Becoming A Life Coach and Self Growth

When I was told that the first requirement for a life coach is continuing self  growth, I was totally sold on the idea of me becoming a life coach for the rest of my life. I consciously adopted the idea of self  growth about 30 years ago and since then have been in love with personal growth and spiritual growth (which I happen to think are the same thing).

Before that I was unconsciously searching for the idea. I joined a spiritual group; I went to a 24-hour encounter group with my ex-husband; I went to a 12-Step group to lose weight and I went to Marriage Encounter with my ex-husband. But I didn’t know what I was searching for and so it was hard to find. I had a spiritual awakening when I realized that I had to leave my marriage. I walked out on the ledge of uncertainty and ran away with no job and with four kids. That was my moment! And I learned from then on that what I was looking for was uncovering the Being I came here to earth to be.

I’ve had other addictions before - ones that made me high or fat - but this is a most positive one! I am addicted to uncovering my inner essence  and my  self  growth - and that is what I convey to my clients.

You University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

The Secret Need of Modern Women- An Insight for Living

An Insight for Living

Got anybody's attention yet? You know who you are. You love what you do. You can't wait to....coach, see therapy patients, work on your website, write in your blog, go on Facebook, create a new class, write a new e-book, etc.

You have working relationships with family, friends, partners, etc. You exercise several times a week and eat healthy. You have everything you ever wanted. So all your needs are satisfied, right?

• Then why do you feel a little bored?
• Why can't you quite find the juice to express gratitude in a feeling way for all that you have?
• Why do you feel a little resentful of your loving partner when he/she is around and hasn't done anything untoward?

The Secret:
YOU DON'T HAVE ANY ALONE TIME WHERE ALL YOU DO IS NURTURE YOURSELF. This is truly an insight for living.

No work. No giving - except to yourself. No supporting - except yourself. And, most important, no self-judgment about how much time you are wasting and could be doing something else because "I'm happy and lucky", right?

It's supposed to be an OLD story that women are only nurturers. Many fought for equal rights. Most of us observe that men watch sports or play sports or have a hobby with no guilt - just enjoyment. That is a man's insight for living. Well, that's one of our rights also.

What day are you going to take for yourself? Or, what hour? And what are you going to do that is just for you?

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Become a Better Life Coach Through Self Awareness

A  question  was  asked  in my  coaching  community.  It is a great  learning experience  for self awareness.   As  a coach  if I use self awareness  as a  tool  it can  create a great coaching  environment for my clients  and me.  The question asked:

I was on the phone with a friend and once again I found myself hearing her complain about her abusive job situation.  This has been going on for about 5 years.  She barely stops to take a breath, I once told her that unless there is progress being made, she is talking about the same thing over and over.

It makes me feel when someone does that, abused.

She has a steady job during a time when folks have nothing.  There is a lot to be grateful in any situation and when someone does that constantly, it bothers me personally.

Is that what goes on in Life Coaching, a b----- session?

How do you protect yourself from the negative energy of that?

Here’s my answer: Your question is a good one and I'll give you my thoughts as they occur to me.

• I'd never let  a  situation  like  this happen with a client because we pretty much know that we are a good fit before we start coaching and I always get permission to jump in when I get their story. So I interrupt.  Part of  the  reason  I  jump  in is my having self awareness.  I  listen to the feelings  around the comments  expressed  by my  clients.

• That's not what coaching (with me) is about. The reason I didn't become a therapist was because I could never see myself just sitting and listening to someone's problems. I'm about positive change. (I know all therapy isn't about that but I was young and didn't know it then.) The positive change is teaching the clients about self awareness   too.

• I'd hate doing that. I hate doing that for anyone because it brings me down and makes me feel powerless myself. (This doesn't mean I'm not compassionate to friends, family and clients. It does mean exactly what it says.)

• When I get off I coaching call, I'm high. If that doesn't happen most of the time, this coaching relationship isn't working and I know it.

Does this mean I’m heartless? No. It means clients pay me to help them get un-stuck. How would I be helping them do that if I just let them stay stuck in their problem? Once I understand what they want to change, my job as life coach is to help them stay focused in that direction.

So, bottom line, I don’t have to deal with the negative energy because I don’t experience it.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Keeping a Gratitude Journal

Expressing Gratitude - Start Now

One of the ways to stay focused on the habit of expressing gratitude is by writing in a gratitude journal.

The benefits:

• Being grateful for what you have right now opens a window for more blessings to enter into your life.
• When you write down what you are grateful for, it puts things in an entirely new perspective.
• You start to realize how abundant your life is right now at this very moment.

Keeping a gratitude journal keeps you focused on all that is good in your life and subconsciously you begin to expect more good things. It can be a simple notebook or a decorative journal. Your journal is very personal and should reflect who you are. Don't worry about writing the wrong thing or any spelling errors. Let your thoughts flow and write whatever first comes to mind. If you experience writer's block, start by writing..."I am so happy and grateful for..." Start out with a list of at least 10 things you're grateful for. Try this out for 30 days and your awareness for prosperity and abundance in your life will greatly increase.

I met a beautiful, vibrant woman recently who weighed 88 pounds, in a wheelchair given a week to live. That was 20 years ago! She met Dr. Bernie Siegel, who taught her to keep a gratitude journal. She said the first day she could only find one thing of the five he suggested she list. So repeated "I am grateful for the ray of sun through the clouds" five times. She said by day 30 she had over 130 things on her list. She is a traditional health person, as is Bernie Siegel, and she teaches all her patients the power of keeping a gratitude journal.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

How to Be Happy with Yourself – That Is the Question

Oh, my mother would have loved to tell me how to be happy with myself.

• She’d tell me to make sure I looked good whenever I go out because you never know who you’re going to meet. What she meant by that was that maybe I’d meet the right guy that would come and take care of me the rest of my life.
  
  
  
  • Well, right away this was a problem for me since I thought I was fundamentally defective and couldn’t look good.
  
  
  • She’d tell me go to the right college (so I’d find that same right guy that I might meet when I went out looking good). I did just that. I went to Rutgers University and graduated in 3 ½ years. And I even met a guy. Today I’d call him the “right guy” because married to him I learned that how I looked or what college I graduated or choosing a guy just because he looked good enough would never make me happy. That big long 19 year relationship lesson taught me that being happy with myself is an inside job.

So if the guy’s not the answer and how I look isn’t the answer and going to a top college isn’t the answer, how can I be happy with myself?

Stop for a moment and go look in the mirror. What do you see? Is all you see only what’s wrong with you?

