I’ve been publicly sharing gratitude throughout the month of November. I have more to be grateful for than I could write in a blog, a book, or a lifetime. It seems the more I am grateful for, the more I have to be grateful for and most days it’s challenging to limit the list. Today, I am sharing gratitude for entering the field of life coaching. If you’re wondering what the heck is life coaching? What do you do, exactly? Or, your considering working with a life coach and what that might mean for you. Listen up!

Life coaching is not therapy or counseling. It is not fixing or advice giving. It is not having a friend to bounce ideas off of. Working with a professional life coach can change your life if you’re truly ready for change. A life coach asks powerful and direct questions to help clients see past their limiting beliefs, thoughts, and patterns that keep them stuck; beliefs and patterns we often don’t realize we have.

I became a coach because I wanted to help people. Little did I know how much this work would change my life. I wanted to publicly share gratitude for some of the ways in which coaching has changed my life.

~ Coaching has reconnected me with my body. I believe this is the most important foundational piece to coaching. Awareness in my body allows me to respond to what’s happening in life from a place of love rather than react from fear. Many of us go through life cut off from the message our body is delivering through no fault of our own. Our culture values thinking over feeling and we’ve learned to adapt. Coaching has helped me to reconnect and listen without fear or guilt about what other’s may think and respond with integrity. This is amazing gift.

~ I’ve stopped believing everything I think. Coaching fosters individual responsibility for everything that happens to us in life. As Byron Katie says, “Nothing you believe is true. To know this is freedom.” Everything is made up. Everything is neutral in life. It’s the meaning we give to the experience that imprisons us in fear or pain. I had to become comfortable with the discomfort of change and growth. To allow the old to dissolve in order to birth something new. In doing so, I’ve gained the skills and tools to inquire into my own thinking and find peace and freedom that are always available to me.

~ Coaching has opened my mind to greater self-awareness, faith in myself, and self-confidence. Fear is a natural response to change. Artist, Georgia O’Keefe, said she was terrified everyday of her life but didn’t allow it to stop her from doing what she wanted to do. I experience fear each time I make a choice to show up and be seen or to put my work into the world (my inner critic is busy judging this journal entry as I write it). With the help of coaching, I’m far more aware of my fear responses, how they show up in my body, and what steps to take to move past that fear to faith.

As a professional life coach, I work on the premise that you are whole, complete, and perfect being. I completed my life coach training through the Martha Beck Institute (the life coach of life coaches according to this 2016 Bloomberg article). She is the real deal! I’ve always been a personal development junkie and am continually reading and learning on the subject. As a coach, I get to put all my training and learning into practice. I get to cheer, encourage, and empower clients on their journey into more fulfilling lives and I can’t think of any work more gratifying and fulfilling than that!

From my grateful heart to yours,