Posts Tagged ‘coaching’

Late May and June signal the end of the school year here in the US and students are graduating from their complete course of study or their grade level.  So, in this time of  endings and new beginnings, I invite you to do a Life Happiness Checkup.  Take a look at your life situation today and ask yourself the following questions.  You can also  download the Wheel of Life Checkup form.  It’s easy and takes only 5 minutes or less.

On a scale of 0 to 10, how fulfilled and satisfied are you in these eight major life areas? (10 is completely fulfilled, with nothing left out).

Fun and Recreation

Health and Fitness

Career

Money

Friends and Family

Significant Other and Romance

Physical Environment

Spirituality or Personal Growth

Do you have a clear, unobstructed path to getting to fulfillment in these areas and are you are on that path  with enthusiasm, optimism and effectiveness?

Do you know what you are best designed to do and be on this earth?  Are your head and heart are aligned; your soul and ego in partnership as you gloriously do the actions and have the impact that you love, love, love to do and be?

For those of you who are  finding clarity or momentum around career, money, relationships, fun, health, environment and/or joy while simultaneously in your busy life commuting, working, raising a family, or handling problems,  I invite you to consider an alliance with a professional to help you focus on you.  It might be a therapist, group, or coach (believe it or not, I’m partial to the coaching solution!).

Businesses readily hire coaches to ultimately improve their bottom line.  Well, the bottom line for your life is what you call fulfillment. That’s my business.  For a no-cost consultation,  call me (510-886-7374) or email me.  I am on purpose as a coach when I  create a courageous, energetic relationship with you so you can clarify and manifest your vision or dream.

Come home to yourself – to the very alive, sweet, precious experience of your own body, your personhood – its culture, values, beliefs, biology, purpose and passions.   Home is your body, your spirit, your mind.  Home is you.  It’s to know yourself as whole, complete, capable,  and creative.   And to feel your energy, your own energy vibrating in your cells, to be fully awake to experience this moment.

Come home.  Why come home to you?

1. To know your own wisdom,  value, values, preferences, purpose.  To get to know you like you know your Facebook community or co-workers.  To discover the culture that is unique to you.
2. To experience the very alive, sweet, precious essence of you.
3. To  love.  To know love – love of yourself and others.   To grow love so that when you’re with partners, children, colleagues, family and friends you have your own wellspring of love to bring to the relationship.  You are not needing love.  You are full and  sharing it.
4. To choose.  The input of the world meets your own personal biology, beliefs, values, and purpose when you come home in order to choose.  Your choices will honor your own personhood – not that of the outer world.  You can say yes to a request from being home rather than from not knowing home and thinking that what others want is also good for you.   You can say no, thank you.  You can honor the wisdom of your body in order to sustain your own inner peace and follow your purpose.
5. To rest.  Your lives are lived at a tremendous pace – every 5 years adds dozens of new distractions, games, shows, demands, and possibilities.  Bodies are built to recieve input – nerves fire and process all over them all day long.  Sleep is a way of coming home.  And so is hitting the pause button in the middle of the day.  When I feel exhausted in the day, often just five minutes of quiet time re-energizes me.

How do we come home? Here are my suggestions – you check out your own biology, life, and style and discover what coming home is for you.

1. To begin, stop  leaving your home, your body / mind / spirit for a period of time each day.   Sit here and just know you.  Even if just for a minute a day to begin.
2. Come home from phones ringing, buzzing or vibrating;
3. and  music, no matter how spiritual it is to you.
4. Come home from digital images flickering through your eyes and brain.
5. Just for these moments,  come home from  people in your space
6. and thoughts churning about problems.  Yes, you can pause them.
7. Come home to your presence in nature, in quiet, in reduced input.
8. Yes – seated, standing, or lying down.  Yes – awareness and senses turned inward.
9. Try the meditator’s way to center -  be aware of your breath. If you are doing this for a minute that is about 10-12 calm breaths.  That’s all.  Be aware of your breath in your nose, throat, chest.  Good.
10. Massage is good for becoming aware of your body.  Start here.
11. At any given moment, just tune in-ward.  After a workout,  during or after a meal, during or after sex, during or after an argument, turn your awareness inward for a deep and pleasurable homecoming.

Now that you have come home, what inspired actions arise from your connection to yourself?  Write them down, then take off!

