Kim Ades on Frame of Mind Coaching: The Executive Coaching Method That Rewires How Leaders Think
Hosts of The Insurance Dudes Podcast — 1,000+ episodes helping insurance agents build elite agencies
Most leadership development programs are built around skills: communication frameworks, decision-making models, management techniques. These things have value. But they all share a limitation that Kim Ades identified early in her coaching career and has spent decades working around: skills don't change results if the thinking that underlies them is still operating from the old frame. Episode 185 is a conversation with a coach who goes to the root, and the root, Kim argues, is always the same place, the beliefs that are running your behavior whether you know it or not.
Who Kim Ades Is
Kim Ades is the founder of Frame of Mind Coaching and has been working with executives, business owners, and high-performers for long enough to have developed a methodology that's genuinely distinct from most coaching approaches. She has worked with leaders across industries at senior levels, and her client outcomes have a consistency that's hard to explain except by the coherence of the underlying model.
Her background is in organizational psychology and she's brought a researcher's rigor to what is often a subjective field. Frame of Mind Coaching is not intuition-based or primarily relationship-based, though both of those things are present. It's built around a specific diagnostic tool, a journaling process, and a specific intervention: identifying the thinking patterns that are generating outcomes the client doesn't want, and deliberately building new ones.
The reason she's relevant to insurance agency owners, specifically, is that the psychological profile of the agency owner, entrepreneurial, achievement-driven, often self-reliant to a fault, frequently struggling with the transition from operator to leader, is one she knows extremely well. The patterns she identifies are not generic. They're the specific configurations that tend to produce the specific kinds of stuckness that show up repeatedly in this world.
The Frame of Mind Framework
The core premise of Kim's methodology is straightforward to state and profound to apply: your thinking creates your feelings, your feelings drive your behavior, and your behavior produces your results. Every leader knows this in the abstract. Very few have actually mapped it with enough precision to intervene at the thinking level, which is where the leverage is.
Most coaching, and most self-improvement work, operates at the behavior level. Do more of this, do less of that, change the habit, follow the system. This produces incremental results when the underlying thinking is functional and it fails completely when the underlying thinking is working against the behavior change. You've seen this in your own agency: producers who know exactly what they should be doing and don't do it, not out of laziness but because something in their internal frame makes the right behavior feel wrong, risky, or impossible.
Kim's intervention goes upstream. Through a structured journaling process, she helps clients identify the specific beliefs that are generating the specific behaviors that are producing the specific results they don't want. This is not therapy, it doesn't dwell in the past or explore the origin of beliefs in depth. It's future-oriented: what belief would need to be true for this behavior to change? What frame would the person need to be operating from to consistently take the actions that produce the results they say they want?
The journaling component is non-negotiable in her methodology, and it's where most of the real work happens. Journaling in Kim's model is not a diary or a gratitude practice. It's a diagnostic. The client writes regularly, often daily, about what's happening internally in the moments that matter most professionally. What were you thinking when you avoided that conversation? What belief was active when you made that decision? What did you tell yourself about why this situation turned out the way it did? That raw material, analyzed with a coach who knows what to look for, reveals patterns that would be invisible otherwise.
What This Means for Insurance Agency Leaders
The application to agency ownership is direct. Consider the following scenarios, all of which show up with regularity in this world:
The agency owner who believes, on some level, that being wrong means being incompetent, who therefore can't get honest feedback from their team, can't acknowledge mistakes in the moment, and unconsciously selects for information that confirms what they already think. The frame driving this behavior is a specific belief about what being wrong means, and no communication training will change the behavior until the belief changes.
The producer who believes that success in insurance is about luck or talent, that some people just have "it" and some don't, and who therefore interprets every difficult stretch as evidence that they don't have it rather than as feedback to be used. The frame generates a specific emotional response to struggle (confirmation of inadequacy) rather than the emotional response that would actually help (curiosity about what to adjust). Skills training doesn't fix this.
The agency owner who believes that asking for help signals weakness, who therefore never builds the systems, relationships, and support structures that would allow the business to grow beyond what one person can personally manage. The frame creates a ceiling, and the ceiling is invisible until someone maps the thinking that built it.
Kim's framework gives leaders a way to see these patterns themselves, with enough precision to change them deliberately, not through willpower applied to behavior, but through examination of the belief generating the behavior.
The Journaling Practice Kim Recommends
For anyone who wants to start applying this methodology without a coach, the entry point is a specific kind of reflective writing practice. After any professionally significant event, a difficult conversation, a decision that didn't go the way you expected, a moment when you didn't perform the way you wanted to, write down the following: what happened, what you told yourself about what happened, what feeling that narrative generated, and what you did as a result.
Over time, patterns emerge. You'll start to see the beliefs that are running your most important professional behaviors. Some of them will surprise you. Many of them will be operating in ways you've never consciously chosen and would change if you could see them clearly.
That visibility is what Kim's methodology provides at a professional level. But the basic version of the practice is available to any agency owner willing to pick up a journal and take twenty minutes seriously.
What This Means for Your Agency
The ceiling on your agency's growth is set by the thinking at the top. That's not a judgment, it's a structural fact about how organizations work. The beliefs the leader holds about what's possible, what's risky, what people are capable of, and what the leader's own role should be are the operating system that everything else runs on. When those beliefs are functional, the agency scales. When they're limiting, no amount of tactics or systems will break through.
Kim Ades has spent decades helping high-performers find and update the limiting beliefs that are capping their results. The methodology is rigorous, the outcomes are documented, and the starting point is accessible to anyone: pay attention to what you're thinking in the moments that matter most and be honest about what you find.
The Bottom Line
Kim Ades is a reminder that the most sophisticated leadership development work isn't about adding new behaviors, it's about examining the thinking that's making the right behaviors impossible. Frame of Mind Coaching reaches the root of performance and gives leaders a way to intervene there rather than at the surface. For agency owners who've tried the skills training and the productivity systems and keep hitting the same ceiling, the question Kim is asking is the one that actually matters: what are you thinking, and is it taking you where you want to go?
Catch the full conversation:
About Kim Ades: Kim Ades is the founder and president of Frame of Mind Coaching. She is a long-time executive coach, author, and speaker who has worked with business leaders and high-performers across industries for over two decades.
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