Marriage and Money Communication

I haven't written anything about marriage and money so far but I think it's a good topic since I believe most marriages have big issues around money.

Like other areas of our lives, we each have our stuff (definition: Ego + Unheard, Unprocessed Emotions + Unmet Needs). I come from a family where there was a lot of fear and denial around money. My mother was very afraid of not having enough. I believe my father was also afraid but he covered it with many layers of denial. So I come by my stuff quite honestly from the environment I unconsciously absorbed for the first 22 years of my life. I've certainly experienced fear around not having enough and in some ways covered that over with denial – a fine combination of both my mother's and father's emotional imprints.

The Martian has his own but I'll let him comment on that. Anyway, since we both believe we attract into our lives at the level of vibration our emotional selves are at (Law of Attraction), we've done just that. We've always had enough even when we lost it all in 2001 at which time we both experienced intense fear for months. I'm guessing that to some extent our financial situation right now is reflective of all those months of fear.

I'm not aware of much, if any fear, about not enough these days but I only know the full truth about it by looking at the results in my life.

So back to money in our relationship. It's never been an issue. Because of our high level of honesty and communication, money issues fall under the topic "Everything We Talk About" and we know where the other is. Also, because we have a real partnership attitude, it's never mattered whether I was earning more or he was earning more. When I was earning more doing work I hated, I was very honest about my resentful feelings that he could not do this kind of work and got through them to the benefit of enhanced closeness and communication.

I guess money issues are only a separate issue if you don't keep them open and honest and communicate whatever is going on with you about them with your partner.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Is "just listening" an acceptable activity for coaches with their clients?

This blog is turning out to also be a bit of a forum for life coaches - not just people who might be interested in hiring a coach. One of my favorite client experiences has been helping a newbie client take off into her coaching practice and responding to questions like these from a reader of this blog:

Thanks so much Maia for your response to my question about coaching clients who can tend to be looking for someone to listen to them rather than in taking action. Yes, I have indeed been asking lot of questions to get my client to be more specific about what he wishes to get from the coaching, but it's proving hard to pin him down (especially as it's coaching via email). As you say, it's important to confirm exactly what someone wants to achieve from the coaching so that I'm clear on what they expect from me - and to ensure we are a good fit.

Tamsin Butters, nudgeme (http://nudgeme.co.uk)

Part of the role I play with many clients is partly listening but I always find out early on what I'm listening for. What I mean by that is: if I know where a client is headed, then I can hear if their account of what's happening with them sounds like its heading in the direction they want to go. I am good at listening between the lines so no problem. But I don't think I'd want to work with a client who was email only. I definitely exchange email with clients in between sessions but email is a funny and tricky thing and easily misinterpreted.

Anyway, what are your thoughts?

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

First Self Exploration Then Relationship

Self Exploration in the Movies?

We saw a movie last night that made me think of some things  Sometimes we jump into relationships or jump from encounter to encounter looking for something.  Only to realize that what we have been looking for can be found from within ourselves.  A little time and self exploration we could have saved ourselves months or sometimes years of horrible or worthless relationships.

Back to the movie: Pretty New York young woman with no purpose other than to find a man. She’s got a good job but doesn’t particularly like it. She just does it. Goes from man to man - drinking too much, having sex too fast and not having any relationships that last and feels worse and worse.

She finally does meet a nice man who comes from another country and wants her to come with him after knowing each other a few days. She declines and, as the plot unravels, ultimately takes a trip to that country, loses his contact information and decides to be there just for her own self exploration.

At the end of the movie she’s on her way to the airport when missing young man walks onto the train but doesn’t see her. My husband and I wished the movie ended with her choosing to not go over to him but that’s not what happened. She goes over to him and allows herself to be taken off the train by him and in the end chooses to miss her plane. It is a big step for her to make that choice based on the personality that’s portrayed but wouldn’t it have been a bigger step (and very non-Hollywood) if she just continued to create a life where she got to know herself through self exploration and became a full person first before she partnered with someone?

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Six Ways a Life Coach Can Help You Boost Your Self Esteem

The Life Coach Boost

Get started boosting your self esteem by hiring a life coach. Since a life coach usually helps people with any and all areas of life from career to finances to overeating, all of the work that you do with a life coach will eventually lead back to your self esteem and help to slowly (or quickly) increase it.

