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Reflections on love and belonging

During my second year in Canada, just before I decided to become a coach, I had a conversation with a coach about life purpose. In the coaching model she was trained in, they were taught to narrow down your life purpose to ONE word that summarises what you are all about or what you are trying to create in your lifetime. A one-word life purpose sounded absurd to me. Could you really narrow it down to just one word? And of course, I was surprised when she shared what she thought my life purpose was. She observed that it sounded like mine was connection. I’ve discovered two things since then...

July 24, 2022 Read more →

Redefining Compassion

During a specific phase of my PhD research, I conducted interviews with participants. One of the questions I would ask interviewees was, “What does compassion mean to you?” I would then follow up that question with a second question, “How do you demonstrate compassion in your own life?” The aim was to get a sense of what compassion really means to people and how they live compassion in their daily lives. The Oxford Dictionary defines compassion as, “sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.” For me personally, that definition feels too narrow. It invites us to feel pity or concern for someone. It evokes within us this sense of feeling sorry for someone about what they are going through. And yet, pity falls short of what is needed. It simply levels compassion akin to sympathy, when my sense is that what is really needed is far more than just feeling sorry for someone.

July 5, 2022 Read more →

Dreams are for losers

I want to speak to you about a commencement speech Shonda Rhimes gave at her alma mater Dartmouth College in 2014, where she said this simple yet striking line: “Dreams are for losers”. Yes, you heard that right, she said dreams are for losers. She goes on to explain why. At almost every commencement speech someone will tell the graduates to go follow their dreams, or to never stop dreaming. And what Shonda says is that isn’t helpful advice. It won’t actually help you succeed, because dreamers aren’t successful...

June 22, 2022 Read more →

The secret to becoming an adult is to embrace your inner child

Recently, I wrote about how most of us are beating up on ourselves for not knowing how to be adults. I shared that life doesn’t come with an instruction manual, so none of us really know what it means to be an adult. We are all trying to figure it out. In Elizabeth Benton’s incredible book, Chasing Cupcakes, she talks about how to take responsibility and create the life that you want, and she essentially shares two rules for adulting.

May 31, 2022 Read more →

On adulting and taking responsibility

I often come across these memes on social media that joke about what it means to be an adult. I’m sure you’ve seen some of them. The key themes tend to include finding it hard to be a responsible adult and make decisions, not knowing what you want to do with your life, or feeling like you have no clue what you are doing, feeling tired all the time, realising you are old, and getting excited about mundane things like clean dishes, dish sponges, or getting to go to bed early. We joke about having to be an adult, but I’m guessing that many of us also secretly feel like we have no idea what we are doing. In fact, I’m willing to go as far as saying that no-one really knows what they are doing. We are all just trying to figure it out, while we hope to come across as if we do know what we are doing.

May 31, 2022 Read more →

Drop abundance

If asked, many of us might argue that the opposite of scarcity is abundance, but that's not accurate. Abundance is not the opposite of scarcity. In his book, Right Now, Steve Chandler challenges the whole notion of striving for abundance and he has changed the way I think about abundance. So today, I want share with you what I've learnt.

May 16, 2022 Read more →

Of puzzle pieces and postage stamps

How many times have you heard the cliché, “you’re unique” and just rolled your eyes? From my perspective, it seems as if people have taken this idea of uniqueness to such an extreme that it has lost its true meaning. The truth is that you are unique. However, how that is often interpreted, is that you are special or different from others in a way that is meant to have you stand out from others. And that is not entirely accurate. You see we all share certain common traits as human beings. We are all mammals. We are all social animals seeking belonging. We are all meaning seekers and meaning makers. We all experience emotions. We are all capable of critical thought and of creativity. There are certain things that we have in common with other people because we are all human. That being said, you are still unique in the sense that there is only ONE human like YOU.

May 9, 2022 Read more →

Thoughts on motherhood

Mother’s Day can be a complicated day for many, and I have always had mixed feelings about the day. Often the stage of life I find myself in, also dictates the scale and intensity of those mixed feelings.

May 9, 2022 Read more →

What if fear is not a bad thing?

The other day I was helping a client work through a lot of fear and anxiety she was feeling. The way she was relating to fear was that it was a bad thing and that she shouldn’t feel so scared. And so often we do that, right? We resist the fear, telling ourselves that we shouldn’t be fearful. Yet, what we resist persists. So, the more we try and ignore our fear, the bigger it seems to get. Eventually it’s like this dark looming cloud. Susan David says, “real courage is not fearlessness, it’s fear walking”. And she has a point. However, have you ever considered WHY you experience fear in the first place?

April 18, 2022 Read more →

You don’t need motivation to get started on something

I’ve always been a highly driven and motivated person. I seldom have difficulty getting into action on something once I’ve decided that I want to do it. I can’t relate much to procrastinating on things, because I don’t do it often. And people have often described me as someone who knows what she wants and goes after it. Two weeks ago, I attended a coaching development workshop. In many ways it was a life-changing experience. And then almost at the very end of the workshop, I received a new insight on motivation that not only changed my perspective on the whole concept, but also made me realise why some people get into action quickly and others don’t. And I want to share what I’ve learnt with you, because it will change the way you think about motivation. The most important thing I’ve learnt from this experience and from reflecting back on my own life experiences, is that you don’t need motivation to get started. You need something else.

April 12, 2022 Read more →

You are the seed of your future self

In conversation with my coach the other day, she said two things that stuck with me. She said, “You are your future self. Whoever you will become, you are already her. She lives inside of you.” And she also reflected that flowers don’t just burst open and start blooming, they blossom slowly. I had to think long and hard about this. What she said hit hard.

March 28, 2022 Read more →

Reconnecting with a sense of hopefulness

As a coach, a big part of my job, is to instill hopefulness and inspiration in my clients. My job is to help them see a different perspective so that they feel empowered to move forward in a difficult situation. I can’t solve my client’s problems for them, but they can navigate their problems with grace, if they feel like they have a choice. And you always have a choice, even if you are not seeing it right now in this moment. So, given that I am the custodian of hope for my clients, how do I stay hopeful during times of chaos and frustration?

March 15, 2022 Read more →