Or if I told you to go write a list of your accomplishments would you have a little voice piping up and letting you know that those things are no big deal? Does it say you didn’t do such a great job or that someone else did better?

Or do you know your accomplishments and like how you look in the mirror and STILL aren’t happy with yourself?

If you said yes to any of the above, you are living with some level of damaged self-esteem. Babies don’t have damaged self-esteem. They are quite pleased with themselves. You were a baby and when you were, you were quite pleased with yourself. So what happened? Why are you not happy with yourself now?

Because I grew up in a family that ended up making me feel quite lousy about and with myself and the feelings got more than I could stand, I’ve made a study of how to feel happy with myself for over 40 years. And it’s worked. I feel quite happy with myself.

So how did I do it? Or more importantly, how can you do it? How can you learn to feel happy with yourself?

I’ve discovered that the method is like a 3-legged stool. If you only have 2 of the legs, the stool will topple. If you don’t deal with all three of the areas I’m going to talk about, you probably won’t learn to feel good about yourself i.e. the stool won’t work.

Let’s talk about BELIEF as the first leg of the stool. You have some mistaken beliefs about yourself that you picked up somewhere between that baby who was happy with herself and the adult who’s reading this because you don’t feel happy with yourself. Now you may try or have tried some of the tricky things you find in self-help books or online sites and you still really can’t seem to change your inner belief that you’re somehow not ok.

The second leg of the stool is HEALING. This is the one that most people neglect. We all have a past. Something or some things happened between the happy-with-self baby you were and the unhappy-with-self adult you’ve become. If you are willing to heal your past, then you will be able to change your beliefs about yourself. Your past is holding you to those erroneous beliefs as if you had invisible leg irons keeping your there. If healing the past sounds like something you resonate with, take a look at how this emotion-based program, might help.

Now once you heal the past and can begin to see the falseness of your negative beliefs about yourself and a very interesting thing occurs. You learn how to take INSPIRED ACTION – the third leg of the stool. In other words, you trust your gut, your intuition, your hunches on how to proceed in your life and soon enough because you are connecting to your own inner wisdom, you discover you are quite happy with yourself.

This is not an overnight process but it doesn’t take too long either. In a matter of a few months, you can be on your merry and happy way with tools to take you through a fabulous and very happy rest of your life.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

On The Phone- How Does Life Coaching Work?

I Don't Have an Office

How does life coaching work over the phone? 100% of the life coaching I do is over the telephone. I live in California and coach people in N.J., Florida, N.Y., Nevada. I even have clients who live in England and Scotland. Since long distance is so inexpensive these days, it's easy. It also means the coach does not have to have an office. She just has to have a phone and a place to sit down - at minimum. She can have (and most do) a good headset and a nice, non-distracting setting in which to sit.

But you might wonder if it is most effective for the client and I will wholeheartedly answer, YES!

I have the ability to read energy. A quote from Gia Combs-Ramirez who says,

Reading energy is our ability to perceive vibrations in our surrounding environment and interpret them correctly. The human body has many mechanisms for doing this, most notably the energy field that surrounds us.

I could have probably quoted some science to prove my point but you can prove it yourself. How do you know someone is angry with you when they smile and say nothing? Or, how do you know when a baby is satisfied when they can't talk?

Start noticing if this is a gift you have developed. I think I developed this gift as a child because I was very afraid of my mother and was always energetically checking in to see how she was feeling so I'd be prepared for her emotional onslaughts. I used to just be hyper-vigilant. Now I live a happy, peaceful life and so I have honed this skill and use it to communicate with my clients and feel what's going on with them.

So that's why I find phone coaching so effective. It allows me to totally tune into my clients with no visual cues to get in my way.

And if I'm not sure, I don't just presume. I ask. So then I am modeling good communication skills which is one of the areas most clients want to improve.

So how does life coaching work over the phone? Very well!

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Are you asking how to improve your self esteem?

Is Asking How to Improve Your Self Esteem Even Important?

Self-esteem may not seem that important to some (they're probably feeling fine about themselves) but it has a huge impact on your daily life. It has an effect on your moods, your reactions and how people treat you. So it is important to ask how to improve your self-esteem.

Seek learning on how to get past negative emotions like anger, jealousy and blame and not let them overshadow your thinking.

Everyone experiences small episodes of these harmful emotions but if you let them be your whole focus, you will never be happy and everyone you meet will know it.

In addition, these emotions build up and create harmful physical conditions like heart disease and high blood pressure. Make sure you laugh every day. Watch a comedy show to lift your mood. You can’t possibly feel hopeless or angry if you are laughing.

Following are more ways how to improve your self-esteem:

1. Increase your self-esteem by doing nice things for other people. They don’t even need to know you did it. In fact, it might is better if they don’t. It will make you feel very good about yourself though, and that is what is important.
2. Stop criticizing every little mistake you make. Watch the words you say about yourself. No more "stupid" or "dummy". Everyone makes mistakes.
3. Take all those negative things you are thinking about yourself and turn them into positive thoughts and your self-esteem will be on the rise one little step at a time.
4. Learn to choose how you respond to whatever situation you may find yourself in. You can decide to calmly handle a situation with as little stress and bad feelings as possible or you can freak out yell, scream, cry and make a bad situation worse.
5. And if your emotional residue from the past is so large it doesn't feel like you have a choice, seek help – self-help, coaching or therapy. Whatever suits you.
6. Another way to make yourself feel better and give your self-esteem a little boost is to dress up now and then for no reason. It will make you feel good knowing that you look good. Do not allow yourself any criticisms about how you look, only good thoughts.
7. If you up for a real stretch, ask 3 people what they like about you. Let what they say about you wash over you. Let it in and just say, "Thank you".

The next time you ask how to improve your self-esteem, think back to this list and get to work.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Is Self Confidence Elusive For You?

Boost Your Self Confidence

Self confidence is all about how you feel towards yourself and how confident you are in your life and the situations you encounter. High self esteem means you truly love yourself and who you are inside.

For example,

• I know I am a truly good person.
• I know I wish everyone well. I also know I am an authentic person.
• I know there is no big gap between what I think and feel about something or someone and how I act.

I love those qualities within myself. I very much like who I am as a person.

Self confidence may change on a regular basis depending on the things that are happening in your life on a daily basis. The change could even be linked to not enough sleep or having a very stressful few days or even hours. Everyone has good days and bad days but if most of your days tend to be bad and you feel stuck where you are and not willing to try new things, you probably have low self confidence and, my guess is, you most likely know it. I suffered from low self confidence for years and I certainly knew it.

