She Started Coaching Kids on the Playground at Seven — and Never Stopped

10 Apr She Started Coaching Kids on the Playground at Seven — and Never Stopped

Posted at 03:43h in Blog by jcs

Tanya Scott, master certified trainer and former Tony Robbins senior coach, tells Jeff Crilley how a 25-cent advice stand, personal tragedy, and thirty years of study built a career helping people move from brokenness to resiliency.

The 25-Cent Advice Stand

A seven-year-old watches the playground politics unfold — the cliques forming, the smaller kids getting pushed around — and decides she's going to do something about it. Tanya Scott didn't have a certification or a business plan. She had a bench and a willingness to listen. "I started seeing people getting bullied and a lot of groups happening," she recalled. "And I thought, you know, I should do something about this."

What started as impromptu peer mediation turned into something more structured. Kids began lining up. They began paying. "All of a sudden, people were paying me 25 cents to get advice," Scott said. The operation ran smoothly until fifth grade, when administrators shut it down. "They said, yeah, no, you can't be making money off the children."

Host Jeff Crilley compared her to Lucy from Peanuts — the doctor is in. Scott laughed and owned it: "It's true. I was Lucy." But the childhood hustle wasn't a phase. It was a rehearsal for a career that would span more than three decades, take her inside the organizations of Tony Robbins and John Maxwell, and eventually land her in a Dallas TV studio preparing to host her own show.

Tragedy at Fourteen

Scott grew up in a family that looked, from the outside, like it had everything figured out. Her father played in the CFL. The household was comfortable. "I grew up in a very well-to-do family," she said. "Our house looked like, oh, it's just so great, and then tragedy struck."

She was fourteen. The specifics she left private, but the impact was total. "I just sat there and just thought, oh my god. My life is over," she told Crilley. "And even after helping all these kids and so forth, I felt my life was over." The girl who had spent years coaching her classmates through their problems couldn't coach herself through her own.

The Teachers Who Changed Everything

What pulled Scott out was not a single moment but a lineage of mentors. She studied under Tony Robbins, John Maxwell, Joe Dispenza, and Jim Rohn — names that carry weight in the personal development world. But she didn't describe the experience as education. She described it as permission.

"The experience gave me the permission to really be my authentic self," Scott said. "They really gave me tools and permission to say, you don't have to stay suffering. You can do something about that." Over thirty-plus years in the personal development field, she assembled her own methodology from those influences. "I've taken from different places and so forth and now I help other people do exactly what I did — come from nothing, come from brokenness to resiliency."

She also spent years in corporate America, working at Coca-Cola in training, mindset, and sales roles. One detail stuck with her: three different managers, across three different stretches of her career, handed her the same book — Dale Carnegie's *How to Win Friends and Influence People*. "The first time I threw it in the trash, second time I threw it in the trash, and the second time I thought, oh, I should really read this," she said. "Not only did I read it, but then I brought it to life because I hired a coach."

The Opera Singer Who Couldn't Audition

When Crilley asked for a favorite client story, Scott didn't hesitate long. An opera singer came to her wanting to audition for The Metropolitan Opera. The woman could sing. That wasn't the issue. "She sang like a songbird," Scott said. "But she didn't have the confidence to go in and apply."

The work took about a year. It wasn't vocal coaching — it was identity work. The singer didn't believe she looked the part. She didn't believe she deserved the stage. "The identity that I don't deserve, I don't have, I have a beautiful voice, people tell me I have a beautiful voice, but I don't believe it," Scott explained. "She needed to believe it for herself." Through modeling opera role models she admired and rebuilding her sense of self, the singer submitted her application. She got the lead role at The Met.

Scott got chills retelling it. "Lots of stories like that," she said.

Slice and Dice Coaching

Scott described her style without hedging. "I'm like Zorro," she said. "Slice and dice and dissect and really get to the root cause of what's happening." She positioned herself against coaches who let clients circle the same story for months. "Sometimes you get in, it's like therapy. You sit there over and over again. Who cares? Nobody cares. What I care about is what is it that you want in this moment? What do you wanna do about it? And where do you wanna go?"

Her clients, she said, describe her as laser-focused, kind, and brutal — in that order. "The key is they don't feel judged," she said. But there's a condition: "You gotta be a thousand percent more committed about your life than I am. And then I'm more committed for you too."

Her courses — Love Is An Inside Job, From Rat Race to Sanity, the Fifteen Minute Coach, and others — address what she calls "the dirty dozen" emotions: anger, resentment, disconnection in marriage, parenting struggles, and the rest. "All my courses are here to help you understand where you're stuck," she explained.

From Rat Race to Sanity

Scott is preparing to host her own show on Crilley's network, titled *From Rat Race to Sanity*. The name came to her in the middle of the night. "I'm sleeping and then it's like, what am I doing with people? What is going on in the world?" she said. "It's a rat race. You're like in this hamster wheel going on and on. I have tools, I have systems, I have processes that help people get off the hamster wheel and stop and go get back to sanity and balance."

When Crilley asked how someone breaks the mental loop — the 3 a.m. spiral that won't quit — Scott gave a two-part answer. First, break the physical state: get out of bed, splash water on your face, move your body. Then ask four questions: What is really going on? What do I need in this moment? What will I do in this moment? And what do I really, really want? "It's usually peace, calm, feeling safe, being okay with what is," she said.

A Quarter's Worth of Clarity

The playground advice stand closed decades ago, but the work never changed in kind — only in scale. Scott now runs coaching programs, appears on dozens of podcasts, and is about to have her own broadcast platform. Crilley joked at the close that she'd raised her prices from a quarter. "Inflation," Scott replied. But the through line is the same thing she offered those kids in grade school: someone willing to sit down, ask the real question, and not look away from the answer.

Tanya Scott is a master certified trainer and life and executive coach, creator of Love Is An Inside Job and the upcoming show From Rat Race to Sanity. Learn more at loveisaninsidejob.com. This episode was recorded at The Jeff Crilley Show studios in Dallas, Texas.

Key Topics

coaching on the playground at age seven
overcoming personal tragedy through mentorship
breaking negative thought loops at 3 a.m.
the opera singer who landed a lead role at The Met
the dirty dozen emotions
From Rat Race to Sanity
why people hire a life coach
root cause coaching vs. surface-level advice

Episode Timestamps

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Episode Chapters

00:00 – Introduction
01:21 – Meet Tanya Scott: Coaching Since Age Seven
01:43 – The Playground Origin Story
02:41 – Learning from Tony Robbins and John Maxwell
03:07 – Overcoming Personal Tragedy at 14
04:07 – Courses: The Dirty Dozen Emotions
05:14 – From Rat Race to Sanity: Her New Show
06:06 – How to Break Negative Thought Loops
07:28 – Success Story: The Opera Singer at The Met
08:51 – Tanya's Coaching Style: Laser Focused
10:13 – Why You Need an Accountability Partner
11:43 – How to Work with Tanya

Tags:

accountability, executive coaching, from rat race to sanity, john maxwell, life coaching, love is an inside job, mindset, personal development, resilience, tanya scott, the jeff crilley show, tony robbins