Client Stories: Chris Fredericks, CEO @ Empowered Ventures

May 31, 2024 Ryan Vaughn

I’ve invited one of our awesome clients, Chris Fredericks, CEO of Empowered Ventures, to tell his story about working with Inside-Out.

Inside stories like these are usually highly confidential, but Chris has agreed to share his story here, in case it might help the next entrepreneur considering working with a coach.

It’s a story of getting to know and trust yourself as a leader, and of the ripple effects that that can have on your life and business. It’s at once common, and completely unique.

Huge thank you to Chris for being willing to share his unfiltered coaching story.

Chris Fredericks, CEO, Empowered Ventures

I got in touch with Ryan for two reasons: I was feeling really stressed at work, and I was having a lot of personal challenges.

From 2010 to 2020, I had been leading TVF, a fabric distribution company, but in 2020, we launched Empowered Ventures, an acquisitive holding company which enables business owners to achieve employee ownership succession outcomes. It meant a completely new role for me in a company that was much closer to a startup than a traditional business. By 2021, when I first contacted Ryan, I’d gone remote and hired someone for Empowered Ventures to lead the effort to find companies for us to acquire, but I just couldn't settle in and find a way to succeed that felt good to me. Even though I believed Empowered Ventures would be successful, it was just too early to know if it was going to succeed, and I was fearful of a less-than-amazing outcome.

It had been a lot of change, and the stress was getting to be too much. I'd been to therapy on and off, I’d had a couple of coaches on and off, and it always helped, but I’d plateaued, and I had a gnawing sense that if I didn't overcome my personal challenges, I could experience some very scary and painful consequences. More than that, I care about living my best life, and I believed that with the right kind of support and help, I could not only overcome my personal issues but truly thrive at home and at work.

What do you want?

I discovered Ryan on Twitter, and I reached out via DM because I resonated with the things he was saying. He and I share a perspective that between the personal and the work life there's no actual separation. It's all just me issues. And people stuff. So working on one is working on the other.

From the beginning, I trusted Ryan and the process. His approach to our work together always begins with the question, “What do you want?” And from there, we branch out into what I want to talk about that day or what is on my mind as I come into our meeting. It feels natural and authentic. He has never put me through a one-size-fits-all system with assessments or pre-planned questions. He just asks me, “what’s bothering you today?” And we start there.

At the beginning, we focused 80% of our time on my personal stuff and 20% on work stuff because objectively everything at work was going well. So the whole first year was about reorienting myself and realizing that I was very stuck in my head. When Ryan asked questions that required “feeling” answers, I just would go blank. And so he eventually started asking questions that were rooted in NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming, to help guide me.

I remember him asking me once, “where is that feeling located in your body?”

Inside I thought, “what are you talking about?” I just felt completely flummoxed by the question.

And so he started to ask clarifying questions like, “do you feel it in your throat? Do you feel it in your chest? Do you feel it in your stomach? Do you feel it in your hand?” The idea was to start to pay attention to my body and uncover where the feeling might be located. At the beginning, I still had nothing, but Ryan was patient. “Well, if you had to say where it was,” he said, “what would you say?” Then, I could respond, “I guess I'd say it’s in my throat,” and that felt okay.

From there, he started asking, “well, what does it feel like in your throat?” And I would find I was stuck again.

“Can you give me options again?” I asked. And Ryan would say, “is it pokey? Does it hurt?” And eventually I could say, “I guess it’s that.”

I felt really illiterate in those moments, and they highlighted how detached I was from my body. Whenever we had those conversations, I thought, “Oh my gosh. It’s like he’s speaking a language I don't speak.”

It was hard at first, and I felt embarrassed because there was now concrete proof I was deficient. But a big part of the coaching process was Ryan showing me that my lack of connection with my body wasn’t a problem; it was a completely reasonable reaction. We took time to understand the disconnect and how it had been serving me, and we discussed the good things that had come from my ability to not be overwhelmed by my emotions in any number of situations. After a time, I was able to acknowledge that I wasn’t as in touch with my body as I wanted to be, but it wasn’t a problem. It just was what it was. Ryan never lectured. He asked good questions that enabled me to ultimately let go of the shame I felt.

That was an unlock to going a little deeper because that shame was a block. But Ryan helped me understand that awareness and doing nothing is its own kind of progress. So 2022 was the year I was able to become aware of a lot of things that I wasn't aware of before. I didn’t immediately try to change myself; I tried to go deeper and understand how different thoughts, behaviors, and emotions had served me. My “work” was to be more patient, knowing that things would change eventually once I figured out how to fulfill those needs in a different way.

Messy and connected

At the start of 2023, I started asking, “where do we go from here?” and we landed on a theme: messy and connected.

All this time, I had been trying to create a sense of safety and control to protect myself from getting hurt, from vulnerability. But then I started to really lean into or rather become aware of the fact that life is out of control. Control is an illusion, and it’s an illusion that I can even have enough control to feel safe. So I set a new goal for myself to get more comfortable with feeling messy and feeling more connected, because both of those things give me a sense of real, rather than imagined, safety.