The good news is that you can build your self confidence but it will likely take time. With some work and a serious commitment there are techniques that you can use to build your own self confidence. You will find many of them on this site.

First you must commit to remaining positive. A positive attitude is crucial to the success of building your self confidence. Then you must stop listening to anything negative that you or anyone else says. And since this is mostly an inside job, the voices you have floating around in your head, are the most damaging or most beneficial. Good self messages sound positive. Low self esteem inner messages are negative, critical and have lots of shoulds in them.

1.   Don't allow yourself to compare yourself to other people. You are your own unique person with your own purpose for being here and it doesn’t matter what others do, say or accomplish. It has nothing to do with you – except as far as you let it run your life.
2.    Associate with positive people.
3.    Spend your time doing work and activities that you truly love.
4.    Do not go over your past mistakes in your head. Forgive yourself and move on.

Start small and celebrate all of your successes. As time goes on, your small successes will become larger successes and you will be on the road to much higher self confidence and many more opportunities to be happy.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Life Coaches Can Help You Take an Objective Look at Why You Aren'tMoving Forward

Your Life Coach Can Help You with Procrastination

Life sure does seem to be happening faster and faster. Can a life coach help with any of this?

Maybe it's my age but I hear lots of younger people voice the same observation. For whatever reason, no matter how fast-paced your life seems to be, you may still feel like you are spinning your wheels and getting nothing done and getting nowhere.

Whether you procrastinate and put off the important things you need to do or if you constantly seem to come up against a brick wall at every turn, sometimes it takes someone else to help you look at your life situation with an objective eye and see what some of the underlying issues may be. Sometimes it's self doubt and low self esteem. Sometimes it's just a shortage of needed skills. Maybe it's a combination of both.

Fear and self doubt may blind you to what is really happening. Feelings and emotions may be in the way and you may never grow past these issues and become prosperous and self-respecting. If you are working hard and still feel like you are getting nowhere, a life coach could be the key to helping you see what the issues are that are standing in your way and moving forward past them to a whole new future. Make a serious commitment now and deal with the situation before it is too late and you have missed many incredible opportunities. Go pick up the phone.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Why we all don't have what we want

Personal Power For All

I've been involved in the human potential movement or on a personal power path for 40 years. When I started on my path I didn't know I was on a path; I just knew I was in so much angst about my life and my body that I had to do something. What I did was go to a 12-Step program and found a spiritual answer or rather I began to understand how life really works - not what I had learned from my parents who actually didn't have a clue. It's not that at 37 I found all the answers. I found out there were questions. Much more important.

So my journey has wound and wound and found me living in L.A., Sausalito, Mill Valley, Petaluma, Dallas and Las Vegas - in no particular order.

• It took me out of my first marriage of 15 years into single parenthood with 4 children with lots of low self-esteem.

• It took me to other 12-Step programs. It found my second husband of 6 mos. in that 12-Step program and led me out of the marriage and the program again.

• It found me at an obscure workshop called Making Love Work by the then very unknown Barbara deAngeles and John Gray.

• It found me discovering my childhood abuse and back into another 12-Step program.

• It took me back to John Gray and Men Are from Mars . It found me my 3rd husband of 23 years.

• It took me to coaching and writing - and many other places.

My life is a miracle to behold. I have 4 lovely adult children, 6 amazing grandchildren, 2 beautiful daughters-in-law. It gave me a most precious and special relationship with my stepdaughter. It gave me friendly but far-away relationships with my other stepchildren and grandchildren.

Why did a woman who was emotionally and sexually abused as a child, who suffered from very damaged self-esteem, married 3 times(!), who saw herself as a victim etc. etc etc. get such a great current life. THE ANSWER IS SIMPLE. I DO THE WORK I UNDERSTAND MY NEEDS TO HEAL, TO GROW AND I DO IT 100%. Even when I didn't have the emotional tools to move on, I had the personal power.  Whether it's with a coach, without a coach, in a 12-step program or out - NO MATTER WHAT, I do and have done the work.

If you have that kind of personal power and commitment to your path, you have anything you want. I promise.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Who's a Fake Coach?

Life Coach - Real or Fake?

With the growing trend of life coaching, everyone is calling themselves a coach these days. I'm on twitter , a cool social networking site. It's amazing how many people who are in sales and network marketing call themselves "coach".

Elsewhere in this blog you might have read that my personal prejudice is that a life coach does not have to be certified and does not even need formal training necessarily. I learned more from receiving good coaching than I did at my very expensive training school.

That being said, if you want to hire a life coach and you find someone who calls themselves coach but has nothing to offer, it will become apparent to you when you interview the coach - whether in person or on the phone.

An authentic coach will offer you a sample session or will have an in-depth conversation before either of you could possibly consider whether you are right for the coaching relationship with each other. I used to offer a sample session but since I don't know you and don't know enough about you, I find that if we ask a lot of questions of each other, if we are forthright in our communication and I understand what you want from your coaching, I can then tell you what I can offer. I often tend to tell a potential client what I've worked on with other clients and what I've changed in my life in relationship to their needs.

Many who call me have told me that they talked to lots of coaches and they felt "sold". It takes a high level of confidence in ones self, a lot of trust in the Universe to provide the material goods required by the life coach and a strong sense of intuition to not feel fearful of not being hired. I told you in another post recently that I "fired" a client when I realized I was beginning to totally resist our appointments.

Since I usually look forward to each session with anticipation and joy and leave feeling focused, centered and empowered, I knew something was very wrong. I realized that I had been blinded during our initial interview by my ego in agreeing to work with this lawyer because he is my ex-husband's nephew and I thought it was such a "special compliment" to me seeing what our marriage status is and has been for 25 years. Well, that didn't work out. We ended on a positive note but I fell into a very human trap of satisfying my ego but not seeing that we weren't a good match to start out with.

So, again, hopefully you will know immediately if you have the right person or not to hire as a life coach. But certainly you will figure it out quickly and that's why I advise - keep interviewing until you are sure.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Are the "noes" of childhood in charge of your life? How can you beemotionally healthy?

Remember when you were a kid and you wanted some things that your parents said NO to? I'm guessing it would not have been OK for you to express anger at your disappointment. Most parents are not so OK with that but where did those feelings go? They most likely never got expressed which means they are somewhere "in" you which means most likely they need some work - some healing.

