Leadership
Thoughts on personal growth, courage, and stepping into your bigger life.
Halfway through the Summer, my coach called me out. She observed that I keep saying I want a slower Summer, and yet nothing about how I was going through my Summer was slow. It stung. And she was right. My days were filled with so much, that I barely had time to sit and just be with my own thoughts...
Recently in a conversation with a client, I observed that she seems to be putting a cap on her happiness – i.e., she is limiting how happy she believes she can be in certain areas of her life. She remarked that my observation felt true, and yet at the same time she felt confused, because she has a good life and is grateful for where she is now. This client has done a lot of work. She has grown a lot, and her life looks significantly different than it did a few years ago, so it makes sense that she feels grateful and proud of where she is now. As we explored this more, what was revealed was a very subtle story about needing to be grateful and about what it would mean about her if she admitted that she didn’t feel fulfilled...
A few weeks ago, I wrote about The Other Side of Fear, and I shared why it mattered to face our fears. Today, I want to expand on that and explore three things: Why we experience fear. We are all afraid of something. Not all fears are equal.
Last week, I wrote about fear, and I asked the provocative question: If you are not excited and scared, are you even living? I’ve been thinking a lot about fear since then. In August 2023, I wrote On the Other Side of Fear, and it feels important to share that story again. Over the coming weeks, I will share more thoughts on fear, and for now, I want to talk about what might be waiting on the other side of your fear…
Two weeks ago, I had my introductory call to the Summer of Love Retreat I will be attending with Kendra Cover this Summer. I also launched THRIVE that same week. What stood out in both groups was that there was both fear and excitement. All the women who will be attending the Summer of Love Retreat (including myself) and the women in THRIVE expressed that they felt excited and scared at the same time. On the Summer of Love Retreat call, Kendra said something that got me thinking. She said, “If you are not excited and scared some of the time, are you even living?”
In his book, Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman reasons that our hustle culture is created by the misunderstanding that our existence is insufficient reason to be happy and fulfilled. Some of us run on an often-unconscious belief that we “must prove that we are worthy to exist”. Burkeman describes it as starting each day in deficit of some productivity debt we believe we need to pay off, before we can relax. The trouble is that we never seem to be able to settle this productivity debt, because every time we achieve the impossible, reach the deadline, or finally manage to get slightly ahead, we realize that we now must keep maintaining this new standard of performance and achievement. Consequently, there is no end in sight, and we keep at it day after day, in the hopes that one day we will arrive at this elusive future where we finally feel “good enough” or like we have done enough. Unfortunately, that day is never coming, because we have set it up in a way that we can never get there…
Last weekend I attended a two-day Intensive with Steve Chandler in Arizona. For those of you who don’t know, in some coaching circles Steve Chandler is referred to as “The Godfather of Coaching”. He has been a coach for forty years and brings a wealth of experience and wisdom to the work. Given his advanced age – he is 81 – I wanted to utilize the opportunity to be in the room with Steve, knowing that I might never get this opportunity again. I’ve been coached by Steve before, and even had the opportunity to interview him last October, and yet, this time was different. I was coming to the conversation, not as a wide-eyed beginner coach, excited to meet her hero, but as a professional coach who is also established in her work, and also brings wisdom and experience to the table. What struck me over the course of the two days was the absence of the feminine voice in the room. And I’m being deliberate and intentional with my choice of words here. What I’m longing to see more of in the coaching industry, is the emergence of the feminine voice…
Do you believe you need certainty before you can take action? Today, I want to distinguish between certainty and clarity. The one is impossible to obtain, and the other is essential if you are truly going to thrive and stay committed to your most important goals.
In a recent article I posed the question: What do you believe you deserve? Today I want to explore this question: What if there is a reason why you don’t question whether other people deserve to thrive? You see, our innate being is one of wellbeing and of thriving. We are meant to grow, learn, expand, flourish, thrive… It’s built into our DNA. If you consider how much a baby grows and learns in their first year of life, and how much can change in the first five years of life, you have witnessed the wonder of our innate ability to grow and thrive. What’s even more amazing, is how adaptable we are, and how our nervous systems will adapt to the environment we find ourselves in. We will cultivate behaviours that will help us survive in any environment, and over time, those behaviours become our habits and our patterns. Anything that is learnt, can be unlearnt...
