Who Do You Choose - a Man or a Woman?

Male or Female Life Coach?

So, you've already made the decision to get a life coach. Now you must choose one. In addition to all the important questions like their experience and how well you can communicate with them, you must also think about whether you would like a female or male coach. This very well could best be determined by figuring out exactly what you want to accomplish with your life coach.

If you have your own company that you are trying to grow or would like to get in line for the big promotion at work it may be better to go with a male life coach. A male life coach might tend to be more logical and less focused on the emotional aspects. (OK. I know this sounds old fashioned and non-feminist but I believe there are tendencies in males and females - and certainly exceptions. Viva la difference!)

Females tend to be more nurturing and emotional and therefore may be better suited to help in a situation where you are trying to improve your relationships or yourself. Of course, remember that this is not always the case and sometimes men relate better to women or the other way around. The best thing to do is interview a couple of each and determine who you connect the best with and who you feel most comfortable with.

I myself have never had a male coach. I don't have a big problem working on my goals or being logical but I sometimes want the support of someone with both high intuition and high emotional intelligence. Certainly that could be either a man or woman. It just hasn't happened for me to have a male life coach - yet.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Is High Self Esteem Feeling Competent or Feeling Worthwhile?

High Self Esteem = Competence AND Worth

What is high self-esteem? Some say it’s the feeling of personal competence. Some say the feeling of personal worth. Or is it both? I say both.

Ask yourself the following questions to determine the areas where you may need to examine find your level of high self-esteem:

Am I able to earn my living doing what I enjoy? Does what I do to earn a living improve or take away from my self esteem?

• Do I know how to give and receive love? Or do I get stepped on and used in my relationships.
• Do I have wonderful friends? Or are my friends undermining and backbiting?
• Do I take good care of myself physically? Or do I eat poorly, sleep little or too much and do no exercise?
• Do I earn an income that is appropriate my age? Or do I go from one low-paying job to another?

Even if you answer positively for four out of the five of your answers, one area of your life that isn't working the way you'd like it to is enough to throw your life out of balance and negatively effect you high self esteem. Be honest with yourself. Do something for yourself. Think about hiring a life coach and focus in particular on the area you need a boost on.

When you have high self esteem you can accomplish what you want to in your life. When you have high self esteem you can stick to what you want to accomplish – even if it takes years. As one who suffered from low self esteem, I know how long and hard it can be but I also know the rewards of high self esteem.

As an example, in three major areas of my life, I’ll give you a little synopsis:

Relationships – from a really long and bad first marriage with two partners with clear self esteem issues,  I now have a long-term marriage with two of us feeling good about ourselves.

Career – from floundering around doing jobs I was either over or under-qualified for, I now know my talents and how to use them.

Self-care - from years of overweight and health problems I now am actually tired of my clothes because they keep fitting me.

Obviously that is not every area of my life but I think it is quite easy to see that having high self esteem makes all the difference in the world in life.

If I can do it, so can you.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Having Emotional Wellness

Loving Yourself

I left my parents home with a horribly damaged self esteem. I then stepped into a marriage that would take 19 years to see the truth of my creation.  I had created a more challenging experience than even my childhood was for me - and further eroded my self esteem. But something magical happened when I started over at age 37. The beginnings of feeling good about who I am started to blossom. This was the start of my emotional wellness.

That was over 33 years ago and I live most days now feeling quite wonderful about who I am and my positive contributions to the planet. That's what good emotional wellness feels like to me. It encompasses me as a relationship-haver, me as a life coach, teacher and writer. It includes all areas of my life. One of the most recent areas for me to feel good about is my physical self. I love how I look even though I'm 72 and have the body of a healthy 72-year-old. I love my naturally silver-tinted hair, and I love how I dress. We all have different appearances and to appreciate our outside we must love ourselves from the inside. I call this emotional wellness.

I was just putting makeup on for an event I'm attending a bit later in the day. I could contemplate plastic surgery or trying to make myself look younger but that is not who I want to be.  Emotional wellness is seeing who you are and knowing that you are exactly where you are supposed to be and loving yourself no matter what.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Are you in a love hate relationship?

I’ve been thinking about what a love hate relationship is. The operative word to me is “love”. If one is calling it “love hate”, it must mean there is first love. So where does that take you? Well, if this love hate relationship is someone with who you are having romantic relationship or marriage with, you’ll want to be investigating, understanding and dealing with where the hate is coming from. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

1)      Am I carrying resentment because of behavior in the relationship that has gone unaddressed?

2)      Do I feel I hate the person I also love because we have issues and they aren’t being dealt with?

3)      Is this relationship about failed expectations?

4)      Am I always in a love hate relationship? (Is it because I like the drama?)

5)      Is this relationship very similar to my parents relationship or my relationship to either of my parents?

There are serious issues underlying the questions above. The first three questions have to do with communication in the relationship. If one is to have a healthy long term relationship that succeeds, communication needs to happen. Yelling is not the kind of communication I mean. I am talking about expressing appropriately the feelings and emotions that occur when one is in close connection with another person. Feelings get hurt. Mistakes happen. Misunderstanding happens. Bad days happen. Big and small events happen. Other people and situations impact what is happening between the two of you. If children are involved, everything is multiplied. And all problems have a solution but if the reason you call it a love hate relationship in the first place is because communication is poor, it is likely it will eventually end up becoming a totally hate relationship and end.

