Meet Lindsay E. Preston - TLC Founder & CEO

From an interview published in Canvas Rebel Magazine, October 2024

Lindsay, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Lindsay: Trust and Leadership Coaching (TLC) is the product of a decade of coaching success and the evolution of Lindsay E. Preston Coaching – a women’s leadership and life coaching entity I created, which featured my premier “Awakened Woman” coaching program, as well as other 1-on-1 and group coaching offerings.

During more than a decade of deep client work, I refined my approach to serving driven women who wanted much more from their lives than success – they were looking for deep fulfillment. “Awakened Woman” helped hundreds of women, from all around the world, with its neuroscience-based approach. 92% of my clients over those 10+ years shared that they achieved their desired goals and more by working with me, and I continuously held a renewal rate with clients of approximately 85%.

Though I achieved my own success and personal fulfillment by leading these coaching programs, I couldn’t help but note a glaring commonality in why many of my clients were compelled to work with me – they each felt immense dissatisfaction and burnout from their corporate positions.

In many cases, corporate leaders had experienced varying degrees of trauma during their careers that negatively impacted their work and their well-being (a recent and universal example is the continuing impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic). To recover from these intense personal and professional experiences, employees required levels of support in their work lives that they weren’t finding access to, leaving them to seek out that support on their own.

Time and again, I saw clients with determination, drive, and privilege leaving their corporate roles behind due to this lack of support – and beginning their own businesses.

While these leaders were empowering themselves to fully utilize their talents as entrepreneurs, the exodus of top talent from the corporate applicant pool has continued to leave a huge number of organizations with a notable challenge: How to manage the increasing need to find, grow, and develop leaders who are impactful, engaged, and high-performing – and to do so without generating trauma or burning them out.

The realization of how widespread this need has become fueled the concept behind Trust & Leadership Coaching – a company that could use proven, neuroscience-backed methodology in business and life coaching and a team of certified, highly-trained coaches to support the issue at the heart of the problem being faced by so many corporations: leadership development.

At TLC, our mission is to provide results-focused leadership development and professional coaching services in partnership with individuals, teams, and organizations who are committed to our mission of helping trusted leaders thrive as they lead the way.

That development and support begins up to three years before an individual enters their first leadership position inside our “rising stars to emerging leaders” program. It continues with “established leaders” who have already been assigned a leadership position and wraps up with those entering mastery as ” executives” or “entrepreneurs.”

Our approach is rooted in the belief that leadership is more than managing others. True leadership demands that we develop the ability to inspire and empower teams by cultivating our own deep knowing, managing our well-being, and creating opportunities for true connection. This allows employees to thrive within their roles in the organization, rather than leaving it.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Lindsay: I’m a trauma-informed, DEI-trained leadership coach specializing in business coaching – including the business of living a fulfilling life. I’m one of the only .002% of coaches with their PCC (the Professional Certified Coach credential recognized by the International Coaching Federation). As a means to offer highly individualized support to my coaching clients, I’m also an Enneagram iEQ9 practitioner who is trained in Clifton Strengths and the implementation of the Kolbe method, along with several other modalities.

Before becoming a certified life and business coach, I experienced success as an entrepreneur and in the corporate world – receiving investor funding to grow a dance studio that experienced a 90% increase in enrollment during my time there and as a Human Resources specialist for multiple Fortune 500 companies, where I directly supported hundreds of employees.

I’m incredibly proud of my 92% success rate with clients, who say they achieved their coaching goals and MORE by working with me over the past 10+ years.

My “secret sauce” has been my skill at finding the root of problems to increase my clients’ professional and personal performance in authentic ways. I lower their stress levels and create fast results. I have also loved building a coaching community that fills up my soul and the hearts of my clients – especially in my mastermind program, Leading the Dream, and in the creation of TLC alongside ten other powerful coaches.

I live with my family in Dallas, Texas – the home base of Trust and Leadership Coaching – while we coach successful leaders who are based across the globe.

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

Lindsay: The connection that we at TLC create with our clients is deep. Our team of coaches has worked with more than 830 driven leaders and dedicated more than 4,600 coaching hours to those clients. Although, as coaches and facilitators, we’re there to serve as outside support on a client’s journey, we’re extremely committed to the success and growth of those we have the pleasure of working with.

Because of this commitment and connection, 92% of our clients say they got everything and more by working with us, and we hold a strong renewal rate of 85% or higher.

Those statistics are ones we’re incredibly proud of, and they wouldn’t be possible if we weren’t continuously driven to apply exceptional day-to-day care within our client experience, which includes:

• Being available for emergency spot coaching sessions when problems arise so they can be solved quickly and authentically

• Doing sessions in person as much as possible, to step inside the client’s environment and see best how they can grow

  And, also – 

• Having outlets to celebrate a client’s wins that don’t trigger others so they can create the momentum needed for ongoing sustainable success

• Hiring coaches and facilitators who have the highest levels of certification in their craft so they can coach and teach for maximum results

• Providing a safe and confidential environment for growth, which we know can sometimes be messy and uncomfortable

• Creating a proven neuroscience-backed coaching system that works so clients can easily see how they’re going to reach their goals

• Staying at least one step ahead of our most advanced clients to ensure they continue to stay challenged

• Cultivating the appropriate community and networking opportunities among clients so they don’t feel alone in their journey and can maximize the immense talent within our clientele

• Immense concern for the client’s experience from start to finish – which begins by pairing them with a coach (and often a coaching community) that is the ideal fit for them

• Prioritizing honesty and transparency within our organization so coaches know when to challenge a client, when to be vulnerable with them for the benefit of the client’s growth and to know when a client’s growth needs to happen outside of TLC’s walls.

By cherishing and honoring our clients’ needs in all these ways, we build coaching relationships that continue to grow with our client’s accomplishments. The vast majority of our client family returns to their TLC coaches year after year – as they gain momentum with each new level of success, establish and achieve their goals at increasing speed, and continue to balance it all without sacrificing themselves, their values, or their well-being.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Lindsay: One of my most significant pivots to date happened during a peak in my career. It was 2021, and my coaching business was thriving – I was near capacity with clients, and the business was generating the revenue I wanted.

Although I was achieving at one of my highest levels ever, my wellness started to tank. I couldn’t keep up with the demand for my services, and I didn’t know why because I had been able to fly through stress quickly in the past.

That’s when I began engaging other practitioners and completing further trainings that allowed me to uncover unaddressed issues in my health, including my nervous system and brain health (undiagnosed ADHD and more), that were significantly impacting my life. While I continued to coach women facing similar struggles, I began my two-and-a-half-year journey to a better understanding of wellness and discovering how to achieve my goals while prioritizing my well-being.

This journey was hard, uncomfortable, and felt slow at times, but I’m so grateful I went through it because now I can achieve at even higher levels, doing less work while taking care of my body and thriving outside of work, as well as in it. Additionally, I can now support my clients’ wellness journey even more effectively – because I’ve lived it!
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Thank you to Canvas Rebel for the feature!
Be sure to follow TLC on LinkedIn & Instagram to learn more about Lindsay & all of our coaches.