Posts Tagged ‘story’

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Your True Story: A Pilot Coaching Program

Written by Jennifer on 26th July 2010

Stories are everywhere.

There is the story of your day, your week, your first love, your career, your professional development, your body. Since the beginning of time, we have been making sense of our world through story and we use stories every day to inspire us, hinder us, explain ourselves, understand difficult concepts and more.

At this very moment, you are in the process of writing your own story.

Because your story is integral to how you experience yourself and your world, I am SO excited to be launching a pilot coaching program to help you create your most powerful and authentic story!

Click here for pilot program details.

After you read the program details, my guess is that you’ll quickly have an inkling if this is the right program for you. The following list of reasons might also help you decide:

  • You’re feeling stuck
  • You keep experiencing the same problem over and over again
  • You have similar symptoms in many areas of your life
  • You’re ready to take a truthful look at your situation and take action based on what you discover
  • You have the time and energy to devote to a powerful, life-changing process
  • You want structure and end dates
  • You always wanted to experience coaching
  • You like significant cost-savings without a decrease in service
Keep in mind that this pilot program launches in August and that I’ll only be signing up participants (who are getting a deep discount!) through the end of this week. If you are ready to craft your own true story, schedule a time with me to talk. I would LOVE to support you in this process!

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Posted in coaching | 2 Comments »

Day 29: Get There From Here (30th Birthday Countdown)

Written by Jennifer on 16th March 2010

As a countdown to my 30th birthday on March 18, I’ve committed to offering 30 people, things and experiences I want to celebrate from the last 30 years. Grab a piece of cake and enjoy reading!

Like most 20-somethings, I’ve spent a lot of this last decade figuring out what the heck I’m good at, what interests me and what I find to be meaningful. Also like most 20-somethings, I’ve done a lot of that exploration in the realm of career. I couldn’t be happier with where this exploration has led me.

Get There From Here – the name of my business (which I hope you’ve noticed, ahem) -is comprised of two integrated realms: coaching and entrepreneurship. I want to celebrate them separately in this post.

Coaching

In 2006 – days before I was scheduled to depart for Toronto to begin my coach training – I shot my own coach an email:

“Patt – Even if I decide I do not want to set up my own coaching practice after I get through the training, you really think the training itself will be worth it?”

Here answer was an unequivocal YES and she was right.

Not only did I not encounter a bunch of flaky, new-aged, very not-funny people, but I embarked on a process that has redefined the way I experience the world. Being a coach has enabled me to drop the judgment; I am attuned to what is said and unsaid; I know how to take good care of myself; I ask for what I want.

Then, of course, there are my clients. These days, with a flourishing coaching practice, I am particularly aware of the tremendous gift it is to partner with individuals to fulfill creative endeavors, identify new careers, enhance their effectiveness as leaders or build their own ventures. Some evenings after a long day of calls I will sit and stare at the wall, my eyes welling up, as I wonder how it has come to pass that I am possibly this fortunate to help others craft their own powerful life stories.

(My class at Coach University.)

Entrepreneurship

And then there is the business.

I became convinced in my early 20s that I must not like to work. What other reason could possibly explain my extreme dissatisfaction with every job I held? Turns out, there were myriad reasons, not the least of which was that I had a really hard time working hard for someone else on what it was they thought I should to in order that they might be successful. I didn’t like being a cog in a business I didn’t care about.

So after years of job hopping, I discovered coaching and decided to hang my shingle.

Being an entrepreneur isn’t for everyone. It is however, one of the shortest of short-cuts to personal and spiritual development that I have yet to experience or witness. Seriously. Like marriage (and like parenting, I imagine), it’s like this constant mirror hanging in front of my face affirming what is whole and highlighting what is broken. It’s painfully uncanny in it’s constant need to truth-tell.

Then there is just the fun part: The fact that this is something I created. That I can take my work in whatever direction suits me. That I don’t have to call a boss when I am sick.

At the end of the day, I am working harder than I ever have in ways that bring tremendous amounts of meaning to my life and apparent good to the world. Get There From Here provides an perfect umbrella under which I get to experience these amazing, amazing gifts!

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Posted in celebration, change, story | 1 Comment »

Day 24: The Great Love Affair (30th Birthday Countdown)

Written by Jennifer on 11th March 2010

As a countdown to my 30th birthday on March 18, I’ve committed to offering 30 people, things and experiences I want to celebrate from the last 30 years. Grab a piece of cake and enjoy reading!

It all started with the shoes. The man wore great shoes. Not your typical upscale LA leather loafers, either. We’re talking fluevogs. I didn’t know at the time that shoes like this even existed. So I did what any self-respecting girl from Jersey would do: I ridiculed him. He didn’t flinch. Rather, he came right back at me.

My heart skipped a few beats.

But I was distracted. I was conducting a lukewarm long-distance thing with a guy from Philly and there was this California boy I had a crush on. Plus my stepmom was dying of cancer. I was certainly not looking to add anything else into the mix.