In my work as an Emotion-Based Coach, I meet both women who've had horrendous backgrounds and women whose childhood was pretty good. It's the one whose childhood was pretty good who have the most difficulty in believing that their past might be the reason their relationships don't work out or they can't seem to do the work that makes them happy or anything else that isn't working in their lives.

Here's an example from a conversation I had this week with a really quite healthy woman who is considering going through YOU University with me as her coach. When she was a kid, her dad wanted her to become a golf pro and apparently put a fair amount of pressure on her to do so. She did not become a golf pro and knows intellectually that her dad wanted the best for her but I believe that the kid in her still needs to express her feelings around being pushed into something she didn't really want to do and the somewhat powerless experience that kids often have even with the best of parents.

We all have situations like the one above in our past. Some of us, unfortunately, have much harsher ones but usually, those women hurt so much, that they try to get relief by going to therapy or being involved in spiritual and/or personal growth programs and reading self-help blogs, books and ebooks. It's the ones with the easier past who have a hard time believing that their "great" childhood could leave any negative impact on them.

It occurs to me that taking this self-assessment might help you get some insight into yourself and how the now is linked with the past.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

What to Do if You Were Taught Not to Take Care of Yourself

Selfish or Self-Care?

It seems when I was a child I was never taught about self-care or to want things. Whenever I wanted something, I was accused of being selfish.  It didn't matter if I was tired or just not wanting to do chores. I heard it so much and so often and didn't want to think I was anything bad like that, I stopped taking care of myself in many different ways. If taking care of me was selfish, than taking care of and pleasing others was unselfish . And I'd much rather be unselfish. I suspect many people and maybe more women are taught this self-defeating, unloving attitude by other women - mostly their mothers who had learned the same thing in their early lives.

If you experienced something like that dynamic somewhere in your past, you might find it difficult to rest enough, difficult to eat well, difficult to take care of your body in other ways. You might find it difficult to take care of yourself in relationships. You might judge your emotions as unworthy of a good (unselfish) person. You might also find it difficult to have healthy boundaries and difficult to stand up for what you know is right.

How do I know all of this? I know it because I have lived it in one way or another. So what do you do if you see yourself in these words?

• Start paying attention to how you treat yourself. Take a little notebook and write down the ways you see you not taking good physical care of yourself. Then get support to change those old habits. Find someone or someones who will help you understand that you are infected with wrong thinking. Funny. My mother also said, "God helps those who help themselves." I'll buy that one. So I help myself.
  

• Start paying attention to how others treat you. Are you taken advantage of in relationships? Are you expected to give more than your partner? Are you underpaid? Do you do work that is unsatisfying? Talk to someone who loves you enough to be an honest mirror and listen to what they are saying. It is most likely the truth and you most likely know it is deep down inside yourself.

Find support to learn to love yourself from the inside out.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Are You Building Healthy Relationships?

Expectations of Building Healthy Relationships

I have a friend for many years. When I first, formally started my coaching practice, she was one of my first clients. I wasn’t able yet to observe myself in the coaching process enough to be able to see if the calls were building healthy relationships between my client and myself. A couple of weeks ago she called and said I need your help. She said, "I’m overwhelmed and confused about creating my business so I either watch TV or eat to avoid the whole thing."  I agreed immediately but we didn’t really lay out what she expected from me and from the coaching itself.  One of the best tactics in building healthy relationships is to outline expectations upfront. The lack of having done that immediately showed up as a problem. She missed an appointment, then had a gas company guy come at the time of the next appt. and was heavy into negativity when we finally spoke on the delayed appointment.

I don’t perceive my job as talking a client out of their negativity. I perceive my job as working with it to change it. Subtle difference but a big difference in results for the client – and results for me. Which leads me to what I experienced that day.

When I hung up from our call I was tired and drained. I thought it was because I didn’t have enough sleep. But several hours later I had my next client appt. and although later in the day, I felt exhilarated and stoked which is how I most often feel after coaching – which I’ve used as an indicator that coaching is a gift of mine. Also, I remember learning from John Gray about a zillion years ago that if a relationship is giving you energy, it’s a good relationship and if it’s taking away energy, there are problems. He was referring to intimate relationships but what’s more intimate than a relationship between a coach and a client?

So back to my question: to coach a friend or not to coach a friend? I still don’t know if it’ll work in this case but I have begun to remedy the situation by requesting my friend to please write down her expectations of me and of our coaching. We will speak about it next week and we’ll see where we end up.

Lesson learned: When building healthy relationships you must request and layout expectations and boundaries.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Improving Self Esteem - 8 Questions to Ask Yourself

The Lonely Issue of Self Esteem

If you think you are the only one interested in improving self esteem, you are not alone. Most people think that they are the only ones that have low self esteem while the truth of the matter is that most people at some time in their life suffer from self esteem issues. I mean really, who wants to walk around all victimy these days and say, “Poor me. I’m working on improving self esteem for myself?” Anyway, self esteem issues are a pretty good subject for your old friend denial to pop right in and cover up the whole thing from your conscious mind.

So if you want to check it out, ask yourself the following to uncover self esteem issues:

• Do you settle for way less than you want in a relationship?

• Do you absolutely never let anyone see you dressed less than perfectly?

• Or do you go the other way and dress pretty sloppily quite often?

• Do you work at jobs that are way beneath your talent ability or allow yourself to be way underpaid?

• Do you tell yourself that those kinds of jobs are all that's available or that you're only doing them temporarily but find that you've actually done them for years?

• Do you let your personal environment go to the point of severe clutter and either clean up only for visitors or keep people out of your home?

• Do you secretly feel your aren't very talented?

• Do you sacrifice your wants and desires for others all or most of the time?

I'm sure many people could add to this list of questions but these are ones I can think back to from my own severe self esteem issue days.

The good news is you can change this. You can learn how to have higher self esteem. If you look around on the internet, you might run into statements like:

•    You just need to learn to love yourself and your life.
•    Let go of any anger or fear you are holding onto and be grateful for all that you have already been blessed with.
•    Forget about the past and the mistakes that you have made along the way. You can’t change them now and it will not accomplish anything by making yourself feel worse.

They sound nice and maybe even easy. But how do you accomplish those ends?

Look around this site. Every coach trained by YOU University Online has worked at improving self esteem themselves - oftentimes dramatically.

Develop your strengths and use them to gain any knowledge that can help you in the direction that you would like your life to go in. High self esteem is not a luxury it is a necessity and the only thing that will allow you to accomplish all of your goals. Since self-esteem affects every facet of life, having a healthy, realistic view of yourself is important. You also deserve to like and respect yourself and to be happy with your life and who you are. And remember, high self esteem doesn’t mean that you’ve gotten too big for your britches — it means you value yourself.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

What Does "Owning Your Power" Mean?

