Category Archive

“I’m not a crier,” said a favorite coaching client. “I’ve tried to cry over this, but the tears don’t come.” My client has a young child — and a job she loves. She’s an executive at a company you’ve heard of.  “I feel splatted,” she says. Her travel schedule involves flying to a different city every week this month. I work on Work/Life balance in some form with all of my clients. Work/Life balance with clients with small children is …

Dear Coffee, I hate to say it, but it’s time we broke up. I love how you smell, I love how you taste, but you’re not good for me. You make my stomach hurt. We’ve had some wonderful times together and I’ll really, really miss you. But I feel anxious when I’m around you. I get all sweaty. I can’t sleep. As I said, you make my stomach hurt. I know we’ve broken up before, but this time I really …

We hear stories about mountain lions at Cougar Mountain, but I’ve never seen one. Nevertheless, the stories are highly motivating. I’ve been running with a women’s trail running group early Saturday mornings at Cougar Mountain. It’s a bit far for me and my nearly bare feet – 8 miles up and down the cold, rocky trails of the mountain. It’s the highlight of my week. I’ve been thinking about why I pull myself out of my warm bed, drive for …

Several (well, many) years ago, I said I wanted to learn how to play the piano before I turned 40. The piano has always seemed like one of those impossible mysteries, like speaking French. Or dancing. As my 43rd year looms, I’ve started piano lessons. I got a free ($200 to move + $200 to tune = free, my partner points out) piano and found a spectacularly over-qualified Russian-conservatory trained instructor. And I’m making music. My left hand and right …

I have a favorite coaching client who wakes up to dread every morning. She wakes up dreading her day. I asked her what the dread felt like. “Like a warm, wet blanket,” she said. “A gray, wet, stifling blanket.” She can feel it heavy around her shoulders. “Does it find you, or do you seek it out?” I asked. “I seek it out,” she mused. I asked her to reflect on the blanket as it descends in the morning; to …

My approach to coaching is to keep it simple. I look for the small, incremental changes that will make a difference in my clients’ lives. The thing about living the kind of life you want is that it needs to be sustainable. Otherwise, any goal is just a set up for feeling bad. As a coach, I listen for warmth, for joy, for passion. Those are the emotions that sustain us. The skill of the coach is to harness those …

Everyone’s going skiing. “See you on the mountain,” someone called after the last soccer game of the season. We won’t be there. We’ve been in lockdown frugality since I quit my full-time job last year. The answer is now “No!” to things like skiing. I’ve been surprised to discover an odd thing about our newfound frugality: It’s a lot easier. There are fewer decisions to make. Fewer choices to sort through. We’ve already decided:  the answer is “No!” There’s no …

I’ve discovered something cool. Maybe everybody does this already. But I thought I’d write about it in case it could be helpful to you. I try to meditate a couple of mornings a week. I do it in a way that I don’t think the abbess at the monastery I occasionally visit would approve of. I sit with a legal pad on my lap. If something interesting occurs to me, I open my eyes and write it down. That way …

I’ve been thinking about mess. Messy rooms; messy corners of life. I have a coaching client who is trying to turn down the noise in her life. Too many demands, too much complexity, too much chaos. She doesn’t have room to think or breath. We started with the literal. She cleaned up some messes that had been distracting her: the unscheduled chaos of her family’s school day mornings and evenings. The noise began to quiet. And a little magic happened. …

I had a random idea awhile back. What if I started a running group and invited people who had never run before to come with me? Running is all well and good, but I only do it for that clear, calm, washed clean feeling afterwards. There’s a lot of spaciousness in that feeling. A lot of power. What if I invited other people to experience that feeling? What would they do with it? Once I wrote the invitation email, I …