Eszter Zsiray is a Certified Life Coach, author, blogger, and creator of the program VELL©, supporting her clients on three continents to successfully transform their lives. With 17+ years of leadership experience, she is passionate about human potential and growth. Her research areas are ownership & responsibility, self-sabotaging behaviors, the positive impact of confidence and empowerment, growth mindset, and healthy habits for mental and physical wellbeing. As a mother herself, she is committed to serving women and mums, and she created a special program for new mothers to adjust to the new life challenges and a program for women entrepreneurs to shift into the proper mindset and to thrive in their professional and personal lives.
Eszter Zsiray, Coach
You are working as a coach for half a decade now, with private clients and with top IT companies, you are the author of the successful Entrepreneur’s Mindset Academy amongst other books to support entrepreneurs on their journey to have a bold and motivated mindset bringing them success. What brought you to be a coach?
I was always excited about the human mind and soul, how we are looking for our fulfillment and happiness and what mistakes we commit and how we could avoid those mistakes or get the right takeaway for us. But it took me a while to become a professional coach. Just like many of my clients, I was living a life highly influenced by external expectations, and I had the wrong ideas about happiness and career. I was limiting myself on so many levels and I was not really on my true path. However, I gained tons of very valuable experience while I was working as a journalist and then as a manager in the corporate IT world. I don’t believe in regrets, as we can always learn a lot from our experiences, and I am grateful for those years.
What are the most important life lessons you got so far on your journey that you can apply as a coach?
Well, there have been a couple of life events that changed radically who I am today and how I see the world, and as a coach, those all help me to be authentic and show a real example that we all are capable of making changes in our lives and our mindset. I am Hungarian, and at the age of 30, I decided to move away to Spain just for adventure, to see if there is more to life than what I knew, without knowing anyone in the country. It was of course hard and very lonely sometimes, but I am proud of myself for being that bold and brave to take the leap and just move with a suitcase and build up a brand new life and I did discover that there is way more to life than what I thought before!
There were some other initiatives in my life that I just decided to go with and I worked very hard to make them real, to find opportunities and then just grab them and jump, like travelling alone and working as a volunteer on different continents or running a marathon even though I finished as one of the slowest ones, just within the time limit. I wrote several blogs about my travel adventures, later on about motherhood and even about my preparation for the marathon. Those are such great personal experiences, but I needed to get over my vulnerability to dare to expose myself, to experience all these new adventures or even to start openly writing about them.
And there were some hard ones as well. I lost my mum a while ago and that was maybe the biggest lesson, teaching me the fragility and the beauty of life at the same time, showing me in the face the importance of family and living a real life, according to your core values. Losing my mum also opened a new window to spirituality, to consciously face the big questions of life, why are we here, what happens after death, which is a topic that we just try to avoid as much as possible in the result-oriented, always rushing Western culture, and it takes a toll on our wellbeing on the long term.
Finally, the happiest and most challenging experience came with the birth of my son. While I am so grateful for having him, being a mum has nothing to do with any ideas I had before in my mind, and I realised that this is a common theme. We all see those great Hollywood movies where all mums are just smiling with an eternal smile on their face – so that has nothing to do with motherhood! Having a kid is just chaotic, messy, sometimes rewarding, sometimes exhausting, and many other things, but again, it has nothing to do with the expectations we all build up in our heads, and that is also a huge challenge and a source of a lot of frustration until we admit and embrace the reality.
You even built up a programme dedicated to mothers – was it based on your personal experiences?
Absolutely! I was suffering a lot to live up to some ideas I had in my head about what kind of mother do I need to be and then, what is realistic. Having a child just changes everything. All the family dynamics will change and the more conscious we are about that, the easier the adjustment will be for us. It will impact our relationship with our child, our partner, and our friends, and we better work on our self-care, or we might go in a dangerous direction, impacting our mental health. My intention is to help as many families with this adjustment as I just can, help women enjoy motherhood, and find their old-new identity as mothers, as women. Priorities also change, and these women want to not only have a salary but to find their fulfillment at work, and that is another challenge where I can help them to find a profession or launch a business that can better support the structure and needs of their new life.
You are known in the industry for connecting very deeply to your clients, for being real, and for transmitting trust and acceptance with them while you still support them to get the results they wanted. What is the key to your success?
I see each client as they are: a vulnerable human being who might be struggling in some areas but who also has the potential to change their own life, their own story, even when they don’t believe in themselves. You would be amazed how much it counts if you have your own cheerleader, supporter, and sponsor and, at the same time, helps you to face your biggest enemy, yourself.
In coaching, almost always, I end up working on areas that the client even didn’t notice that were problematic, and that is where my role is so important. They come to me with a goal that they want to work on, and while we get closer and closer to that tangible dream, we open up newer and newer layers that turn out to limit them without them even noticing it. In the end, what is stopping us is always us, so it is very important for me to gently help them to discover what is and what is not serving them in life on a holistic level. We change the negative self-talk, the fears, and the excuses and turn them into confidence, we empower them to get out of their comfort zone and we celebrate their success together – all these in the rhythm they are ready to take. My clients are all fantastic and very capable people, it is just we all have our blind spots that we can’t see without a mirror – so I am holding that mirror for them.
What do you consider as your biggest success?
In my personal life, that is my family and my own journey to be who I am today. I was quite a different person ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, just like all of us, and I learned to be proud of myself – I learned to be more loving and gentler with myself, while at the same time, I am more authentic to who I am. I learned to find my strengths and values, build on them, enjoy them, and, very importantly, ignore more and more what others might think and just be me.
In my professional life, I am very proud of each coaching program, those were all life-changing experiences for my clients. It is an amazing feeling that I managed to make an impact there and add something valuable to their life, to their mindset, and that is the biggest success for me - simply serving others. They come out of the program loving and accepting themselves more, they have more confidence, they realise what behaviour, and what mindset serve them, and they go away with tools that help them to succeed in the jungle of life.
Who is your dream client?
Well, I love working with all kinds of different topics and problems, and my clients are all diverse and unique. Sometimes they approach me with similar problems, like changing their career or job, being a greater leader, preparing for a professional race, building up habits to write a book or lose weight, and in the end, we work on extremely diverse areas, like accepting not being a mother, confidence issues, relationship problems, stress management or self-worth and self-acceptance. We all are so much more complex than it looks like at the beginning of a coaching programme, and that is what I love in my work, to support people not only to obtain a tangible objective but to take away mindset changes that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
What would be your most important message to your readers?
It doesn’t matter what they do. If they find a self-help book, a coach, or they are journaling, all could work – what matters is to put themselves out there and experiment with new things, new adventures, and a new mindset. If we think every day the same thoughts, we will have exactly the same results every day, so if we strive to get better, to be more successful, more balanced, we need to start to make changes, maybe small ones, maybe bigger ones, but the best thing is that we can always change ourselves and our approach, our mindset, that is absolutely in our control!
Thank you for your time. It was great to get to know you better. How can our readers connect with you?
Thank you for the conversation! They can contact me through my webpage or through my social media profiles to read more about me or to find some tools, thoughts, or articles that might be valuable for them, and they can experience coaching with me by writing to me here.
