Coach Approach Blog

When I was a kid, I was raised in a tradition of reward and punishment, a religious mindset that put people into categories of good and evil, of chosen and not chosen. I knew myself to be in the evil category, and was praised for that knowledge. I hid my knowledge that I was not chosen.

But when I was 28 years old and in deep despair after a miscarriage, the beauty and honor of human life became perfectly evident to me. I was so sad about the loss of my child and so aware of her inherent worth …

I was in a coach training on a Friday afternoon with a man who considers himself a real champion of women's empowerment. At one point he taught our group of mainly women, “It’s so important that I, as a white man, learn to give away my power.”

From his perspective, I’m sure that felt true. To me, and the other women in the room, it felt gross. Something about the way he said it proved that he believed deep inside that he inherently has and deserves the power he has in excess, and we could feel …

When I first became a coach, I was on a high about all the changes my clients were making in their lives. It was all about achieving goals, success, promotions, career ladder-climbing, taking action, and excitement. At the same time, it took a lot of my energy. I felt like I was constantly needing to infuse a boost into my clients’ lives, and they would still come back looking for more without making the lasting changes I knew they could. 

It took me years to piece together the levels of depth …

Those of you who know me well remember that I struggled for about eight years with panic attacks. I remember being nine months pregnant, walking the halls of the Rayburn building in Washington, DC to convince the powers that be to enact a piece of legislation that would benefit my company. 

I was exhausted, but kept pushing myself to do more, to impress and to succeed. I was constantly overwhelmed and stressed by the demands of my daily life. Every morning, I would wake up feeling anxious and a…

In chapter 4 of Rising Strong, Brené Brown writes,

"The opposite of recognizing that we’re feeling something is denying our emotions. The opposite of being curious is disengaging. When we deny our stories and disengage from tough emotions, they don’t go away; instead, they own us, they define us. Our job is not to deny the story, but to defy the ending—to rise strong, recognize our story, and rumble with the truth until we get to a place where we think, Yes. This is what happened. This is my tr…

As I've been lying around blowing my nose and recovering from a bad head cold, I'm feeling so grateful for the sacred spaces I can see from my bed. 

On a bookshelf across from me, I can see a little collection of arranged items:

• A photo of my husband and me, representing the young love we experienced in Paris when we were newly married.
• A blue lantern shining forth my core values of community and grace - gifted to me by a group I led in Brene Brown's Rising Strong course in Kenya.
• A Tibeta…

If you've got a thought that keeps coming back, is holding you back, or you just feel gross when you think it, why not try a hilarious way to hear yourself thinking? 

Let's say, for example, you have a thought that sounds something like this: 

• "I'll never be able to do that."
• "I'm not that smart."
• "I'm too old/young for that."
• "I'm not good enough." 
• "I just can't figure things out."
• "I'm so confused."

What if you try playing around with how that thought (remember, it's a thought, no…

Pardon my French. It seems like swearing and F-bombs are par for the course in a lot of blogs and newsletters I receive, and I really admire all those of you who can swear like sailors, but I'm just not very good at it yet. So, you'll probably see words like "m*ckety-mucks" in my writing. Sorry, not sorry.

But I digress. We were going to talk about how we know things. Like that thing, we all know about men.

Let's start with something simpler than men. Like a ball.

I know what a ball is like. …

One day, I was walking down a woodland path, enjoying the sun shining to my left onto the pond, and the peaceful sounds of the breeze rustling through the leaves overhead. Suddenly, I saw a huge snake to the right side of the path, its head held up at an angle ready to strike. My heart pounded in my chest for a millisecond and I leaped back in terror. My actions were instinctual and rapid. I took no time to analyze or think through my motivations.

However, once I had jumped back, I stopped and …

Sometimes you're just itching for a change. And many times moving to a new home, changing careers, and developing different relationships is exactly the right thing. Other times, the urge to make a change is about wiggling out of a situation that might require you to address some issues.

How can you tell the difference?

1. One indicator is whether the unwanted situation tends to recur, regardless of the environment.

For example, I repeatedly wrote curriculum, developed training, and did the t…