If your answer to question 4 is yes, I’m betting the answer to number 5 is yes also. If this is the case, it might not be enough to just express emotions appropriately within the relationship, it might mean you will have to deal with your relationships with your parents before you can turn your love hate relationship into one you’d call a love relationship, there’s a lot of healing work that needs to be done. With large and unresolved issues from the past, it is most likely that every relationship you ever have will continue to create problems until you realize that you are worthy of a love relationship and do not need to settle for love hate.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Boundaries - Building Healthy Relationships

Boundaries. You hear people talking about them but maybe you aren't sure what they mean. A boundary around a piece of property is the outer limit or can be a wall or fence that is there to keep others out. For you, personal boundaries are your limits for other people in relationship to you. It is the key to building healthy relationships.

Boundaries are an important part of life for everyone. If you do not set boundaries in your personal life, you may find yourself unhappy and resentful. Learn to say no when your boundaries are being pushed too far. For example, your friend often wants you to pick up her kids from school and do a little shopping for her but today you had planned to do your own shopping in a different part of town. It is within your rights to say no. Don't allow anyone to take advantage of you. That doesn't mean you'd never do a favor for your friend. It doesn't mean your boundaries can't be flexible. But unless her need is based on serious circumstances of incapacity of some sort, allow yourself to feel uncomfortable with no , but say it anyway.

Don't let yourself be one of those who time and time again are taken advantage of by the people in their lives. It is unhealthy. You must love yourself and realize that you can't do everything and although you may not like saying no to someone, you have to find a way to get comfortable with saying it. Or maybe you'll never be totally comfortable but you will train those people in your life to think more carefully before they ask you to take on their responsibilities. Boundaries are an integral way to building healthy relationships.

Some people will try to take advantage of you and push your boundaries to the breaking point anytime you allow them too. Don't allow them to. Take care of yourself first and the way to do that is to decide what is acceptable to you and be courageous enough to say no when it is in your best interests. You have to do what is right for you, not your mother, not your husband, not your sister or your neighbor, but you. Only then will you truly be able to continue to help others with love and even enjoyment and without hurting yourself. If this is a tremendously problematic area for you, you might ask a life coach for help.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Inner Child Healing and Finding Your Creativity

Inner Child Healing

Perfectionism started for me as a child. My mother wanted me to be perfect and I bought into it totally. I don't feel like a victim here because the way I imagine it, that the choice was made during some period when I was out of a body and just an energy - a soul - and decided that a good part of my path in this life would be to always try to be perfect. I often fall very short. Many years ago I started working on my inner child healing and realized at age 66 that perfection is a mental box. It keeps creativity from entering.

Let's look at an example. Let's say I want perfect grooming. I try to figure out how to have my hair look perfect. I try to figure out how my nails should look to be considered perfect. I spend lots of effort figuring out how to dress, moisturize, deodorize and criticize myself into perfection. Does it work? Can I ever truly be perfect? Of course not! The more I try to be perfect the more I cut myself off from my inner child healing and know my true self.  It is not worth severing that connection with myself to fit into someone's fashion box.

Let's look at another example. Let's say I want the perfect career but I don't know who I am or what my gifts really are. I must start with my inner child healing, spending time on my own knowing.  Otherwise I will have cut myself off from that inner knowing by spending so much time in my thinking-ego-mind that I'm even confused about what others think is the perfect career.

You are the only expert on you what you need. How do you take those "cut off" parts of yourself back? You keep learning, being open to hearing from truly loving support and you keep knowing that you are intrinsically, infinitely creative by virtue of being a part of the magnificent Whole. You are perfectly you.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

How do I know I have low self esteem? How to fix it?

I’m guessing if you are looking around the internet for information on low self esteem, trying to decide if you have it, you are experiencing some of the following:

• You discount yourself and don’t think you have much going for you.


• You’re pretty sure everyone else feels pretty good about themselves but you just don’t.


• You treat yourself poorly.


• You think others have all the answers for you. You don’t trust yourself.


• You let people take advantage of you.


• You have an inkling that you are not living up to your potential and you would if you actually knew what that is or what it means.


• You have poor relationships.


• You feel lousy a good deal of the time (lousy might include: fear, guilt, sadness, emotional pain, anger, hurt, blame, etc.)

Having been a person who had low self esteem for many years, I know what you feel like – and it isn’t good. And it isn’t that you are defective somehow. It’s that the people and situations that were supposed to keep your automatically-there-when-born self esteem all shiny, did not do the job that you would have wanted them to do. In other words, your childhood caretakers were less then perfect and probably suffered from similar low self esteem feelings themselves.

But you live at a time when there is help for such a thing – lots of help really. If you found this article, you’ve likely found others. Some may promise you something like “7 Secrets to Good Self Esteem”.

I am sure that articles like that have some kernels of truth and help in them but mostly they don’t go deep enough and so even though you try to make use of those secrets, you still feel most of what you always felt – lousy and lousy about yourself.

So what is the answer? How does one fix it? Well, first let me tell you that there is no Arrival Building at Good Self Esteem. Building good self esteem takes work and time. It’s a journey of sorts. The journey can sometimes be painful but it is always worthwhile.

Here’s what I’ve done for the past 30+ years which has worked so well that I now have a business training coaches who suffer from the same issues themselves and want help themselves and want to then be able to help others. So what do we do?

Well, first we insist on a certain attitude. That attitude is one of “I created everything” and it means that I have chosen to believe that I created the emotionally abusive mother I had and the sexually abusive father. Now did I really do that? Who knows ? Even some scientists today are beginning to believe that we actually do create our lives. But truly, that doesn’t matter. What matters is the attitude of self-empowerment as opposed to feeling like a victim.

When I felt like a victim, not only did I have low self esteem, I also attracted people and situations who would convince me further of my being a lousy person.

Next we require you to deal with their past experiences in a way that allows the old unexpressed feelings and emotions to be brought into the light and turned into something positive.

With a toolbox full of highly useful and reusable tools for continuing the process, you go off into the world to continue growing and finding the beautiful person who you really are.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching