Category Archive for Life Coaching

Earlier this week, I ran across Stephan Miller’s blog post, “What To Do When You Forget What Romance Is” on the smartmarriage.com newsletter. He writes about how he’s sweating it, working nights and weekends, caring for the kids, never making enough, making the wrong moves.

I love [my wife] and she loves me. We both know that. But the nights of me staying up late to get a handle on work and the weekends of telling the kids, “No, daddy has to get some work done,” has done some damage to this love. I have forgotten how to bring it back.. .Plus I am paranoid. One bad day of sales and I’m Chicken Little. The next day, I spend even more time here with this stupid machine.

Oh, God. I so remember those years.

Does she understand? Yes. Do I understand what all this has done to her and to us? I tell her I do, but I am slow to learn. She is a much more patient, trusting, understanding person than I am. . .

You have to read her comment to his blog. It’s so sweet. She’s taken her older friend Juanita’s advice to expect the bad times. She blows off the “work at it” approach and goes with a “this too shall pass” philosophy. No matter how much he worries, her response is, “It’s okay. Go for it. You’re fine.”

She’s not trying to change him. She’s not on him about needing or wanting more. She appreciates his work and encourages him to keep going. She’s fine.

She knows the secret: If you just take care of yourself reasonably well and if you appreciate him for who he is and what he does, then you’ll have the ability to say the right thing. Then you’re able to speak, not from fear or anger, but from the heart and from a good feeling.

And look how he responds: “Love you too baby.”

Ah. . .

Now that’s romance.

Martin Seligman’s happiness movement, “Positive Psychology,” is popping up everywhere: Learn to think positively and optimistically, and you will experience health.Of course, Dr. Seligman is absolutely right, and his ideas are wonderful:

1. Consciously raising your mood opens your mind and expands your perspective to new possibilities.
2. Creating health is an improvement over simply treating illness.
3. You feel good when you do good for others.

But the problem is:

1. You can’t feel good when your work, health, time, money, and relationships are a mess, and you have no framework or simple process for improving it all.
2. You can’t be happy when your life is not aligned with your values, or when life has hit you so hard that you don’t even know what you value any more.
3. You can’t effectively help others if you haven’t first cared reasonably well for yourself.

Tradition has evaporated. A quagmire of so-called “expert advice” has replaced it. There’s so much to figure out in a day!

Stress is a wakeup call. When I feel it, I do the laundry and file papers. I work on what Coach U calls my “personal foundation.” When I clear the small stuff and free up my head, the big problems either go away or they become just another design challenge.

When it gets bad, I call my girlfriends. Nancy will always put it into perspective with a laugh. She always reminds me of what I know already: Happiness is only one thought away.

Sometimes nothing’s right.

Work is wrong. Love is messed up or nonexistent. Life is not what it’s supposed to be.

You might be in a college that you thought was right for you, finding that nothing is right anymore. You don’t know your major. You don’t know who you are anymore, and no one else does either.

You might be out of college, well-into the working world, doing a job that you thought you’d love, but finding it’s harder and more stressful than it should be. You feel like you’re watching your miserable life stretch out before you.

You might be having babies, slammed with doing it all, and feeling that your man and your career aren’t at all what you want anymore. Suddenly, they no longer fit your values or your priorities — whatever they are.

Or maybe the kids have flown, your money is not at all where you’d hoped it would be, and your relationship no longer feeds you.

It’s transition time again. Once so sure of yourself, you’re stumbling around like an adolescent. You’re supposed to be an adult, a pillar of the community, together and smart like everyone else seems to be, but you feel lost and unsure.
Here’s my take on it:

1. This is a good thing.
2. So what if you don’t know yourself? Your “self” is growing. Losing track of yourself is part of living life. It’s these changes in our thought processes that define who we are — and who we will be.
3. Stop volunteering. Focus on yourself first.
4. Welcome chaos.
5. Step back from fear.
6. You’re changing your relationships to your relationships.
7. Forgive everyone. You begin to see that everyone’s on a continuum of struggle. Everyone’s doing the best he or she can.
8. Add joy. Do simple things to make your day good. Take a bath instead of a shower. Put on music. Clean out a closet. Play with your child. Pack dinner up and take it to a park.
9. If you’ve mixed drugs and/or alcohol into this, get help.

Remember, nothing in life is more true or real than change. It WILL happen. Change is life, crisis is part of all change, and sometimes it can suck.

Play with it.

Explore the opportunities. True, change is not for sissies, but the result can be a great gift — perhaps a life you’ve never imagined. Take it in stride, and use this time to learn more about your self.

For more thoughts, see Chapter 9: “When It All Goes Wrong”

Seth Godin’s Hard Work blog entry compares “one” to “or and the other” in business: Getting and MBA/Keeping your promises. Policies/Judgment. Offering the lowest rate for a cell phone/Not tricking customers with a bait and switch. He’s so good!

I immediately ripped off his formatting and applied it to love and relationships: Read the rest »

They’re like diets and budgets. The second I resolve to eat or spend less, I sneak behind my better self and scarf a chocolate or buy yet another book on Amazon.

I’ve got a refrigerator stuffed with a drying turkey carcass and leftover carbs, a 2-foot pile of papers stashed in the closet of my study, and a car that hasn’t been run through the carwash in a month. It’s time to for teeth cleaning, a skin check, and mamotorture.

It’s time for making a list. Not a “to do” list. An Awareness List. A list of everything unfinished, hanging over my head, bugging me. They are what Coach U calls “tolerations.”

The list inspires a process. Here’s what I wrote in Men Are Easy about the benefits of the list: Read the rest »