“It is easier to try to be better than you are, than to be who you are.” – This quote by Marian Woodman struck me. So often we treat ourselves like self-improvement projects, thinking that if we could only be better than we are, then everything would be the way we want it to be. If we could achieve that elusive level of perfection, then we would finally be happy, and have all the love, joy, and abundance we are craving… At least, I know this was true for me. I started working with my coach, with the hope that it would help me figure out what was wrong with me, and that I could then fix myself. My coach was unwilling to participate in that experiment, and she kept treating me as if there was nothing wrong with me. I was baffled. And now, seven years later, I get it. None of us are broken. We are simply disconnected from our true nature. We have allowed for so much conditioning to settle into our minds, hearts, and even bodies, that we have completely forgotten who we are...
In my most recent article I talked about the drive to do more, and I questioned the desire for abundance. This may have left the impression with you that I’m saying that wanting more is bad. And that is not what I’m saying at all. Over the past three years, I have discovered that there are two kinds of desire for more…
I’m not someone who tends to write about the steps you need to take to overcome something, or fix something, and today I want to talk about something Alison Armstrong shared that landed and resonated deeply. And it’s directly connected to our willingness to let ourselves grow, stretch, and ultimately thrive… So, I hope you will indulge me in sharing with you what you could do if you are currently feeling overwhelmed.
At the start of the new school year in September, my daughter’s music teacher handed her a recorder. One of the skills she is mastering this year in Grade 4, is learning to play the recorder. She loves music and loves learning. Since September she has practiced every single day. And every time she masters a new song, she receives a new colour belt. The goal, I’m told, is to first get her first black belt, then reach three gold belts, which will unlock the ultimate prize – a rainbow-coloured belt. She is obsessed with rainbows, so of course a rainbow-coloured belt is the ultimate coveted item right now. I’ll be honest, there have been days where I have had to remind myself that the noise is part of the journey, and that she can’t improve her skill without practice. Then one day it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard her play in a while. A curious question as to why I haven’t heard her play, resulted in tears. “All my friends have moved on to black belts, and I’m still stuck at purple. I’m so far behind…” And there it was. The cry I’ve heard so many times from friends, loved ones, and especially from clients – they fear that they are behind in some way. This is not a new phenomenon, and my daughter certainly isn’t the only one experiencing the feeling of being behind in life. In fact, it saddens me that she is already feeling behind at such a young age...
When I was completing my master’s degree, our professor would always talk about living your dash – which was perhaps a not so elegant way to talk about how we choose to spend the time between our date of birth and our date of death. Today marks the one-year anniversary of my father’s passing, and it has me thinking about how he lived his dash, and how all of us live our dashes.
I discovered the practice of Bhava Yoga in October last year. I was looking for something that would support me in being in my body to release all the intense grief I have been carrying this past year. Many years ago, one of my Yoga teachers said that we come back to Yoga when we are in pain – whether that is physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual pain. I have found this to be true. This time, I was coming to Yoga to work through my mental, emotional, and spiritual pain after losing my father, and walking through one of the most difficult years of my life in my marriage. Over the past 12 months, there have been days where it has felt impossible to get out of bed, and yet, I got up. I have to, because I have small humans who depend on me. However, I also understood that I could not show up for them if I wasn’t resourced. So, Bhava Yoga has become non-negotiable. It has become a way that I return to the sacred...
Over the last two years I have sat with this question: What does it mean to thrive? I used to believe that if I could achieve enough outside success, then I would thrive. When I started my coaching business, I read The Prosperous Coach, in the hopes that I could figure out how to prosper – which is another word for thrive. I was longing to find the secret to thriving / prospering / flourishing / expanding. And I will be honest, initially I thought that I would feel like I was thriving if I were making more money and if I was really successful in my business...
