What have you learned this year?

Image by Jean P Mouffe from Pixabay

Image by Jean P Mouffe from Pixabay

What have I learned this year? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself each December since I began coaching.

To answer that question, I spend some time reflecting. A lot of my reflection is sort of stream-of-consciousness thinking as I go about my day, but each year, I do a little journaling around specific questions. My list of questions evolves a little each year. Here are the questions I’m asking myself this year:

  • What were the best things in my life this year?

  • When did I have the most fun?

  • What accomplishment from this year am I most proud of?

  • What task(s) did I take on this year that I wish I had not taken on? Why do I regret it?

  • Who were the people who energized me and fed my soul this year?

  • Who were the people who drained me?

  • What were the things I wanted to do this year and didn’t? Why didn’t I do them?

Sometimes I work on these questions over several days because as they percolate in my head and my heart, new things occur to me. After some time thinking about all these questions, I begin trying to draw out the lessons from the year.

As I write this post, I’m still in the middle of reflecting, but I’ll share a few of the lessons that are bubbling up for me.

  • Just because I can do something capably doesn’t mean that I should do it. Some tasks drain me instead of replenishing me. I want to give back to a world that has given me a lot, but I need to give back in the ways that are nourishing for me, not in the ways that drain me.

  • I am not my work. Most of the best parts of my year had nothing to do with my work.

  • Nonetheless, my work does feed my soul. Many of the most energizing people in my life this year were clients.

  • I’m a slow learner when it comes to not overcommitting myself, but I am learning.

  • Spending more time petting the cat is good for both of us.

How about you? What have you learned this year? I’d love to hear from you in the comments section. And in the meantime, I’m going to shut down the computer and pet the cat. Happy holidays!

Making the Best Decision

Making the Best Decision

Right now, I’m working with two clients who are on the verge of launching their own businesses. Both of them have carefully crafted business plans. Each is highly trained in her field and has spent years building a solid base of experience. Both have taken wise steps to lay the groundwork to enable them to hit the ground running. They’ve done their research, consulted trusted advisors, and organized their finances. They are eager and committed. They are ready. Yet both have recently said to me, “I’m afraid I’m making the wrong decision.”

What are your dreams for your life?

What are your dreams for your life?

A few weeks ago, I asked an accomplished client who is feeling stuck in her current job, “What are your dreams for your life?” “That’s the problem,” she said. “I just don’t know.”

 

Recently another client explained that she didn’t have a clear sense of her next career move. This client is also quite accomplished. Throughout her career, she has taken the right steps to move forward—the right degrees, the right jobs, the right decisions for her family. But somewhere along the way, she has lost the ability to hear that inner voice that whispers her personal dreams.

Powerful Questions

Powerful Questions

Coaching is about helping clients find their own answers to the dilemmas they face. Asking—rather than telling—is central to helping people listen to their “inner teachers” and find their own answers. That’s why one of the first skills you learn in coach’s training is that of asking powerful questions. A powerful question is one that invites the client look at the situation in a new way and discover new possibilities and fresh insights.

Savoring Everyday Delights

Savoring Everyday Delights

During July, one of my yoga teachers encouraged her students to stop at least once each day to savor the delights of everyday experiences—eating an ice cream cone, smelling fresh cut grass, the feel of clean sheets. Katy urged us to link this practice to our five senses. I’ve loved this idea, and ever since, I find myself pausing several times each day to savor an everyday delight.

How Women Rise: A Review

How Women Rise: A Review

In How Women Rise, Helgesen and Goldsmith identify twelve behaviors that often prevent female professionals from achieving their goals including expecting others to spontaneously notice and reward your contributions, overvaluing expertise, and ruminating over setbacks, feedback, and interactions.  They offer concrete strategies for adapting behavior in ways that better serves women and those they are leading.

The 10-10-10 Strategy for Making Decisions

The 10-10-10 Strategy for Making Decisions

A few months ago, I listened to one of my favorite podcasts, “Women at Work” which is produced by the Harvard Business Review. In this particular episode, the hosts were interviewing Therese Huston, the author of How Women Decide, a book I reviewed on my blog a couple of years back.

 Huston discussed the challenges women face in making decisions—particularly the various double binds we face--and she offered some strategies to help women make challenging decisions. One of those strategies was the 10-10-10 method.

Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Happiness books and books on de-cluttering are all the rage right now. The latest book from Gretchen Rubin (The Happiness Project) combines the two. In spite of the trendiness of her topics, there are some useful bits of advice in Outer Order, Inner Calm: Declutter and Organize to Make More Room for Happiness. Rubin offers a lot of suggestions for little actions that can make a big difference in our daily lives. The book offers the added bonus of being a quick read.

