up when we share things we normally hide. We agree to each have 100% ownership – meaning that you do what you need to do (hunger needs, bathroom breaks) to come to this space ready to play. There’s a commitment to be here to serve each other and not just take.
We’ve had one meeting so far and it’s already setting the stage for so much depth and growth together. I’m truly so fucking excited for what’s to emerge in each of our lives in these next four months.
MJ: What’s surprised you about Coaching Corner lately?
Kelly: The conversation around events!! It showed me that the community steps up and is really honest when you invite it. It’s been incredible to realize how deeply ingrained our commitment to candor here really is.
Thanks for the voice memos, Kelly!
Pop quiz: what is the largest desert in the world?
The answer will be in next week’s newsletter (and is easily Google-able.) Hint: you can find it somewhere in this email.
Upcoming Events 📆
🗣️ Real Talk: Practice the Art of Revealing: | Friday, March 27 | Hosted by Kelly Liu
🫙 The Scary Jar: Come Get Shit Done | Thursday, April 9 | Hosted by Kelly Liu
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