What messiness means to me is choosing to “be” based on what feels right to me even if it doesn’t fit within the box of what a good son should do or even a good spouse. So the messiness comes into play in terms of letting go of the idea of the person I'm “supposed” to be. I’m working on being more open with people about who I actually am, what I feel, and what I might want. Ultimately, that's a messier version of me than the “good” son, “good” husband, “good” CEO I was trying to be.

I felt far more connected and vulnerable in 2023 than I'd ever felt and that played out in simple ways: more fulfilling conversations in my personal life and just generally feeling understood, validated, and trusted. And at work, I think similarly, being messy and connected is playing out in terms of sharing from a feelings perspective. In the past, I never mentioned feelings. That didn’t seem like an appropriate way to be in a professional setting.

But now, when it comes to decision making in the workplace, for example, I’m much better at speaking from a place of uncertainty. I can tune into how I’m feeling when I make a decision. Is it fear or uncertainty or even excitement? Instead of thinking to myself, “I should know the right answer to this” or “If I say something, it better be the right answer,” I can say to the team, “I'm feeling uncertain about this decision,” or “I'm feeling fearful because I don't know which of these is the is the right choice.”

The reaction has been very positive, and my colleagues seem to want to know more of the real Chris. There's a lot of truth to the idea that you should surround yourself with the kind of people you want to be like, and so with Empowered Ventures, I have built a team around me that is more open and vulnerable than what I was comfortable with at first.

Part of me is surprised by their reaction because I sometimes can’t help but think, “Are you sure you really want to know the real me?” That’s the underlying belief that’s always been here up until now. I always felt like I needed to be impressive and seem better than I actually feel. But no matter how “successful” I've been in work or career, I’ve never felt good enough. I guess it's imposter syndrome. I always felt that eventually everyone was going to figure out that it had all been luck. And they were going to say, “Let’s stop and put someone else in charge who knows what they’re doing.” That kind of insecurity has always been there.

Going deeper

Ryan and I identified a new theme recently, which is to go deeper. I still have some trust issues with others and with myself that hold me back from what I want. Resolving them is more of the same work, which is to keep going deeper into my connection with my feelings, my body, and my intuition. And, ultimately, the goal is to continue deepening the relationships I’ve developed at work and at home. Specifically to become more trusting and more trustworthy in those relationships with others and with myself.

Trusting is trusting that people like me and have my best interests at heart. Trustworthy is showing up authentically and not holding back. I've learned during my work with Ryan that I have a tendency to hold back a lot. And that's not a very trustworthy place to be. I can’t be very trustworthy if I'm holding back things.

My relationships and my life are more enjoyable now. It’s been amazing, not just the difference in terms of my own enjoyment but that other people enjoy working with me or being in relationship with me. I've gotten a lot of feedback this year that it's been good to work with me. And my spouse has noted that I’m a different person than when I started this work a few years ago.

I understand now that the imposter syndrome comes from the idea that there's a perfect version of a leader or husband. I once believed that the only way I could ever be fulfilled and enjoy life was if I achieved that perfect version of all the roles I play in my life. I haven’t completely gotten rid of that belief, but I put much less stock in it than I did before. But more importantly, I have a new sense of my purpose. I was put on earth to be Chris, and the best version of Chris I can be isn’t perfect. He’s the messiest, most connected version of me. The more I move in that direction, the more I know it’s right. I just keep asking myself, how much more fulfilling could life be if just being me is the point?

Ryan has given me an unbelievably safe space to practice being messy and to learn to trust that being messy is a good thing. And in addition to the enormous difference our time together has made on how I show up in the world, the impact on my work and the business has been very powerful. I’ve been able to develop much stronger relationships with my board of directors and key executives, and the resulting alignment has helped us accomplish more than I could have imagined in the first four years of Empowered Ventures’ existence.

We’ve grown from one company with 75 employee-owners, to four businesses with more than 250 employee-owners, all the while growing enterprise value by around 200%. Importantly, my stress has dropped from unsustainable levels to being much more manageable, and to being a window into further opportunities for growth. I always felt like I needed more support and could benefit from working with a great coach. Working with Ryan has been the unlock I needed at work and home.

Want to dive deeper?

If you liked this, check out this list of my top posts, read and shared by thousands of entrepreneurs.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Executive Coaching for Entrepreneurs

There’s a reason every elite athlete in the world works with a coach. You need more than one perspective to see your best work.

I’m an executive coach and the founder of Inside-Out Leadership, a boutique leadership development agency that supports entrepreneurs to step fully into their lives, and transform their companies into their masterpieces.

Leveraging 15-years as a founder/CEO, along with deep training in mindfulness, psychology, Neurolinguistic Programming, psychedelic integration and more, I have helped leaders from some of the fastest growing companies and VC funds in the world design a more conscious life and make key changes to improve their performance and satisfaction.

I coach leaders how I want to be coached:

Focused on the person, not the role.
Focused on results, without the fluff.

To learn more about working with me, click here.