Courageous Intimacy is the sharing of all of one's heart with one another. And I'm not talking about sharing the pretty parts - like love and joy - with each other (although that's great and I encourage you to do so). I mean sharing all of you: the good, the bad and the ugly. Sharing who you really are—which is a practice of unending vulnerability.
The Cure for Anything
Every dream comes at a price. Sometimes the price is on the smaller side: a few sleepless nights, a few extra dollars, maybe even a tax on basic self-care needs. Sometimes the price is an internal shift: learning to be vulnerable, learning to let go, learning to have faith. But there are other types of dreams — the ones that keep us up at night, the ones that gnaw at our hearts, the ones that haven’t left us alone, for days, months or even years — and those are the most expensive dreams of all. Those dreams mark the threshold between who you are now, and who you are meant to become.
A year and a half ago, my dream was born from a puddle of tears (as most important dreams are). After ten years of pouring my heart into my life coaching career, I came to the heartbreaking recognition that although my tools were helpful and even life-changing for some, they were falling far short of what many of my students needed. I had come to the last inch of a dead-end road with my career...
How to Quit (And Why You Should)
We all have things we do a little too much or a little too often. To really be able to quit, your ‘why’ has to be strong enough to overcome the temporary discomfort of quitting. Without a good why, you won't survive the journey.
10 Mantras To Help Heal Your Relationship with Money
Money is often considered a dirty word. It's a taboo subject often rife with struggle, secrecy and scandal. Most of us want to have happier and healthier lives. We want to find more joy and freedom and experience less tension and anxiety. For many of us, our relationship with money is one of the most shameful, stressful and worrisome aspects of our lives.
3 Key Steps to Self-Compassion
Most of us have a natural compassion towards others. We see someone struggling or suffering and it's our human nature to want to extend a hand, to offer loving kindness and to want to help. Yet, when we look inward, many of us struggle to offer ourselves the same kindness.
Self-compassion means to extend love, friendliness and acceptance to one's self in instances of perceived inadequacy, failure, or general suffering. To some extent, self-compassion also has the meaning of trusting oneself - trusting that we have what it takes to know ourselves thoroughly and completely without feeling hopeless, without turning against ourselves because of what we see. Self-compassion is a form of faith: a faith in the way we hold our conversation with life.
The Dalai Lama says that having compassion for oneself is the basis for developing compassion for others. When we have learned to have compassion for ourselves, this leads us naturally to unlimited friendliness toward others.
6 Steps to Dealing with Emotional Triggers
An emotional trigger is an emotional response that is out of character from your typical behavior. A trigger is something that sets off a memory or flashback, subconsciously transporting you back in time. When you're triggered, you're no longer responding to the present situation. Instead, you're running old software, unwittingly trying to repair your past.
10 Things You Should Give Up to Be Happy
Most of us want to live happier, healthier and more meaningful lives. In this pursuit, we often look at what we should DO to be happy, and that seems pretty obvious: do more things you like and less things that you don't like. But, we often look for happiness in all the wrong places. We hold on to so many things that cause us a great deal of pain, stress, and suffering — and instead of letting them all go, instead of allowing ourselves to be stress-free and happy — we cling to them. The Buddha called this habit "mistaking suffering for happiness," like a moth flying into the flame. This means that we confuse our temporary sense of relief or pleasure for happiness rather than seeing how it creates long-term suffering.
Self-Esteem 101
It snuck up on me before I even realized it. I was walking into yoga, my mat rolled under my arm, minding my own business, and out of nowhere there appeared a perfectly beautiful specimen of a woman. She was tall and thin with her hair smoothed back into a neat ponytail. She was elegant and drop-dead gorgeous. And her body? Ridiculous. Before I could even take in the entire spectrum of her prettiness, my stomach started to churn, my shoulders dropped, my eyes sank, and my feet wanted to run back to my car. Just the mere sight of such a beast of beauty made me want to cower and hide.
How to Find Balance
Balance? Are you kidding me? Is that even a thing?
Work-life balance seems to be not only my own nemesis, but just might be the great white whale of our time. It's the thing that we are constantly seeking to conquer, yet never quite able to attain. We wish that there was some kind of magical pie chart that would show us the exact proportions of a life well-lived, but in my experience, the math never really adds up in real life.
I work twelve hour days, seven days a week. I wake up before dark just to get my four miles in before the kids wake up. On any given day, I've got three companies to run, yoga to practice, reading to catch up on, and any spare minute is squirreled away for my writing projects. My husband and I high-five each other on the way out the door in the morning and pass out on the couch hours before the kids put themselves to bed. (Sexy, I know.)
The Power of a Beautiful Question
Every January I take some time to look back over the previous year. I reflect on what went well and the aspects that I liked. I look at the challenges of the previous year, what was difficult and how I can rise above those challenges in the upcoming year. This past year was a demanding work year for me. I worked more hours, in more locations, with more intensity than ever before. Yet, reflecting back on how much energy I've been expending, I still feel like I'm not keeping up. At the end of the day, I'm still collapsing into bed with the nagging feeling that I could have and should have done more.
I've spent the past week journaling, studying and reflecting on my priorities, my desires and on the overall vision that I want to create for 2016. What I found is that I had forgotten the importance of one of the most basic (yet life-changing) life coaching tools available: the power of a beautiful question.