Life Coaching Testimonials

I have a background of an extremely chaotic and abusive childhood, followed by an adulthood of Complex-PTSD, depression, and anxiety, and so I spent the past 20+ years doing intense self-improvement work of all types: therapy, self-help books, courses, and treatments of all types, EMDR, ECT, ketamine, DBT, ect. and finally made a breakthrough to where I made major improvement in life! Then after about a year, I plateaued. No matter what I did, I just couldn’t progress. So I went to someone I have the highest respect for asking for recommendations for a life coach, Doug Castillo, and he put me in touch with Mandie. While I am VERY much an in-person person, and Mandie is in Montana and I was in Arizona, I decided to give it a try. So Mandie and I had an evaluation call, and I knew immediately that I absolutely wanted to work with her, and I am SO glad I chose to! 

Over the past 4 months the progress I have made is nothing short of astounding! Here are some of the reasons I have come to love Mandie, and don’t have the vocabulary to recommend her highly enough:

• She cares! She is 100% interested in helping ME improve MY life, whatever that means to ME. It’s not HER agenda that is important, it’s what is important to ME that is important to HER. And while she has a program, a schedule, a plan, all of that is secondary if what I need in the moment doesn’t align with what she had planned for the day. My needs ALWAYS come first, and she is flexible enough to work around what I needed at the time, which I know from experience, is not always the case, and I also know is how I will make progress the quickest. She is wise enough to adapt to what I need in the moment so that our time spent together is the most effective and efficient.

• She listens to understand, she takes notes, and she remembers. Like every TRUE problem solver, Mandie listens until she understands what the problem actually IS before providing potential solutions. There is none of this “one solution fits all” nonsense here. And she is humble and realistic enough to recognize that not every solution is going to work for every person. Yet, she also doesn’t let me off the hook without giving a solution a fair shot before discarding it, she doesn’t let me discard things that could help because I don’t “want” to, or because there is internal resistance. If those things arise, she helps me examine why there is resistance, why I don’t want to, because there is likely a reason, something that needs to be addressed that could be a source of the problem itself. But if I give something an honest effort and it doesn’t work for me, she has no problem trying something else.

• She works as hard at helping me as I’m willing to. I can’t tell you how many times she was willing to put in extra time because we were on the verge of a breakthrough, or I was hitting a wall and just couldn’t get past it. She TRULY cares and is matching my effort step for step. She follows up frequently throughout the week with motivational texts, momentum steps, check in texts. And she is there for me anytime I need her.

Like I said, I don’t have the vocabulary to recommend Mandie at the level that I truly feel. But hopefully reading through my experiences with her will give you an idea of the absolute treasure she is, not only as a coach, but as a person!