Client Spotlight: Megan Coltoniak

Megan Coltoniak is the Executive Director and Owner of Bloom Creative Arts and Therapy in Buffalo, New York. She and her team focus on music therapy, music enrichment and special education programs. Megan is also a mother of two kids under 10 and wife to her husband Jeff, who works for the Buffalo Bills.

Megan had always wanted to get coached. “I’m a big advocate of self-help and reading self-help books, and I kept reading that one should have a coach,” she says. Finding a coach who was a good fit for her personality was very important to her, and she had avoided getting a coach until now because she didn’t know if they’d mesh well. 

“I used to Google ‘coaching’ and would see pictures of cheesy guys in suits,” she says. “I finally Googled ‘woman-owned coaching’ and that’s how I found Frame of Mind Coaching™.”

She then had a complimentary coaching session with President and Founder of FOM Coaching™, Kim Ades, and Megan shared what she was and wasn’t looking for. Kim matched her with FOM Coach Becca Woodring Buttermore, a business owner of a thriving optometry practice and mom of 5.

Becca agreed to Megan’s terms: not talking politics and being cool with the occasional F-bomb. Megan was able to be very real, transparent and raw with her, which was exactly what she needed. She describes Becca as a bright light. “Even during phone calls, you know she’s smiling on the other end,” says Megan. “She is real, thoughtful with her words and always prepared.”

Megan came to coaching to overcome certain mental blocks in order to reach her goals. As fate would have it, she was thrown some huge financial curveballs right in the middle of her coaching journey. One of Megan’s clients had been quoted an incorrect rate for her services without her knowledge, and she ended up making big financial moves (like expanding her business) before discovering the error and owing that money back.

“It was so helpful to be able to talk about it confidentially with Becca,” says Megan. “She gave me different perspectives on it and helped me through it.” 

This was a particularly hard situation that filled Megan with worry and impacted her sleep. “Becca encouraged me to be curious and to ask a lot of questions,” she says. “She really helped me see that when it comes to our choices, there isn’t just option A or B, there’s also option C, D, E, etc. Everything isn’t just black or white.”

Without coaching, Megan says that this would have been harder to overcome and that she would have had less confidence in herself. “Becca helped me take down my walls and show people who I am,” she says. “I used to say ‘it’s lonely at the top’ – she pointed out how frequently I said that and taught me that what I focus on grows. If I’m always saying ‘it’s lonely at the top’ then it’s always going to be that way. Now I catch myself when I say that.”

These lessons have ended up impacting Megan on a day-to-day basis, and in all aspects of her life. She also enjoyed learning how to journal. “Becca would prompt me to go deeper about the things I was avoiding,” she says. “Now, when I have a mental block, I can journal it out and coach myself through it.”

In the end, Megan is satisfied with her woman-owned coaching experience and would recommend it to others. “Coaching was very useful and a lovely step to take to push myself further,” says Megan.