I offer coaching and workshops on inner peace, and taking off from there

In what ways do you come home to yourself?  What do you discover?

Look up high in the rafters of the circus tent.   Trapeze performers in glitter and glory release one swing and gracefully  fly through the gap for a brief second until they grasp the next swing, perfectly timed for their arrival.  In that brief moment in the gap, all structure is gone and there is nothing.

Are you experiencing the Gap?  Have one or more of your structures crumbled, walked off, or booted you out?  Have you chosen to discard structures in your life?  Are you in the gap that exists before you grab onto the  next structure?

We often struggle, cry, and rail against that gap.  But what a delicious time!  This is where you are creative,  acting on faith, intuition, and courage, even though you may feel terrified.  You know you are alive.   What would it be like to relish this crazy, uncertain, risky but alive moment of life?   What about holding this moment as flying, as needing all your wits and energy, as a demand to draw on your creativity and resourcefulness?

OK, what about you who have no job, been unable to find work, and are losing things that matter to you like cars, homes, and savings?    Where’s the glitter in that?  On the one hand, yes, it’s messy, scary, and undesired.  On another hand,  what skills have you honed or created?  Who have you met you wouldn’t have met?   What have you learned?  What are you willing to learn?  What if you were five years old and didn’t know enough to be scared, what would you do in this gap?  Yes, these are not easy, but they are  what grow us.

I’m celebrating 25 years of marriage this month.   My former husband divorced me and sent me reeling into the gap for a year.  I learned who I was, what I wanted;  I learned that I could be fine on my own; I learned what I wanted in a partner; and I learned where I failed in the relationship.  I would not be here without that gap.

What have you discovered in your time in the gaps?  Will you share it?

Coaching Mode!

Ten years ago I hung up the phone and cried tears of gratitude after my first completion call as a coach.  I’ll call him Roy.  He had achieved his goal in about 5 or 6 sessions, and our final call was to acknowledge and celebrate and clean up anything left undone or unsaid.   He had trusted me with his life and heart; and allowed me to journey with him for a while as he created courage and stepped into a new, bigger experience in his life. That moment marked a turning point in my years of seeking fulfilling work, training, certifying, letting go of the old work, starting a business, marketing, and finally coaching.  It’s been many clients and sacred journeys since and I am filled with gratitude for all the people who have allowed me to serve their emerging brilliance.

We are deep into autumn here in the U.S. and the energy has softened and cooled from the brilliant summer days.   This reduction in energy and light affects us.  While the West does not pay much attention to the change, the Chinese, for example, recognize the seasons and their influence on the earth and our bodies.  Nature displays the change very clearly – it brings forth vegetables and fruits – the result of the sunshine, nutrients and water building all spring and summer.  The end of a project.  Leaves go to work one last day to produce food for the tree; they give a last brilliant signature color, then let go.  The end of a project.  The animals that hibernate or travel south begin to shut down or shove off.  The end of a project. As the light changes, so do we.   Our bodies start to pull in, its energy shifts to our core away from the extremities as we prepare for less heat and light.  The end of a project, or many projects.  The bright, fast energy of summer is giving way to the softer, slower light of autumn. There is a pause, even a sadness in the air as we say goodbye to the sun.  And it is good.  The rest is good. It is time to gather the vegetables and fruits and clear out the vines that produced it.

A Leg UP

I just finished watching  Michael J. Fox  special on optimism.  He visited a country between India and China called Bhutan.  They measure their Gross National Happiness instead of their Gross National Product.  Wikipedia says, “While conventional development models stress economic growth as the ultimate objective, the concept of GNH claims to be based on the premise that true development of human society takes place when material and spiritual development occur side by side to complement and reinforce each other. The four pillars of GNH are the promotion of sustainable development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance.”

What if we measured our GPH- Gross Personal Happiness. What would your GPH be based on?   Productivity?  Integrity?  Laughter?  Connections?  Income?  Balance?   How are you doing with it?  Leave a comment and let us know.

The anniversary of the moon landing reminded me of the anniversary of a life-changing journey I created.  Twenty five years ago this summer I was riding my bicycle solo across the United States.  I was in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks on 7/24/84 sharing two lane roads with gigantic motor homes – worse than the east coast traffic!

