This is something that I decided to write about today in my morning pages. It’s a really good question – How and why did I become a Life Coach?
I wan’t actively looking to become a life coach when it happened. I stumbled across a podcast called The Life Coach School and started binge listening to lots and lots of episodes every time I had a solo photo assignment. Everything that Brooke Castillo was saying resonated with me.
The podcast really started to get me thinking about all sorts of things.
First, I started to self reflect in the most positive way. I started to dive in deep to some long held beliefs that I had, many since childhood, that had affected the trajectory of my life and how I viewed myself.
I also learned that life is exactly as it was meant to be. There’s no beating ourselves up for where are now because without all the past experiences in our lives we would not be right here at this moment ready for the next chapter.
And I also began to understand that it is impossible to be happy all the time. Life is a balance of 50/50. When it is good it is great and when it isn’t it’s not. But that’s all ok.
I learned about the model. I learned about buffering, emotional childhood, the manual I have for the people in my life (that by the way I can’t control, so I realized that having all these rules about what people should and shouldn’t be doing was moot), accepting that I can control exactly one person in this world and that is me and only me.
The deep dive opened my eyes to how powerful our thoughts are and the role the two parts of our brains play in the outcomes in our lives.
This podcast found me right after I had watched my mother die at the end of an unfulfilled life. Hearing a lot about our thoughts and our brain really resonated with what I had watched with my mom.
This thought I had after her death that was something like – ‘I don’t want this to happen to me or any other woman’. Ever.
I kept thinking, wow, we are given this one chance at life and why do so many people squander it? I was struggling to wrap my head around not being in control of your own life. She let life happen to her. Why do so many let this happen?
Trust me, I am not at all trying to oversimplify depression and mental illness, all of which is very prevalent in my family. BUT I do believe there are turning points in all of our lives where we can accept our fate or draw a line in the sand and say no more, I control my life, the circumstances of my life do not.
Using the example of my mother is easy for me because I watched the trajectory for the last 50 years. I saw the turning points in her life. I witnessed when she could have made different choices or changed her thought process about specific situations and she did not. I watched her become more depressed. And I get it, as the years went on, she became more and more beaten down because of her choices and her thoughts about them.
This flamed a desire in me to understand more about how the mind works.
Why do we hang onto beliefs that are old and don’t serve us? Why do we coast through life, rinsing and repeating, day after day, week after week, year after year?
How could I learn from my mother? How could I be different? How could I do my best to become an example of what is possible? To create a path that I could share with others?
Becoming a life coach taught me how much I control within my own life. I am the one who decides how I want to view a situation, how I want to interpret something that happened to me, what I have held onto for years that were my versions, thoughts I told myself.
This is about moving forward, not dwelling in the past. Accepting life as it happened and deciding to make a conscious effort to make the thoughts we have become the beacon for what the future holds.
I could not be more excited to be on this life journey with you.
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