Jessica Fuentes is one of the coaches that we found this month and we did a little interview with her. She impressed us with her passion and dedication.
Her journey is a testament to resilience and transformation. As a single mother of two, she navigated the complexities of balancing her dreams and responsibilities with remarkable determination. Initially moving to Miami to pursue a career in the music industry, she faced numerous challenges, including starting her university education almost from scratch. However, she embraced these obstacles as opportunities, ultimately earning a degree in Management from Florida International University.
Her professional path spans over two decades as an Office and Administrative Manager, but it was a layoff in 2023 that catalyzed her shift towards a more fulfilling career. She started sharing her thoughts first on Facebook back during the pandemic. Then, she launched her personal blog where she can express her wisdom. Now she ventured into podcasting and earned a Professional Coaching Certification from iPEC, marking the beginning of her journey as a life coach.
She dedicates her expertise to helping clients overcome obstacles and find their purpose, focusing on self love, self empowerment, and personal growth. Her unique coaching approach emphasizes the intangible aspects of self awareness and self discovery, guiding clients to improve therelationship they have with themselves and unlock their true potential. Most importantly, she helps them turn self doubt into confidence so they can reach their goals. Here is what she said.
Meet Life Coach Jessica Fuentes:
Name: Jessica Fuentes, Certified Professional Coach
Pillar: The Heart
Who is this coach for: Anyone who wants improve the relationship they have with themselves and turn self doubt into confidence so they can reach their goals.
How they can help: By using various tools and techniques like active listening, asking empowering questions, visualization and laser coaching, just to name a few.
First of all, how are you and your family doing after these Pandemic times?
I am doing great!
Very happy and excited about our interview today.
My kids and family are doing well, thank you for asking!
I can say that after the Pandemic life changed in general.
Before the pandemic, we were accustomed to live life in autopilot: commuting to work, complying with our responsibilities, and getting back home to comply with the role there.
After the pandemic many people got accustomed to working from home and many others were looking forward to going back to their regular routine.
I honestly don’t think things went back to that norm.
I don’t think they’ll ever will!
We first had to adapt to the change of doing almost everything remotely and now we are still adapting to going back to the old ways.
But I always try to focus on the opportunities behind changes and challenges.
How did the coronavirus pandemic affect your clients? Did it affect you at all?
During the Pandemic I was still not a coach, I was going through my own process of self healing and self discovery.
It was a moment of growth for me.
I indulged myself with many books of self help, leadership, business development, and self improvement.
Some of the books I read that were transformational for me were:
- “Love Me, Don’t Leave Me: Overcoming Fear of Abandonment and Building Lasting, Loving Relationships” By Michelle Skeen
- “Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success” By John Maxwell
- “Atomic Habits” By James Clear
- “Think like a Monk” by Jay Shetty
- “The Four Agreements” By Miguel Ruiz
What are the biggest lessons that you learned in this pandemic?
The biggest lesson was that being alone is not the same as feeling lonely.
Being alone is actually a blessing, because during that time I had so much alone time that I got to really know myself and I started to love the person I was transforming myself into.
I’m not going to lie, in the beginning I felt anxious and stressed out, but then I thought to myself “this is what I have at this moment, what good can I get out of this? What can I learn NOW that I NEVER had the chance to learn before?”
So, I decided to get to know myself!
Kind of like when you are dating…
So, I did that with myself.
And it was nice to get to know ME.
The Origin:
Tell us about you, your career, how you started with your coaching career?
I am from Puerto Rico but have been living in Miami, Florida for over 18 years.
I am 45 years old.A single mother of two.
I have a grown up daughter that is currently 23 years old and an almost teenaged son that is 12 years old.
The reason why I moved to Miami was because I was in pursuit of a career in the music industry.
I made a Demo and I even auditioned for American Idol, but I didn’t get that far and then I decided that since I didn’t make it passed the audition, I was going to complete my bachelor’s degree instead, so I went back to university.
Back when I was living in Puerto Rico, I had completed 3 years at the University of Puerto Rico, but when my daughter was born, I decided I needed to work, so I dropped out.
When I went back to university here in Florida, I only got 12 credits validated (out of the 85 credits I had completed), so I basically had to start University all over again.
This is actually one great example of a challenge that I encountered.
This was an opportunity for me to choose to be a victim rather than seeing the opportunity behind it all.
But I chose to see the opportunity.
It was my chance to re do things even better than before.
It was my chance to improve my English.
And I did!
I learned so much!
I graduated with a degree in Management in May, 2011 from Florida International University (FIU).
I’d like to mention that while I was working on completing my bachelor’s degree, I was a Full Time employee and a Full time Mom of a daughter with ADHD.
It was extremely hard, but I did it!
My only thought while going through the experience was “I don’t know HOW I am going to do it, but I AM going to do it!” and I did!
Professionally I have worked as an Office and Administrative Manager for over 23 years.
In June, 2023, I was Laid Off from a job of almost 18 years and it was another difficult experience.
As the sole provider, it really scared me!
Fortunately, my former boss recommended me for a role as a consultant and this opened the door of independence for me as a professional.