Introducing, (your name goes here) the great!

How Do I "Own My Power"?

Our neuroses are the raw material out of which an interesting personality may be crafted.
Original Self, Thomas Moore 2000, Harper Collins, p. 15

 

I've been a study in holding myself back. These are some of the ways I've done it:

• I’ve given certain people too much power. I think they know or can do more or better than I can. Thinking that I have tried to almost BE them. Guess what? You can't be anyone but yourself.

• I’ve protected someone close to me from the judgment of others. For example, I never wanted my mother to know when I was hurt or angry with my ex-husband. I guess I didn’t want to let her think she was right. She didn’t like how he treated me (and I didn’t like how he or she treated me). The funny thing about this is that SHE was the one who he reminded me of and who changed a happy sensitive little girl into a person who would totally ignore her own knowledge that this man was never going to be a good partner for me.

• I’ve said I was going to do something – and then didn’t follow through like the zillions of times I said I was going to lose weight – and didn’t. How loving is that to me?

How have you held yourself back? Are your boundaries being stepped on? Do you keep your word – especially to yourself?

Here’s an assignment to help you get your power back. Every day ask someone what they value in you. The more stuck or depressed you are feeling the more important it is to ask this question. The more you don't want to do it, the more you need to.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Way Beyond Ordinary- Self Esteem

Self Esteem - Where's Yours?

Are you spending your life feeling ordinary? Do you feel like you are just a "normal" person like everyone else  and that life is no big deal - particularly your life? That is what's wrong with your thinking and your self esteem. Every single person on earth is completely unique and not exactly like anyone else. Think of the miracle it takes for two people to come together and actually have all the conditions exactly right to create another human being! Think of the miracle that it takes for that little tiny creation to properly grow and develop into the unique individual that you are today!

 That is beyond ordinary. Remember that there is nothing ordinary about you.

• Focus on what you really want in life and you will begin to receive all the things that you have always wanted.

• If you love and accept yourself first, you will treat other people the same way that you want to be treated and your relationships, your work and your overall happiness will change and you will realize that you are way more than ordinary and begin to prove it to yourself  and your self esteem every day.

 YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Letting Go - Teaching How to Forgive

Do you ever find yourself going along thinking you know something or that you've resolved something, letting go and all of a sudden there's more to learn or you discover you just resolved it a bit more?

Sometimes I think an issue is resolved and then I discover there’s even more to be uncovered and resolved.

My ex-husband was in my life. We shared four children and five grandchildren. We lived a few miles apart. It's taken a lot of work on my part to be in a state of forgiveness. A lot of letting go. We had a very difficult marriage. We were too young and too unsuited to each other to have anything but a contentious relationship for a good deal of the four years we dated and the 15 years we were married.

I had been going along thinking I had forgiven him for the hurt I felt but wouldn't you know it, I learned just how much internal protection I was holding onto when it came to him. And I am sure he could feel that. I wasn't letting go. I kept seeing him as ‘weird’ until it I clearly saw, “Your four kids are half his? Are they weird? Are they part you and part him which makes them somehow defective.” Of course not! So another letting go.

Maybe some people who grow up being abused never learn how to fully relax and fully trust others. Or maybe it happens in degrees over the years. I'm not sure but what I'm sure of is that I sat next to my ex at a holiday performance at our grandson's school the Friday after realizing this and I felt completely open to him for the first time – probably since we met in 1961! And then again in those couple of weeks, another unfolding and another awareness and another letting go. We had the best conversation about a difficult family issue. It was the best conversation we’ve had in 50 years!

Life is a wonderful teacher and I felt lighter and better about myself with this burden dropped - or maybe they'll be more to drop someday in the future.

You University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

What is the definition of emotional intelligence and how can you develop yours?

From a website dedicated “to communicating scientific information about emotional intelligence” I found these definitions:

Emotional intelligence represents an ability to validly reason with emotions and to use emotions to enhance thought.

They also say: a more formal definition is...the capacity to reason about emotions, and of emotions to enhance thinking. It includes the abilities to accurately perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth.

So now we have a formal definition which I might translate this way: emotional intelligence allows you to know what you are feeling, understand others' feelings and to be able to use those feelings to promote your own emotional and personal development.  

That doesn’t sound too hard, does it? Well, actually for most people it is quite difficult. It is only easy for us when we are babies because emotional intelligence is a natural part of being a human being. And just as intelligence (called by us IQ) is a measure of our intelligence capacity so too is EQ a measure of our emotional capacity.

While intelligence can be affected by a person’s environment, even more so a person’s EQ can be affected by a person’s environment. To make that perfectly clear: if as children you were not allowed or supported in continuing to express your emotions as a baby so easily does, it is as if a little plug was put in some part of your emotional expression ability. For example, you are two years old and you want to play with the water in the toilet. Mommy says “no” and picks you up and moves you away – probably closing the door of the bathroom so you cannot get back to the water. You are pissed off. But Mommy does not have time for you to have your way right now. She distracts you or is not happy with you in some way. Most likely she does not encourage your anger but likely tries to get you to be a “good little girl”.

This simple example shows you how this happens. Children often are forced to not feel or not show they feel what they actually do feel – particularly if it is anger, hurt or sadness. So those old emotions get stuck and begin to be much of the driving factor in how you live your life. They create your unconscious beliefs about yourself and your world.

The way to develop your emotional intelligence is to work with someone who can:

• Offer you tools to rid yourself of the old stuck emotions.
• Help you bring the false beliefs about yourself and the world to light.
• Provide you with tools to keep your emotional and personal growth growing for the rest of your life.

I have been working on just this very thing myself for about 30 years and from someone who didn’t even know I had stuffed a lot of unexpressed anger and who most of the time didn’t know what I was feeling and felt often very disconnected to myself, I am now considered an emotional intelligence expert. It takes work but the results are amazing.

Oftentimes people are very afraid of this kind of work because they believe they might be overwhelmed and not be able to handle the emotions that come up. However, if you find the correct help, you will discover that that isn’t the way it works at all. Somehow our own healthy desire keeps the old stuff coming up at a rate that you will be quite able to handle.