Is It Time to Reframe?

Is It Time to Reframe?

Sometimes when a client is feeling stuck on a negative way of thinking about a situation or experience, I’ll ask, “How can you reframe that?”

When you reframe something, you look at events, emotions, and situation through a more positive lens. It’s not unlike what happens when you take a dingy albeit valuable landscape painting that you inherited from an elderly relative to a frame shop, and the craftspeople there transform it into a beautiful vista simply by putting it into a shiny new frame with a clean mat.

How to Play Big--A Review

How to Play Big--A Review

About two years ago, a client recommended Tara Mohr’s Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead (Avery, 2015). I immediately bought the book and added it to my bottomless to-be-read pile where it resided until last week. I should have retrieved it from the pile sooner, because it’s one of the best self-help books that I’ve read in a long time.

Self-Care Should Start at Work

Self-Care Should Start at Work

We can invest in self-care outside work, but if our days are still overscheduled and frenzied, we’ll still suffer. That’s why I focused my workshop on ways we can better care for ourselves at work. By making our workplaces more humane for ourselves and our co-workers, by making better use of our time at work, we can create more space in our days.  We can do our work at work instead of taking it home, and then we can feel less frazzled.

Mapping Your Career Path

Mapping Your Career Path

Not long ago a client said to me, “I’m 41 years old, and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.” In fact, many of my clients make some variation on that statement when we launch our work together. Some feel like they’ve had no coherent career path. As a client explained, “I’ve taken good opportunities when they came to me, and I’ve been successful, but I haven’t had a plan. Sometimes I worry that people think I’ve flitted from job to job, even though I can see what ties some of it together.”  These clients often worry that there is something wrong with them, and when they do seek a career change, they struggle to articulate their skills and experience to potential employers in a way that feels like a clear and rational career path.

Beginner's Mind

Beginner's Mind

One of my yoga instructors often reminds her students to approach yoga practice with a beginner’s mind. What she means is that you no matter how experienced you are in practicing yoga, you always come to your mat as if you are beginner.  You try never to think, “I’ve done this pose a zillion times, so I know exactly how to do it.” Instead, each time you take the pose, you pay attention to the things a beginner has to think about: how to ground yourself, where to place your feet, how to align your spine, how to breathe, and how to move. By using beginner’s mind, you continually approach your practice with an open mind and a commitment to building on a strong foundation for your pose. You are constantly refining your postures and building strength and flexibility.

Coping with Life’s Changes

Coping with Life’s Changes

One of my niches is working with clients who are navigating some form of transition.

      Our lives involve alternating periods of stability and change. None of us can avoid dealing with change. But some kinds of changes shake us to our very core, challenging our sense of who we are. These kinds of changes are either the result of or the catalyst for a transition.

Decorating the Tree: A Meditation on Gratitude

Decorating the Tree: A Meditation on Gratitude

Just after Christmas last year, the wonderful woman who has been cleaning my house for more than ten years turned to me in astonishment and said, “Melissa, do you take every ornament off your tree every year. I’ve never seen a closet big enough for your tree.”  After all these years, Karin has had occasion to be in every drawer and closet in my house, and I think the fact that I couldn’t simply cover my artificial tree with a sheet and slide it in the closet had just occurred to her. Maybe this is not so astonishing with everyone’s trees, but mine is covered with hundreds of ornaments. I assured her that I enjoyed decorating the tree and that taking it down was not such an onerous task. (I don’t think she believed me.)

Holding Hands With Strangers

Holding Hands With Strangers

I don’t know about you, but lately I’ve had an awful lot of days when I’m afraid to get out of bed. The waves of awful things happening in our country and our world just seem to come faster and faster like a hurricane building to Category 5. I’m afraid to check the news—and afraid not to. The other day at the end of savasana, the period of motionless rest at the end of every yoga practice, a period intended to be refreshing, I found my mind racing, and I thought, “I hope something new tragedy hasn’t happened in the world while I was in yoga class.” Fear has become my constant companion. And I know that I’m not alone.

Saying "Yes" to Saying "No"

As with anything else in life, it’s pretty easy for me to give my clients good guidance and pretty hard for me to apply that guidance in my own life.  Take the business of saying “no.” I’ve written before about the importance of choosing commitments carefully so that we don’t become over-committed, overscheduled, overworked, and frazzled. As I put it in that earlier blog post, “saying yes to something means saying no to something else.” Yet I find the process of learning to choose my commitments wisely and say “no” more often is just that: a process of learning over and over from my mistakes.