Instead of allowing myself to remain a victim, I decided to learn how to do a Podcast and started working and preparing it.
I also enrolled in the Professional Coaching Certification Program from iPEC and got Certified as a professional Coach.
Now I feel that life is aligning for me as it was meant to align.
My job as a professional has always been to facilitate the executives’ lives and ease their loads of responsibilities, but I always felt that what I was doing had no real meaning.
I wanted to help others in other ways, but I didn’t know how.
Getting Laid Off took me off my comfort zone and that experience taught me that I have no control over a job, but I do have control over my career.
I might not have control over other people’s behavior’s, but I get to choose my own response and my behavior towards them.
It took me years to realize that I am stronger than I thought I was.
Years struggling with my insecurities, but it was with these and many other challenges that I realized how much I’ve learned and how strong I actually am.
I don’t think of myself as being better than anyone. I just focused on becoming a better version of myself.
But I thought it would be selfish of me to keep the knowledge I’ve acquired to myself.
So, since I wanted to help others, in March of 2020, during the peak of the Pandemic, I decided to create the Facebook and Instagram pages of Empored.Selflove in which I started sharing my thoughts in Quotes.
A year later I created my webpage: www.empowered-selflove.com and started a Blog.
But now it was time for me to speak up and launched my Podcast Empowered by Self Love the Podcast on June 1st, 2024.
I also completed my Certification as a Coach and Launched the Coaching business.
What was your biggest obstacle that you had to overcome in your life that made you who you are today?
I could say the lack of Self Love.
When I realized that the root cause of many of my problems, my failures, and my insecurities was that I never loved myself enough, therefore I always felt less than everyone!
And because I felt less than everyone, I never though I was deserving of many things!
Simple things such as love, respect, and success.
But when I accepted that I was not loving myself enough I entered a realization phase, in which I came to understand the reasons behind me accepting less than what I deserved.
But this process was hard, sometimes it is still difficult, because it is a false idea implanted in my brain since childhood, and now it requires the new conscious me to remind the little girl that, that idea is not the TRUTH.
And this is when the transformational phase began!
And now I feel the responsibility to let everyone know that the magic ingredient behind any level of success is the love we show to ourselves, because the way we love ourselves is reflected in the way we present ourselves out to the world.
The Coaching Style:
How do you innovate with coaching your clients?
I help my clients Overcome Obstacles and Find Purpose with tailored Coaching for Personal and Professional Success.
My goal is to help my clients reach a greater level of awareness and guide them in their discovery process so they can stop getting in their own way and discover the path to self love, self empowerment and self fulfilment.
In a nutshell, I help my clients turn self doubt into confidence so they can reach their goals.
What’s unique about your coaching approach?
I feel that most people focus on material outcomes and those are extremely important and necessary to have, but my coaching approach focuses more on the intangible.
It goes deep!
The purpose is for my clients to get to know themselves, understand themselves, and love themselves.
The intangible target for me is for my clients to fall in love with themselves.
Because once they reach that point, everything else in their lives will fall in place.
What benefits do your clients get after working with you?
I can say:
Self Confidence
Self Love
Self Empowerment
Do you use any specific tools to be efficient with your clients?
I love to first LISTEN to my clients and use my INTUITION to determine their ENERGY LEVEL and their BLOCKS.
Then I use EMPOWERING QUESTIONS to collect more information and to CHALLENGE my clients.
When it comes to measuring emotions, SCALING QUESTIONS are key to determining where the client is standing and that makes their feelings more measurable.
I also like to use VISUALIZATION, BREAKTHROUGH LASER COACHING, and AIM SMART tools.
It is important that the client feels in a secure environment since that allows them to open up.
The Impact:
If you had a super megaphone that, when you speak into, the whole world will hear your message, what would you say?
Wow! That would be amazing to have!
I would say:
Love yourself ABOVE anyone else!
Because the love you give to others will be a reflection of the way you love yourself.
You will have the capacity to accept what you know you deserve and reject what doesn’t serve you, and therefore, you will be able to give others the best version of yourself.
What is the greatest lesson you have learned in your life?
I have learned that every mistake teaches us a lesson and if we don’t apply the lessons learned they will continue to show up in front of us, until we learn them!
Your final thoughts?
The magic of coaching is that all answers and solutions are inside the client, which is something I love!
Because I am not there to tell my clients what to do, I serve as their guide.
But when the magic happens, when they realize their strength, their knowledge, their worthiness, and their capacity… Uuuufff!
That is priceless!
That is my goal with each and every one of my clients, for them to realize that even though they had been questioning their potential, the answers were always inside of them.
Where Can You Find Jessica Fuentes?
If you liked this interview and you would love to find out how to turn self doubt into confidence so you can reach your goals, go to https://www.empowered-selflove.com/ and see how coach Jessica can help you.
If you’d like to peak a glimpse of her coaching, check out her podcast Empowered by Self Love the Podcast. You can also find it on YouTube.
If you’d like stay in contact with her, follow her Facebook and Instagram accounts.
And if you’d like to connect with her more personally, you can do that through LinkedIn or by sending her a direct message on her Email [email protected]. It was an honor having this interview with you.