You University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Expressing Gratitude Brings Me Closer to Myself

I am 72. I was born during a World War - another "war to end all wars". I've lived through the Korean War, the Viet Nam War, entrenched fear of Communism, Middle East Wars, September 11th, jobs I hated, a challenging marriage, teenagers with troubles - sometimes very big ones, financial losses, early stages of breast cancer and many other events both personal and world events.

How can I experience all of this and still feel happy, joyous, grateful and optimistic with an inner knowing that we are all in for amazing wonders of planetary transformation? How can I have such a great life with so much expanding love of family, friends and complete strangers? How can I be seeing material success beginning to occur even within the current economic climate? Am I different than others? Am I more blessed? More special?

I think not. I think that on a personal level I have begun to understand how life works. My experience has shown me to:

• learn how to focus on what's good
• learn how to let go of the old negative tapes I've picked up from various places in my life
• tell the truth of how I feel - at least to myself
• keep expressing gratitude
• know for sure what makes me happy

By doing these I  not only create the life I want, I contribute to the positive vibrations on the planet and get to be a part of the solution.

I am no different than you. We are all one. We all effect each other by our very eye blink. With all that said, I will tell you what I am grateful for:

• I am grateful that my 79-year-old husband thinks I'm hot and just asked me to sit on his lap before he took off to teach a couple hundred inner city kids Physics.
• I am grateful that I have 5 beautiful grandchildren, 4 wonderful kids with various amazing partners, step-children, friends, clients - love abounding!
• I am grateful I am my right weight and able to maintain it and love myself in the doing.
• I am grateful for our Wii Fit and that I am willing to use it quite often.
• I am grateful for my  smartphone and my  iMac.
• I am grateful for all the wonderful connections I've made all over the world by doing social networking.
• I am grateful for knowledge of how to feed my body and keep it healthy.
• I am grateful for all the wonderful teachers I've had including John Gray and Barbara deAngelis.
• I am grateful that I could go on and on and on.

Expressing gratitude works to create the life of your dreams. What are you grateful for?

Now that you're done, I have one thing left I'd like you to do.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Hire a Life Coach to Help Clarify Career Goals

You Can Do Work You Love

A life coach works with you to examine and clarify your needs, values and beliefs and develop the goals that help you grow. One of the most important things that a life coach can help you do is to clarify your career goals to determine if you are on the right track or you need to make some changes. Once you have accomplished this, the life coach can help you set up a specific plan that will take you right to the finish line.

A life coach can make this process much easier and much faster. A coach will help you take an objective look at where you are compared to where you want to be in your career and help you realize talents and skills that you may not even know that you have or thought could be a help to you in your career. With a coach working with you on your career plan, you will always have someone to support you and motivate you to keep going when you feel like giving up.

You may do this with a career coach or a life coach who understands the needs of someone creating a career plan. If self esteem and lack of belief in yourself is a factor, your coach can help you there too.

Since what a coach excels at doing is very individual, you can discover how to get your needs met in your communications with potential coaches before you might hire them.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Letting Go of Clients Is Like Letting Go of Butterflies

Life Is a School

I fully subscribe to the concept that Life Is a School and so the events of my life often take on powerful meaning and personal growth. They serve as signposts along my life's journey. On Election Day one of those significant events occurred. (If you want to read about it, click here .) The long and short of it is that we ended up with 7 year newer, better car, a car payment and a new source of revenue - a new client.

Which brings me to the new client. We are such an amazing energy match! She is my perfect client: aware, spiritually-oriented, bright, creative and has a somewhat limited view of how truly fabulous she is. I love our conversations and know our work together will bring us both to new heights.

As often happens in the beginning of a gigantic personal growth journey, something very big happens in your life - most often a truly important outer experience reflecting your inner resistance. My car incident could easily be categorized as an example of that. Well, my new client ended up with a very big experience of food poisoning.** It had her being taken back and forth to the hospital and experiencing gigantic pain and scary pre-diagnoses prior to the doctors figuring out what was really going on physically.

All of this threw her into big turmoil and apprehension and she put our coaching on hold.

Switch to me now and think about my experience of all this. Of course I feel real concern for her physical condition - and then there's that other niggley little thought, "what if she changes her mind and I don't have this source of income?" Now I know who that voice belongs to. It's the voice of my ego in it's incarnation as a worried mom. I know that is the voice of no trust, fear and not-enough. From  my  own  personal  growth, I know to ignore that voice and not let it take over. But it did not fully heed my snub. While sitting on the couch minding my business, it snuck right in and started shouting!

I   had  to  use the tools that I  have taught to  my  clients in  their own personal growth.  It was the mentality  of "Life is a  School" that put my energy  and feelings  into a more positive place.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Why Do I Need a Professional Life Coach?

Has Life Gotten in Your Way?

If you're one of those people who's somehow always on top of your goals, you probably don't need a professional life coach. However, if you're like most of us, life tends to get in the way of achieving those long term life goals. Work, the kids, chores, TV, family time, gardening, chores all help distract us from our dreams and long term goals. And then there's that really subtle bug-a-boo - the one that makes us think we can't have what we want or accomplish what we want.

How would it be to have someone focused just on you and your goals? You are the star! If you think it would be wonderful, you'd probably do great with a professional life coach. Coaches focus 100% on you achieving your chosen future goals.  A professional life coach will concentrate on you -actually helping you figure out your goals and how to execute what you want to achieve. The result may be that you get what you want and then learn to enjoy having what you wanted in your life.

Each individual professional life coach has their own particular something special to add to the mix. It might be their extraordinary intuition. Or their gentle holding up the mirror of truth for you so you don't go into denial. Or their vast experience in the business world.

Whatever you are looking for in support and wonderful help, a professional life coach could be just the ticket.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

New Relationship Advice

What qualifies me to hand out new relationship advice? Well, I tried it the “old way” twice and it ended in divorce both times. So I figured I better learn and do something differently then I did before if I was ever going to have a relationship that worked.

So the questions became for me:

• “What wasn’t working?”
• “What should I do differently then I was doing before?”
• And “How do I do it differently?”

Of course, I didn’t know I was asking those questions consciously but I was asking and searching – as you are – to get some new relationship advice.

My previous teachers were my parents. Their relationship sucked. Very unconsciously I married at 22. Basically I knew nothing about how to succeed in a relationship. I just knew I didn't want theirs.

I’ve been asked recently if one person can work on a relationship and expect improvement. It depends on many things.

• How bad is it?
• Did you get into this relationship because you desperately needed to be in a relationship?
• Did he?
• Is their basic love and respect back and forth to each other?