The other day at my son’s Hip Hop class some of the other moms were discussing camps they were booking for their children for Summer. Summer?! It’s January. We are still in Winter. I laughed a little at their urgency around needing to get their Summer camps booked now. This event left me with two thoughts…
I know most New Year’s articles often start with a note of excitement and anticipation about the new possibilities ahead. I would like to start my first article of 2026 on a more sobering note. You might find it depressing, and yet, I want to invite you to consider that perhaps it’s not. Perhaps it’s the key to your liberation this year. On the first day back to school from the holiday break, I was talking to the father of one of the kids in my son’s Kindergarten class while we were waiting for them to be dismissed for the day. I asked him how the holidays were for him, and as per usual, I got the response I seem to get a lot from people: “Busy”. How often do you find yourself responding to a question on how you are with the that one word, “busy”? What was even more interesting, was when I asked this father what he was most excited about in the coming year, he said he didn’t know yet, because he hadn’t had a chance to catch up on emails. He shared that once he has caught up with everything he is behind on, he will have a better sense of what he wants to do this year. And this is how most of us run our lives. When… Then… We play this endless When… Then… game with ourselves, without recognizing the three most important truths that will set you free from this endless hamster wheel...
December always feels like paradox. Most of the world seems to be winding down, and somehow things are speeding up at the same time. In the Northern hemisphere, there can be a longing for cozy evenings in front of the fireplace, comfort food, and warm blankets. In the Southern hemisphere, there is the longing for lazy days on the beach, or around the pool, barbeques, and Xmas parties. Yet, I also hear from people that their inboxes are running over, they are drowning under urgent deadlines, and organisations are hurriedly trying to complete planning for the new year. There is an increased urgency to get things done, and completed, and a tension between desperately wanting rest, and feeling like you can’t rest yet. With children in the mix too, the holiday season can feel anything but relaxing and restful. Often there is no childcare available, and you are scurrying to figure out how you will keep your children entertained or occupied. And somehow you have unknowingly also taken responsibility for ensuring that there is “holiday magic”? When did that get added to the list? And why is it even a requirement? The core leadership challenge that no-one talks about, is not strategy, planning, or systems, but rather how to navigate the internal negotiation between your energy or capacity, and outside expectations. And that is why today I want to talk about capacity...
At the end of each year, I complete a Year-End Review. I spend time looking back at the year in granular form. I go and look at one month and one week at a time. What am I looking for? I look at what was happening both personally and professionally. I look at my calendar and my business tracking to see who I was serving, where I was travelling to, and what felt important during each moment in time. I reflect on how I felt, and how I was relating to all that was occurring. Why do I do this? I complete this detailed Year-End Review every year, because it gives me the opportunity to reflect on my life from a zoomed-out perspective with new knowledge that I didn’t have at the time that the events were occurring. It often has me change my perspective on the story I tell myself about the year I just had. And it ensures that I tell myself the truth instead of just holding on to a story...
I want to start this article a little differently to how I would usually start a post. I want to start by sharing this funny video that captures my evolution with KPop Demon Hunters in 15 seconds. And if you don’t know what KPop Demon Hunters are, welcome to the movement. May it inspire you as much as it has inspired me. If you are not a fan, that is totally fine too. I feel a little sad for you. And, you don’t need to a be fan, or even have watched the movie, to get value from this article. It’s just my starting point, and it doesn't need to be yours. So, just hang in here with me for a little bit as I provide some background to why this movie, why this article, and why now?
A minor car accident a month ago was a wake-up call for me. It made me pause and had me face the truth of where I am right now. It’s been seven months since my father’s passing. Since then, my mother, my mother-in-law, and my father-in-law have all been ill this year. And the day before my birthday, my aunt passed away. I have felt myself reeling with shock and confusion over the past eight weeks. I wish I could tell you that I was wise and calm during these intense weeks, but I have not been wise and calm. Far from it. I have fallen into old defensive patterns in a futile attempt to make myself feel safe…
During the Summer I took a trip to Whistler with my family. Whistler is a town north of Vancouver, British Columbia, that's home to Whistler Blackcomb, one of the largest ski resorts in North America. People go there to ski in the Winter, and they go there for adventure biking in the Summer. There is a cable-car (gondola) that takes you up Whistler Mountain. Additionally, there is another gondola that takes you between the two peaks of Whistler Mountain and Blackcomb Mountain. This is called the Peak-to-Peak gondola and is an epic ride up the mountain. Once you are half-way up Whistler Mountain, there is an option to take an open chairlift to the peak of Whistler Mountain. The Peak Express chairlift is your access to the Top of the World Summit, Cloudraker Skybridge and Raven's Eye Lookout. This chairlift ride is an exhilarating experience that takes you over top of an ancient glacier while cresting over a 100-foot vertical cliff at the top. I have a morbid fear of falling – not heights, I’m pretty ok with being high up. I’m terrified of falling though, so I don’t like feeling like I might fall. So, going up the mountain in an open chairlift was not an option I was even considering. It was clear in my mind that that was something I could not do...
