Get clear…get moving
Hello, again…
I am delighted to tell you about myself.
What’s been most important to me over the years is supporting people to craft their life and work around their best gifts and what they most want to contribute to those around them. This work, bringing forward the clarity of my clients’ own wisdom, is still the love of my life and the core of my small practice. About 30 years ago, before coaching was named a certifiable “profession”, it was just the way some of us did business as usual as mentors, consultants and coaches. It was the way I chose to use my gifts through my work as a management trainer, consultant, leadership coach, speaker and author. I delighted in inviting clients and friends to see differently, change their minds about things, let go of behaviors and ideas that no longer served them, and create long desired results for themselves.
Making life changes is never a quick fix operation. Even when “stuff happens” dramatically that actually forces you to change your ways. ”Stuff” happened to me! After 25 years in my own business, happily using creative ways to help clients address a) their management questions, b) their personal success and effectiveness questions, and c) their leadership questions, I was diagnosed with a chronic illness. This prevented me from being able to work and play at many of the things I loved in life–working with groups, tennis, dancing.
In 2000, I relocated to Western Massachusetts, to a family home beneath a mountain, pictured above. I was harshly offered a new set of questions for myself, albeit on a silver platter: How will I heal? Is it even possible to heal from an illness that the doctors say has no known cause and no known cure? I’ve lost so much, how will I survive? How will I create and balance a new way of being and doing in the world?
My life had changed. The abrupt change prompted the writing of my first book, a small book of poetry, highlighting the confusions of those years. (For a taste, click on Musing Along the Way: A Woman’s Journey Looking at Her Life Through the Lens of Chronic Illness.) The book chronicles my journey after the jolt of an unwelcome diagnosis, a cascade of losses, and my hesitant adoption of a more self-nurturing way to be. Over the years, I learned to smell the roses. I made peace with the loss of my professional identity. I started afresh, crafting a new life. And this life keeps evolving in surprising ways. Ultimately, in 2010, I published what I consider to be my legacy book, Why Not Do What You Love! An Invitation to Calling and Contribution in a World Hungry for Your Gifts. This fulfilled a long held dream. Given that the title can be seen as a question as well as an exhortation, it was clearly part of my way of grappling with my own burning question, “What will I do for the rest of my life?”
My 10-year forced time-out was the healing time I needed to address so many concurrent losses, divorce, physical disability, the passing on of the business I founded, and the strenuous pace at which I lived. What I had was time. To think. To discover the important. This supremely hard worker was challenged to slow down, and to nourish my body, soul, and dreams. Finally, a new peace, new energy, and a new mission coalesced: ”I want to live out my life purposefully and gracefully and help others do the same.” Fortunately my own emerging clarity and the serendipitous arrival of new vitality has brought me back to my roots as a coach, mentor, and facililtator, where I can once again help others, perhaps you, gain clarity about what’s next for you. Be assured that the act of inviting you to articulate what you deeply desire and to start doing more of it, is a precious gift and pleasure of mine.