I did not understand that I needed to communicate how I felt or it would grow into bigger and bigger unmanageable resentment and lower self esteem than I already came to the relationship with.

New Relationship Advice:

• Find out how to communicate effectively. Go to a marriage counselor or search online or let me teach you but find out how to do it without blame so  you’ll be heard.

I knew nothing about a partnership where both parties honored what the other wanted and who they were. Now I know that in 2014 in the Western world (and maybe everywhere), partnership is what it’s about. We each bring some special things to a relationship and we need help with other things. Who is better to be your partner than someone who loves you and wants the best for you?

New Relationship Advice:

• Learn how valuable you are as a person and that your wants and needs matter. Do not think that “7 Steps to Good Self-Esteem” is going to solve your self image and self esteem issues - the issues that keep you making poor choices for potential partners.

I have spent the last 30 years figuring out how to do that for myself and what I’ve learned works quite well. It does work and has taken work but I am worth it – and so are you. I came into my relationships with a past. It needed to be worked on and healed. So does yours.

I didn’t know that defending myself was not how to be understood by another. It just put up a wall – of fear, of feeling misunderstood, of disconnection and fueled by deep shame. Nothing good came out of that for me. Now I know that I can trust the feedback from my partner of where I fell short somehow because I want to hear. I want to improve. And so does my partner.

New Relationship Advice:

• If you don’t value yourself, how can you expect anyone else to do so? The core of a good relationship is the coming together of two people who value themselves and are open to growing along with each other.

I didn’t even know that any relationship advice existed. Now, in the age of the internet, advice abounds but you wisely chose to look for “new relationship advice” and you got it. Hope it leads you into a new relationship with yourself and with anyone you choose to partner with.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

WHY HURT? - Expressing Emotional Pain

Expressing Your Emotional Pain

Are you afraid of your feelings?

You could have looked at this subtitle and thought one of two things:  "What's the big deal? We all know how to deal with our feelings" or "Yes. I think my feelings are too big or too many or too scary". For those with the second comment: sometimes when we find a challenge, like in addressing our emotional pain, their are benefits. Only, if we look.

I don't know what it's like in other states on other freeways but you've probably heard we have lots of traffic here in L.A.

Well, I'm scared of driving on the freeway and so  I usually don't unless someone else is driving. A couple of weeks ago my husband was driving in pretty heavy weekend traffic going south on the 405. Sometimes when we drive we chat about this and that (in between grousing about the traffic and drivers). This day we were chatting about how lucky we are to have been trained how to deal with our feelings and emotional pain when along comes a license plate saying WHY HURT.

WHY HURT  can mean more than one thing. It can mean:

• First- "You don't have to hurt" and I agree with that. We can make a choice. Unfortunately, many think they can't, but still, WHY HURT?
• Second (this is the reason it struck me so) - A reason to feel  hurt (if you are really in touch with your feelings and know how to let them flow as they were meant to) could mean you are on your way to healing your emotional pain. HURT is milder than ANGER, on it's way to having one know their FEARs and a bit closer to LOVE and FORGIVENESS.

So I ask you: "Why hurt?" you are so close to being in a place of love and forgiveness. Why not learn and move on and become that much closer with yourself?   In the pursuit of not feeling our feelings, at the very least we become disconnected from ourselves and have problems relating to others deeply and well.

Why hurt?

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Healthy Relationships – The Coming and the Going

Healthy Relationships

It is a scientific fact that healthy relationships make us healthier and happier. And this includes all different types of healthy relationships - friends, family, partners and colleagues. All different types of relationships but bottom line - no matter what type of relationships you have, when it's healthy, so are you. The healthier they are, the happier you will be and the less stress you will have in your life.

Anyone whose ever been in any kind of  relationship knows there are sometimes (or often) challenges. You might get disappointed by the other but by accepting the people that we love for who they are and not expecting them to change for you, you have a good start towards having healthy relationships in your life.

Take the time to really talk to the people in your life and actually listen to what they are saying – you know, communication - a key factor in maintaining healthy relationships with anyone.

In recent years my disappointments in relationships have been about certain people disappearing from my life. I've kind of been mourning the loss of a couple of people from my life recently and lo and behold! – I was sent this reminder by one of my clients:

People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime.
When you know which one it is, you will know what to do for that person.
When someone is in your life for a REASON, it is usually to meet a need you have expressed.
They have come to assist you through a difficulty, to provide you with guidance and support,
to aid you physically, emotionally or spiritually.
They may seem like a godsend and they are.
They are there for the reason you need them to be.
Then, without any wrongdoing on your part or at an inconvenient time,
this person will say or do something to bring the relationship to an end.
Sometimes they die. Sometimes they walk away.
Sometimes they act up and force you to take a stand.
What we must realize is that our need has been met, our desire fulfilled, their work is done.
The prayer you sent up has been answered and now it is time to move on.

Some people come into your life for a SEASON, because your turn has come to share, grow or learn.
They bring you an experience of peace or make you laugh.
They may teach you something you have never done.
They usually give you an unbelievable amount of joy.
Believe it, it is real. But only for a season.

LIFETIME relationships teach you lifetime lessons,
things you must build upon in order to have a solid emotional foundation.
Your job is to accept the lesson,
love the person and put w hat you have learned to use in all other relationships and areas of your life.

Yesterday I was talking to my husband about my feelings of loss and not understanding why these people left our lives and he said he's given this a lot of thought and this is what he concluded: friends have a certain give and take. When the give and take no longer works for one, they usually disappear. They don't always disappear forever. They may come back into your life when they see they can get what they are looking for again. Depending on interpretation of these words, that can sound very cold but, on the other hand, it takes the pain and judgment out of it. It requires a very wide perspective to be able to see that.

Remember that everything and everyone changes and although that may be scary, it doesn’t mean that it is a bad thing. Be sure to make plenty of time for yourself and take care of yourself especially because if you have been putting someone else’s needs ahead of your own. Eventually, this will become a habit until you begin to resent the other person even though you are choosing to put their needs ahead of yours. They aren't choosing it for you. Preferably do not focus your life on just one person rather than yourself and the other people in your life.

Keep your own identity as long as it is not at someone else’s expense.

Another important factor in healthy relationships is following through when you tell someone you will do something. It is crucial to the trust in relationships to do what you say you are going to do or don’t say that you will do it to begin with.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

What Are My Barriers to Personal Growth and Development?

I believe that my denial or reluctance about personal growth and development affects the balance of what I attract into my life, affects my mindset and the progress of me as a continually developing person.  If I don’t acknowledge my barriers to personal growth, I will be in terrible discomfort.