In April of this year, I did a thing. With the gentle nudging of my coach, I participated in a professional rebranding photo shoot. The photo shoot took place in the midst of tremendous grief and sorrow. I was still reeling from the shock of my father’s passing. If I’m being honest, I’m still reeling from it now. There are days where the grief of it is so intense that my heart physically aches, and the tears have a valve of their own that cannot be turned off… And yet, the photos are more real, more authentic, more true than any photos I have ever taken. They reflect someone who is more grounded, more present, more connected to herself, Life, and others. They reflect who I am without any filters or pretense. They are raw and real. They are vulnerable. They are beautiful. This photo shoot in April was not some spur of the moment, spontaneous event. It was part of a much larger agreement with my coach to start to see myself more clearly, to claim the value of the work that I do, and to realign my brand to clearly reflect that. It was part of a project called “Seeing Myself”. Why am I sharing this with you, and what does seeing myself have to do with the title of this article? Everything really. When we slow it down...
My father died believing he was a failure. From his perspective, he had failed, because he had been unable to secure full-time employment after losing his job during the pandemic. He lost his house and had almost no money when he died. He based a lot of his self worth on external measures of success, and he believed that he did not measure up. However, that's now what I saw or believed...
A few weeks ago, in conversation with a client, she asked a powerful question: How do I know what my truth is? The answer to that question is multi-layered. Here’s why…
I recently finished reading, Little Earthquakes: A memoir by Sarah Mandel where she recounts the heartbreaking story of her six year long battle with stage four metastatic breast cancer and the ensuing trauma that unfolded from that. Mandel was a therapist who used narrative therapy to help her clients work through their trauma, and then chose to apply her own therapy methods in the writing of her memoir. It was a way for her to make sense of the trauma she had walked through...
My dear beloved community, I have not written to you since January. In fact, I have not written much in months. And my writing today comes from a tender and vulnerable place as I choose to share what has been unfolding in my life that has prevented me from sharing my regular newsletter with you.
Usually in January we hear a lot of talk about goals, dreams, aspirations, ways that we are going to be better and do better. This time of year tends to be a time when there is a heavy focus on self-improvement. Although, I will say that this year, I feel like the energy is different. I don’t know if it’s only on my side of the world, or whether you have experienced something similar? And I’m attributing it to all that is occurring in the world at the moment – wars, elections, wildfires. One colleague said what I was thinking. He said, “It feels like it’s the pandemic all over again...” I will share that that is certainly where my fear-based mind went immediately, because I remember that there were these out-of-control wildfires in Australia at the beginning of 2020 just before the pandemic really hit. And if you are feeling less inspired and excited this January, I want to invite you to be gentle and compassionate with yourself. My sense is that in many ways, we are still recovering from the trauma of the pandemic, and that our nervous systems are constantly bombarded with more things to process. And it’s a lot. It really is. And this is why I want to discuss the difference between self-improvement and self-growth...
These past few weeks I’ve been riddled with guilt, so much so that my guilt would wake me up in the middle of the night, and I would feel my heart beating in my chest, and my mind racing with worry. So often, my clients share how they carry their own guilt for choices they’ve made, especially when others do not approve of those choices. Recently, I had a deep conversation with my coach about guilt, and I had a profound insight that has changed the way I see my guilt. And I want to share with you here what I’ve learnt about guilt...
My coach recently gifted me a book by Michael Neill called Things I’m Avoiding Doing: A four-week program to overcome procrastination and get shit done. The title of the book is misleading, because it makes it sounds like the focus of the book is to learn how to get over procrastination and get more done. In a world, where we are already overloaded with too much to do, it’s probably not surprising that we are not getting everything done. And yet, when you read the book, you’ll discover that it’s not really about getting more shit done, and that Michael Neill doesn’t believe that procrastination is actually real...