One of my big aha’s this week as I remembered this bike trip with a coach, is that I had a plan for the trip.  It was simple.  Every day I got up and pedaled at least 60 miles down a very clear path – the road – unless it was dangerously hot or pouring down rain.  The road took me east every day.  Not north, south or west.  East towards Boston and the Atlantic Ocean.  As long as I followed the road, and kept safety precautions, I would get to Boston, to Deborah D.s house – my best friend from high school.  Now, the problem with me in my business is that I keep changing plans.  I change marketing plans, I change my goals, I change niches. I doubt my vision.  I worry about money.  I take exits off the road to visit giant balls of string and two headed snakes.  I wander north and south and wonder why I’m no closer to Boston.

The road and my goal focused all of my energies. It kept me true and on task.  Sure, I never saw the two headed snake, but I reached Boston, I accomplished my goal.

Action

Take stock of your plan. What is it to honor it?  What are your two-headed snake detours?  What are three changes you’ll make to your plan or how you honor it?  I invite you to respond in the comments.  Thank you for the courage to invent yourself everyday into your greatness.

Brilliant Gorgeous Talented Fabulous

Marianne Williamson spoke here in the San Francisco bay area this week.  She talked about asking the big questions in politics.  What are the radical questions, the ones a child might ask. Like why do 16,000 children die of hunger every day?  She got me looking at where I play small, hide my brilliance, and avoid the big questions.  What beliefs do I hold that allow me to  tolerate that death rate?  (someone else can take care of it; I’m too small). What is really hurting in my clients? (fear, despair, anger, doubt; needing to re-invent themselves as their “employer” rather than the corporation) Will I go there and address that pain for as long as it takes to heal and give its gifts? (I have done so.  I need to be vulnerable and strong, just like my clients). What’s small about my business and how I play the game? (When I’m one-one with clients I am willing to stand on the brink with them as they step into their unknown.  I don’t yet hold raw and vulnerable conversations with my audiences.  Now’s the time to step out and do that.) I choose out of this conversation to hold bigger conversations.  I will ask bigger questions of myself and my work and my clients and audiences, and stand for bigger answers and responses.  If not me, then who?  If not you, in your area of purpose and passion, then who?

Action
As I ask you these questions, I ask them of me as well.  What’s the next bigger arena that will call forth your greatness and use your purpose?  What’s your payoff for avoiding it?  What’s the price you and the world pay?  What story stops you? What is the first step for {!firstname}?  Take it this week.  If that step has you freeze, find a way to unfreeze.  Break it down into smaller steps, find colleagues, get a coach.

Thank you for your courage, purpose, passion, and your fears, concerns.  It’s all good.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.  It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.  We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?’  Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.  Your playing small does not serve the world.  There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.  We were born to manifest the glory that is within us.  And as we let our light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” —Marianne Williamson

Do you realize you can declare that you have a clean slate at the beginning of the second half of the year?  I just worked on my 3rd quarter plan on  Eric Lofholm’s  sales protege call.  We’re at the beginning of the quarter.  It’s time to start fresh with the second half of the year. You may have done everything in your plan, or you may have veered off most of the time.   Give yourself permission to start with a clean slate.  Complete and let go of what you did or did not do up till now.  No amount of thinking, regretting, celebrating or sadness will make the future any better.  Just shake it like a tree, get all the apples out of it that you can to take with you into the future.  Those apples are the gifts of learning from the past six months.
Complete the past 6 months.  Use a ritual, declaration, celebration dinner, or whatever it takes.  Then breathe and let yourself become aware of what wants to be created next.

The next step is to assess where you are and picture where you want to be at the end of the time frame.  Do you want to be joyfully employed? Making another $10,000 or $100,000? Three sizes smaller?  Then work backwards. Who do you have to be to achieve those goals? What will you learn?  What results will you produce in July, Aug and September?  Each week? What will motivate you?  How will you handle breakdowns this time?  How will you keep your goals fresh in your mind?

Finally, make a plan.   Make it as detailed or general as you need to be successful.  For me, great detail just makes me crazy.  I like broad brush strokes.  For others, details are it.   The plan isn’t over until it’s on your calendar.

“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion”. Thomas Hardy

Leave a comment – Did you declare a clean slate?  What is your planning process?