Can a friend relationship be one of my barriers to personal growth?

Here’s an example from my life: Over my lifetime in the past, I have formed powerful relationships with certain women to whom I willingly gave my power or, if I didn’t give my power away exactly, I denied the truth of some clear and subtle aspects of the relationship. I thought I was done doing that.

But several weeks ago I realized that a relationship I’ve had for 15 years had many aspects OUT OF BALANCE and I had indications and feelings for years.

For example:

• Almost all of the emotional support was going in one direction – from me to her – and had been for years
• I felt like it was an obligation to give her time and she felt like it was an obligation to give me time
• Truth be told, I no longer feel proud to call her my friend as she lives her life in ways I do not feel good about – let’s call it stagnated personal growth and development.

I could tell you stories that support the above but those stories would cloud the truth. The truth I had to be willing to allow myself to know was it was time to let this relationship go. I have done that. It was hard. I don’t like to think of myself as not loyal or a rejecting sort of person but for my own personal growth and development as a human being on Planet Earth for a fleeting lifetime, I did it. I hope it somehow has a positive effect on her but I did this for me.

I feel the peace of growth and the positive “backlash” of balance I’ve achieved.
Anything niggling at you? Take a look at your barriers to your own personal growth.

Now that you've finished reading, I have one thing left I'd like you to do.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

If Your Partner Is Your Best Friend, Who Do You Turn to for Relationship Advice?

Relationships are hard work and come with a lot of questions and uncertainties – hence the title. Some people warn women not to make their partner their best friend because then they have no one to talk to if they are having relationship trouble. Now what's wrong with that relationship advice? Seems to make sense on the surface but here are the fallacies:

• If there is relationship trouble between the two of you and you can't sort it out with your partner or at least feel safe talking about what's going on with your partner, you have deeper issues underlying that problem. You have a basic flaw in the communication and trust areas of your relationship.

• One of our (my husband and I) secrets is: Make Your Commitment to the Power of the Relationship I suggest making that kind of commitment so that if there is a problem in the relationship, you will not feel like running out the door away from your partner to get away from the problem. Instead you will remember that the relationship is bigger than the both of you and you will at least both be willing to find a way to work it out.


• The second thing wrong with that relationship advice is that it assumes you can have only one best friend. Friends wear different hats. I might not talk to my single friends about a problem in my relationship, but I will talk it over with a friend who's relationship skills I respect.

Many people don’t have the someone else in their lives and when things are rocky in their relationships, they may feel like they have nowhere to turn.

If you do find yourself looking for some relationship advice, be very careful. It is easy to find relationship advice all over the place. Magazines, books, the internet and other complete strangers will freely give their advice about all sorts of relationship issues. During my first really bad marriage of 15 years, people asked me for advice all the time. Now I know that's just the kind of person I am and has nothing to do with my relationship understanding at the time. I shudder to think what I might have told anyone at that time.

And, unfortunately, not everyone has your best interests in mind. They are trying to sell their magazine or book or some may even be trying to push their organization. Many churches and political organizations may offer free counseling services for people but you must keep in mind that they have very specific ideas and motives and they may be trying to convince you that your relationship should be the way they feel it should be or it is wrong, while this may be very different from what you truly want out of your relationship.

If you decide to hire a life coach or a therapist, don't be intimidated by their expertise. You are hiring them and you have the right to interview them – even on the success of their own relationships. I would think it strange for someone to hire me as a coach to help with their relationships if my own marriage was a shambles.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Life Is So Damn Much Life

I teach people how to get their emotions in order - what are they, how to get through the hard ones, how to get to the good ones and not have the hard ones always be in control. As a result their lives and their feelings about themselves change drastically and dramatically - all to the good.

So what happens to the teacher when she is having one of "those" days? Well, I'll tell you. I'm pissed off that things aren't how I want them to be. I can neither sit, stand, walk or lay down totally comfortably for very long - and it's been months - and it's really gotten to my head today. Not only that, the bank made a dumb error that I have to call them about and several other "first world" issues that I feel too embarrassed to publicly moan about. But Damn! Life is so hard sometimes.

And I don't even feel like being spiritual about it (but I will sneak in and say that Someone has played exactly the song I needed to hear this morning, the Beatles "Because" and put exactly the right book into my hands, Steve Jobs biography, and had me turn on a documentary about very emotional, very creative Isaac Mizrachi all of which reminded me that a) fame and success is no barrier to feeling upset, b) even people who have lots of emotional difficulties contribute greatly to the world and c) because the sky is blue it turns me on). But, as I said, I don't feel like being spiritual or grateful today. 

I just want to scream, complain and be downright annoying. I want to be a little baby again. Just like I was in the picture sometime in 1943.

I know tomorrow will be a better day and if I go clean my dumb kitchen, I'll feel better.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Will Life Coaches in USA Be Coaching Women in China for SelfFulfillment?

It has never seemed likely that USA life coaches will ever coach Chinese women unless it's related to athletics or achieving a gold medal for their country. But who knows? Things are changing there and we have really inexpensive long distance and even internet phoning.

Since much of coaching is uncovering what makes you happy and fulfilled, a likely question to look at is what makes a Chinese woman happy? Power, money, love, sex?

In fact, self fulfillment ranks the highest for more than 60 percent of the respondents in a recent survey conducted by the Yueji Self, a Chinese-language magazine jointly launched recently by the Chinese-language Women of China magazine and the New York-based magazine publisher Conde Nast Publications..

Self fulfillment is defined by The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language as the fulfillment of oneself, the fulfillment of your capacities or the act of consummating something - a desire or promise, etc.

"The high marks for self fulfillment are inspiring and encouraging," Li Yinhe, a noted sexologist and professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said. "It shows big progress. More and more women want to achieve their life value, which eclipses the importance of the private life for women. "When women start to value self fulfillment, they become more equal to men."

"In China, the traditional mindset is that men live for their careers and women live for love. Although only about 22.5 percent surveyed prioritized love as the big happiness maker, it doesn't mean that Chinese women no longer believe in love," Li said.

"The awareness and recognition of women's empowerment are relatively low in China," Li said. "The country has long been a patriarchal society and still is, offering less opportunities and encouragement to women to compete with men. Despite the progress made in gender equality and women empowerment in recent years, only 20 percent of the National People's Congress (NPC) members are females," Li said.

Life coaches, can you imagine yourself coaching women half way around the world? What an exciting prospect!

YOU University Coaching/life coach training and life coaching