Just before the completion of the Coaching Leadership Mastermind I did with my coach, she invited the group to consider where, in which dimensions of our lives, we added value either to ourselves or to others in the past 24 hours. We worked through The Wheel of Life and considered which dimensions of our lives were enriched in the past 24 hours? Then my coach invited us to reflect on the past week, and consider where in the past week we add value to either ourselves or others? Lastly, she invited us to review the whole month and consider in a deeper way where did we add value to ourselves or others over the past month?
Something that we all share as human beings, is the desire for learning and growth. It’s built into our DNA to want to learn and grow. If you don’t believe me, simply spend some time with babies and you will see it. We learn more in the first year of life than in any other time in our lives. We are simply geared towards learning, because learning things helps us survive, and even once we have figured out how to survive, learning helps us go from merely surviving to thriving. If you consider the technological advancement of humanity, it becomes quite evident that we want to grow, learn, and expand. We almost can’t help ourselves. What I’m most baffled by though is how our natural instinct for learning and growth then starts morphing into a need for self-improvement and/or self-betterment, and then sometimes even morphing into an obsession with perfectionism. The idea of self-improvement has been with us for centuries. Even the great philosophers advocated for continuous self-improvement. And yet, I feel like there is a tipping point where self-improvement becomes toxic...
The energy in September tends to be similar to that of the start of the year. Once back from Summer break, people now need to recommit to work, and schedules, and often with the start of the new school year, and after having a break, we vow that we will start doing things differently...It’s interesting how I found myself in the first week of September, already wondering how I will get through the rest of September… Perhaps this feels familiar to you too? And yet, often, even when I feel less resourced, I find myself still pushing through. One of the stories running in the background was, “You can’t be tired now. You just came back from a vacation.”...
Recently I shared how shame can get in the way of us living more wholeheartedly. Today I want to talk about numbing. All of us numb from time to time. Some of us numb more than others, and yet all of us numb. What does it mean to numb? Numbing is what we do to avoid feeling uncomfortable feelings. It’s what we do when we are resisting feeling our true feelings about something. And usually, we resist our true feelings about something, because we have convinced ourselves that it would be too painful to feel our feelings, or that we might get overwhelmed by our feelings if we let ourselves feel them...
In April, I shared with you about the launch of my private six-month coaching group called Living As If You Matter. This group is all about living as if you truly matter, or as Brené Brown would put it, wholehearted living. Today I want to talk about what gets in the way of living more wholeheartedly or living as if you matter, and the antidote to it. In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown explains that the biggest thing that gets in the way of us living more fully as our true selves, or living as if we really matter, is something that we all experience – shame. Shame is that warm feeling that washes over us, making us feel small, flawed, and never good enough. It’s the feeling that makes us want to hide or run away. It’s what sometimes makes us overreact in certain situations. According to Brené Brown, “Shame is basically the fear of being unlovable… Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.”
I’m currently listening to Life Loves You by Louise Hay and Robert Holden and in Chapter 3 of the book Robert Holden shares about a talk he once attended on the mind where the presenter posed the question: “Can a flat tire really give you a headache?” The reasoning was that you might complain about getting a flat tire, and you might even feel like you have a serious headache after having to deal with replacing a flat tire, but is it really the flat tire that is giving you the headache? The only way the flat tire can be responsible for your headache, is if the tire came off, bounced, ricocheted, and hit you in the head. What is really giving you the headache when you need to replace a flat tire, is your thinking about the flat tire...
A while ago I wrote an article about what your perfectionism is really trying to tell you. Perfectionism is a misunderstanding that we need to earn our self-worth or prove that we are enough or worthy. The truth is that you came into this world worthy and then got disconnected from that truth over time. So, embracing your imperfections is a way that you can choose to reclaim your inherent worthiness...
How do you relate to failure? Do you believe failure is an essential part of success? Or do you believe that failure is to be avoided at all costs? How we relate to failure hugely impacts our openness and willingness towards risk taking and trying new things. If we see failure as something that is “bad” and that needs to be avoided at all costs, we will be less open to taking risks or trying things that are new, different, unfamiliar, or out of our comfort zone. However, if we believe that failure is part of the process, and that success without failure isn’t possible, we would be more willing to fail.