But like I said – he could take as well as he could dish. It turned out he was also brilliant. And beautiful and athletic and artistic and generous and thoughtful.

And I fell hard. And he fell hard.

Then this whirlwind of a love affair that seemed to be so ill-timed due to death and divorce and age and the whole complicated mess that is life became a relationship and then an exchange of engagement rings and then there was cake and dancing and a honeymoon on Vancouver Island.

It’s been nearly 10 years and I am still having a great love affair that causes my heart to race and my eyes to light up. I still think Scott’s the cat’s pajamas, the person everyone really should meet. He’s the one I’m eager to come home to, the man I always long to sneak away with.

These are gifts I never anticipated I’d be celebrating when I turned 30. And yet here I am.

So thank you, love, for being my co-conspirator in this amazing tale of romance. For being willing to tell the same transformative story with me over and over again. Maybe we can slip away to the Mediterranean this weekend – just the two of us – where we can laugh late into the night and go shopping for Spanish shoes…

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Posted in celebration, change, commitment, story, travel | 6 Comments »

Day 23: Theatre (30th Birthday Countdown)

Written by Jennifer on 10th March 2010

As a countdown to my 30th birthday on March 18, I’ve committed to offering 30 people, things and experiences I want to celebrate from the last 30 years. Grab a piece of cake and enjoy reading!

If my mother was to say I was born in the dirt, my father might be likely to say I was born on the stage. I’ve performed in Shakespeare and Brecht, Wilder and Moliere, Jones and Inge.

My dad, who’s been teaching theatre at the same university for almost as long as I am old, first started including me in his productions when I was barely five. I went on to perform in my high school productions and a little in college, but outside of “the platform,” as they say in the professional speaking world, my last curtain call occurred three years ago when my dad needed a pinch hitter for Tartuffe and I was available.

(In Godspell when I was 16.)

Theatre is easy to celebrate because it’s almost always centered around some kind of story and humans love story. More to the point, I love story. It’s also easy to celebrate because it’s like music and painting – it’s art and everyone loves art in some form or another.

I’m celebrating my own history of theatre these first 30 years, however, because it has helped me understand my own identity and my own story. For example, I vividly remember the day a college director pushed me and pushed me in a role to get angry. I’d never allowed myself to feel so angry or express it so openly. Suffice it to say I never had trouble after that; the experience of playing someone else opened me up to a whole new part of myself.

Theatre has done something else important in my life. It has helped me understand the maleability of my own identity and my own story. In other words, through acting I began to see that how I show up in the world is, to some degree, no different than trying on different characters. Jung called it “persona” and it comes in pretty handy when embarking on new adventures in life.

So today I bow down to Dionysus for the joy and revelry and truth-telling that occurs on a stage. And I give thanks to all the muses who have helped me identify, create and re-create the person I am and the life I live.

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Posted in celebration, change, story | No Comments »

Day 12: An Irish Grandmother (30th Birthday Countdown)

Written by Jennifer on 27th February 2010

As a countdown to my 30th birthday on March 18, I’ve committed to offering 30 people, things and experiences I want to celebrate from the last 30 years. Grab a piece of cake and enjoy reading!

My last surviving grandparent died this morning.

Of all my grandparents, I was closest to her. Mommom was the one I adored as a child; the one who loved the wind; who gave out ironed $5 bills to her grandkids so they might “buy a Coke”; who painstakingly celebrated each Christmas gift given to her; who served tea in Irish Beleek China; who would hold my teenaged hands in hers and give me some bit of advice.

(Christmas, 1996)

But I have only seen Mommom twice in the past five years even though we live fewer than 10 miles apart. Both times were during this last month while she lay dying on a hospital bed at the age of 98.

This is because Mommom had “disowned” me.  I will spare you the details and let it stand at the fact that five years ago I suggested we build a better relationship.  She has never spoken to me since.

When I got the call two weeks ago that she wanted to see me in the hospital, I obliged. I have long ago released any anger toward her and was hopeful that she would release her own toward me, perhaps offering herself some comfort at the end of this road. Alas, in the unforgiving nature of dying, she was unable to speak to me by the time I arrived at her side. Her stroke had left her partially paralyzed and in need of a ventilator, preventing her from vocalizing.

I held her hand for over 30 minutes while she struggled with great frustration to tell me something. But it was too late. For her, there could be no deathbed speech.

The life lessons learned by watching Mommom from afar have been invaluable and I have found myself celebrating them frequently in these last weeks. In particular, I celebrate the understatement that it is better to address matters of great importance in a timely fashion.  I find it easy to also celebrate the warmth and generosity I experienced with her as a child and the Depression-era Irish Catholic strength that coursed through her blood.

Today, however, on the day of her death, I  mostly celebrate what I hope is freedom for her from the suffering that clouded most of her life. To do so, I offer this:

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

by William Butler Yeats

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

May it be so.

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Posted in celebration, death, integrity, story | 7 Comments »

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