A question I love to ask my clients, is: What’s your context to life? This question reveals so much about how someone is relating to their experience of life. A context to life, is the story we tell ourselves about life, about ourselves, and about others. It’s the things we believe to be true about Life, about ourselves, and about other people. For example, someone might believe that Life’s a bitch, and then you die. Or they might believe that life is hard, and only the strong survive. Or they might believe that life is the relentless pursuit of more. Or that life is unfair. Or that life is a gift. Or that life is a journey. What we tell ourselves about life, determines how we might respond to different situations IN our life.
I have shared about my experiences with perfectionism before in my writing about a Perfection Detox: Learning to trust yourself and I have shared how I battle with my P Twins – i.e., Perfectionism and Pleasing – whenever I am navigating important situations or events in my life. Perfectionism isn’t just about wanting everything to be clean and neat, or orderly. Perfectionism can take different forms, and often people who are perfectionists, see their perfectionism as a moral compass or guideline to measure their personal “goodness” as a person. In other words, somewhere they internalised the message that they are only a good person, or lovable when they are perfect. This of course sets you up for a lifetime of struggle, frustration, and failure, because there is no such thing as the perfect person who always does everything right. So, you end up living in constant fear that someone will discover that you are not perfect, and that you will be ostracised from the very groups of people you are trying to belong with.
Recently Rich Litvin posed this question: What is the most powerful force in the world? People have so many different opinions about what the most powerful force in the world might be. What would your answer be?
This past weekend, I led a workshop for 19 people called “Creating 2024 with Intention”. These 19 individuals made the conscious and brave choice to slow down, take stock of what had transpired in their lives in 2023, and really become intentional about who they want to become in 2024 and what experiences they would like to be having this year. The New Year often evokes within most of us the need to set new year’s resolutions. It’s an invitation to start anew with a clean slate. And it’s been my experience that so often people are so eager to move forward, that they don’t take the time to slow down, turn around, and look back to where they had come from...
There are two times of year that I find quite intriguing. The one is just before the Summer holidays and the other is just before the Winter break for Xmas and New Year’s. People tend to get into a frenzy to “wrap everything up” or “get everything done” before they “take a break”. And some people treat their “break” as a “to do” item on their to-do list. My sense is that this is a symptom of the society we live in – a world that is always on and always on the go. I firmly believe that we are not built for speed. Human beings are not meant to be moving at the pace that we are moving in this world right now. Here is why...
Last year, at the start of the holiday season, I asked whether you would be inviting the Twin P’s over for dinner this holiday? It seems that many of us – especially women and caregivers – turn in to control freaks during the holiday season. We become frantic and tend to experience a tremendous sense of overwhelm, because we believe it’s our job to create “the perfect holiday celebration” for our family. What that usually looks like, is we want everything to be perfect – whatever that means? – we refuse to ask for or accept help from others, and we become control freaks, so we become impossible to be around. But what if it doesn't have to be this way?
As I write this, Christmas is exactly 30 days away. And the New Year is 37 days away. Something that tends to be a popular topic of conversation – or perhaps I experience it that way because I’m a coach – is how will you finish the year strong? I’m a big fan of finishing the year strong. I’m not someone who stops before reaching the finish line. And, just like with the concept of Christmas, the concept of “finishing strong” might hold different meanings for different people…
It was my birthday last week, and I had the most incredible birthday. I used to hate birthdays. I used to want to avoid my birthday at all costs. And for the past three years, I have had really amazing and joyful birthdays. So, I want to share briefly what has changed for me, and why it’s important.
I recently shared what I had learnt from watching the Barbie movie. And the key insight I shared was how we put labels on ourselves or how we identify with certain labels without considering that perhaps they are just that – labels. And the label we assign ourselves or get assigned by others, could never really fully capture who we are, because we are so much more than the labels. In that article I pointed out that each of us have a responsibility to know who we are outside the system of rules we have created for ourselves. And today I want to talk more about the rules we create for ourselves. A lot of these rules operate unconsciously, and yet, they dictate how we live our lives, so they are worth investigating...
The other day on my morning walk, I came across three deer. They wanted to get past me to the other side of a set of stairs. Their fear prevented them from doing so. And this got me thinking. Isn’t this just how we are as humans? We reach a fork in the road of life. We are faced with a transition or a challenge in our lives. We tell ourselves we want to change, and yet we stay frozen right there in the middle of the road, too afraid to take the next step. We consider what might be on the other side. We take a few small steps forward; only to take three big steps back again, when things start shifting...
This past weekend we went to the cinema and watched the new Barbie movie. I was initially very resistant to watching it. I had my own story about Barbie and that it would be a complete waste of my time to watch the movie. I was not a big fan of Barbie growing up. I had some Barbie dolls at one point. And I loved dressing the dolls. And at the same time, I felt a lot of resentment towards the stereotypes that the doll’s existence perpetuates. Barbie perpetuates an unrealistic and unattainable ideal that is very hard for most women to be confronted with. My husband was very keen though. He thought it would be funny. So, we went to see it. Here is what I learnt about life from watching the Barbie movie...
We all have Gremlins – also know as Saboteurs or Inner Critics. Our Gremlins are what we consider the worst parts of ourselves – the monsters that come out when we overfeed them. They come out when we feel most insecure, most inadequate, most incompetent, and when we feel most like we lack confidence in ourselves and our abilities. It’s the judgements we have of ourselves. It’s what we most dislike and want to hide about ourselves, because we believe that they get in the way of us showing up fully as our best or highest selves...
To live a full, rich life, requires taking ownership of our responses and our experiences. It requires that we co-create WITH life, instead of fighting against life. And secondly, it requires that we take full responsibility for our own healing and the integration of our different parts. Life is asking us to choose to be Creators instead of Reactors...
In a recent article I spoke about unhealthy striving. I pointed out that we live in a society of high-achieving, high-producing, chronically tired and burnt-out individuals. I shared how often we wear a lack of sleep as a badge of honour. People often pride themselves on how little sleep they are getting and how much they are getting done, without realising that “functioning” on only a few hours of sleep per night, is equivalent to driving under the influence of alcohol. However, have you ever tried to fix a persistent lack of energy by sleeping more only to sleep and still wake up feeling exhausted? The reason for this is that sleep and rest are NOT the same thing. We tend to incorrectly assume that to rest means to sleep. Yet sleep is but ONE form or rest. So, in the spirit of truly slowing down to take stock, I want to talk about rest...
Recently, I posed the question, can you handle the effort shock? And there was quite a reaction to that article. So, today, I want to speak to those of us (myself included) who tend to overdo it and who tend to not know where the line is between effort and burnout.
Recently I wrote about what it means to be a hero. Something I did not touch on is just how hard it is to create a life that is different and resonant; just how much effort goes into creating a meaningful and fulfilling life. My sense is that my last article could have perhaps left you confused. I shared that heroes are not special in some way. They are not extraordinary. They don’t have special powers. They are simply ordinary people doing extraordinary things. If this is true, then why do so few of us take up the challenge? Why are we not all the heroes of our own story? The answer is Effort Shock. Let me explain…
What is a hero? Marvel and DC have taught us that heroes are special. They have incredible strength and supernatural powers, and they perform outrageous acts of courage. So, we tend to think that an average person can’t possibly be a hero. Heroes are special somehow, so they can’t be average people... We forget to be our own heroes in life. We forget that we get to create who we want to be in the world...
Whenever I’m in conversation with a new person, I invite them to dream. I invite them to consider what they want. For some peole, it’s easy to know what they want. They find it easy to dream. And for others, knowing what they want, knowing the longing of their own heart, feels unreachable or impossible. The experiences of their past are so painful, or they have fallen into pleasing others and morphing themselves into whatever they think others want them to be, so much so, that they lose their sense of who they are and what they want. I remember a time in my life when I was so busy adapting who I was being to try and be more loveable or acceptable to others, that I had no sense of who I was. During those times, I found it hard to dream. I found it hard to even begin to know what I wanted outside of asking others’ opinions about what they thought I should want. Recently, my coach Amber Krzys, shared an email with the title What’s your relationship to wanting? And that got me thinking...
Today, I want to say a little more about setting goals. As I’ve shared before, I’m not a big fan of traditional New Year’s resolutions. I believe that when we are setting goals, these goals should come from our highest most authentic self, our Inner Wisdom or Inner Leader. When our goals come from this place, they are aligned with who we want to be in the world and what we feel called to create and bring into the world. When our goals come from our Ego, or from our sense of how we see ourselves falling short when we compare ourselves with others, then our goals are essentially SHOULDS and not WANTS.
As the holiday season approaches, life has brought me some interesting experiences that has me contemplating the value of celebration. The dictionary defines a celebration as “the action of marking one's pleasure at an important event or occasion by engaging in enjoyable, typically social, activity.” And this time of year, tends to open people up to celebration for various reasons. Whether you are celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s, or anything in between, this time of year is mostly an invitation to celebrate. And that got me thinking about my relationship to celebration...
A few weeks ago, I wrote about taking up more space and what that might look like. Today I want to talk about a real-life example of that. Back home in South Africa, Jeremy Mansfield was a radio announcer and television presenter. He passed away recently from cancer. To me he was a living example of what it looks like when someone takes up more space.
We live in a world where the word change comes up often. Things are always changing. And it is even said that if you can’t keep up with change, you will become stagnant, irrelevant, redundant. There is so much change that most of us feel like we simply can’t keep up. The pace of change is so staggering that it leaves our heads spinning. And yet, have you ever stopped to consider what the word "change" actually means and how it is not all that helpful to our personal growth and development?
My commitment to changing the level at which I live my life, deepened about four years ago when I decided to embark on the biggest personal transformation of my life. And the most important thing about personal growth and transformation, is that you never arrive. There is never a point of completion. The deeper you go, the more you start to value and appreciate the journey. You fall in love with the process, because you realise that’s all there is. So, as I write this, I’ve renewed my commitment to being 100% committed to the process and 0% committed to the outcome. I cannot control the outcome. So, there is no point on focusing my energy and attention there. I won’t get me what I yearn for most anyway. So, instead, I fall in love with the process of learning and growing, and I stay on the path towards mastery. I choose to be a student of life and I accept and embrace never arriving. For the rest of my days here on earth, I am a student of life, and I am here to soak up as much love, learning, joy, growth, awe, and inspiration as is available to me. These renewed commitments stem directly from my attendance at a Game Changer Event with the ultimate mindset coach, Devon Bandison...
One of my favourite TED Talks is a talk by Caroline McHugh on The Art of Being Yourself. I share it with all my clients at some point, because of the power of her message, which is essentially an invitation to take up the space the universe intended for you. What does it even mean to take up space? Most of us play small. We hold on to limiting beliefs that has us playing out the same patterns over and over, and we allow fear to stop us from stepping out of those patterns. We tell ourselves stories about what we are capable of and what we are not, and we believe our own stories. We let other people tell us what should matter to us, what our priorities should be, and we spend our lives in fear of the question, “What will people think?” And very often that thought stops us from taking action on the things we value.
ly listening to another human being feels like a lost art these days. My great-grandmother used to say that we have one mouth and two ears so that we can listen twice as much as we speak. And she was a great listener. She seldomly spoke, so when she did, I always listened, because I knew that what she had to share would be valuable... Today I want to talk about far more than simply listening for learning or for our own personal understanding. I want to talk about what it means to listen deeply to another in a way that has you both feeling seen, heard, and deeply connected.
I recently read an interesting article by Sarah K. Peck, a fellow coach and mompreneur, where she questioned the value of morning routines. She highlighted how morning routines have become very popular. These days many famous and successful people attribute their success to a solid morning routine. However, does your morning routine really support you in who you want to become?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Over the past few days, I’ve watched with shock and horror the events unfolding in Ukraine. The fact that one person could yield so much power to literally destroy people’s lives, is appalling. And the sense of powerlessness I felt, was causing a knot in my stomach and an intense and deep ache in my heart. Coincidentally, I attended a Co-Active Leadership Experience this past weekend. The Co-Active leadership model turns traditional assumptions about and definitions of leadership on its head. It postulates that we are all leaders and that different situations call for us to take on different leadership positions. And frankly, it’s profound, because it cultivates a true sense of power. It teaches that in any moment you can take ownership of how you want to show up and as a leader. It’s your responsibility to take ownership of your impact on the world. And we are all having an impact.