A life coach can:

• Help you focus on the positive


• Show you that you are deserving of all good


• Challenge you to reach for what you are worthy of


• Challenge you to reach for what you want


• Point out the positive attributes that you take for granted about yourself


• Gently (or not so gently) tell you the truth about where you are kidding yourself

As you work with the coach and overcome challenges that you face and reach the goals you set out, your regular experience of the focus just being on you with your life coach, will continue to help you raise your self esteem. The life coach will be someone other than yourself that will help make sure that you are held accountable until eventually as your self esteem and self confidence increases, you can learn to hold yourself accountable for your actions and learn to change the negative, critical voices in your head.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Love Wears Many Faces or Acts of Love

If I write out my feelings, I will feel better - basically the idea behind journaling. I will also become more clear and, as a natural-born teacher, I can offer my experience to benefit others. So here goes. I'm calling it "Love Wears Many Faces or Acts of Love".

For many, many years my husband and I have created a morning ritual/habit whereby we get up very early which sort of fits our biological clock and gives us time to connect in the morning. But in many ways, it has stopped working.

• I've been noticing that we are not that interested in what each other is saying. (Of course, the little girl in me wants to say "HE is not interested in what I am saying and I go out of my way to care" but knowing that it takes two, let's just say it's "each other".
• I've been wanting to sleep quite often later than 4am but get up anyway.
• I'm kind of tired of being so out of sync with most of the rest of my world. We almost never consider doing stuff at night because it's such a big disruption in our schedule, etc.

So this morning I was dying to finish this conversation which has started because I'm a little bent out of shape because he actually admitted that he was thinking of something else the whole time I was telling him something important to me. My "act of love" was leaving it for another time and not laying my whole emotional deal on him right before he leaves for work.

How can I not love and respect a man who continues to support me in every way possible including financially at 80 years old? How can I not know from 30 years with him that he absolutely IS interested in what I am doing and saying? How can I see him off to work giving him a hard time to have to deal with on the way?

And you know what's sad, we didn't kiss goodbye? I wish I could run out and chase his bus and get that kiss in.

I think we just need to look at this as an indication that what we have done out of love has turned into an almost unconscious habit. Neither one of us wants to end being like so many couples we see at The Coffee Bean early in the morning on the weekend who are reading the paper and not talking at all or couples we see out at restaurants doing the same.

Life is a school and today it became very clear that we need a little shake-up of our schedule to wake-up and figure out new ways and time to connect.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

I Made My Own Relationship Support and You Can Too

Appreciating Each Others' Gifts

The year my family and friends celebrated my 65th birthday with me, we had about 16 people including 3 noisy little boys ages 8, 4 and almost 3 in my not that big living room. It was joyful mayhem at its best.

I was discussing the wonderfulness of it all and the Martian said he realized that one of the things he wants to learn from me is how to create a loving family and friends as I have done.

He reiterated how both his mother and father left their families behind and subtly and not so subtly gave him and his sister the message that people and particularly families are too much bother and trouble. We all know that families are bother and trouble.  To me there is so much happiness from the relationship support I have with my family and friends. There is great joy and richness in working out of the bother and trouble.

Here's a couple of quotes from my step-daughter's special birthday gift to me 70 Things I Love About You. (Are you curious why it's 70 not 65? When I was 60 she mistakenly made a list of 65 which we all laughed about but I wouldn't let her take any away so now she's creating a tradition of giving me 5 extra. I like it!)

#14. Your unconditional love for all your children and grandchildren

#15. The pride you have in your children for both large and small accomplishments

#50. The way you allow others to be themselves

This is one of my gifts but it was not always this way.  My family was a crazy one including a cheating dad who molested me and a raging mother who focused a lot of that rage on me. But along with their dysfunction I also saw how they made their best friend's family into their own. The Martian saw almost no one ever even visit his childhood home. I  had to take the lessons and gifts from my childhood and create my own relationship support.

I love having this gift but how extraordinarily wonderful it is that my husband not only appreciates the gift in me, tells me he appreciates it but wants to change his ways and develop this talent in himself?!

So the next Saturday he invited my daughter, his step-daughter for 29 years to have breakfast with us and I noticed he went out of his way all day yesterday to give out more special hugs than he often does.

Even if your family is scattered or dysfunctional and you want nothing to do with them, you can create a family of loving friends and have the joy that family can bring.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

---

Taking Responsibility for the Negative and the Positive You Create

One of the things I teach my clients and practice myself is taking responsibility. I believe we fully create our lives by our thoughts and feelings. However, I don’t require my clients to believe like I do. I just ask them to try that perspective out and see if it works for them. So far, no one’s declined. So it is definitely a filter I coach from.I’ve pretty much mastered being able to point out a client’s responsibility and whatever that entails without creating defensiveness. It’s probably because my clients trust me and I have a gentle manner but speak the truth as I see it (which is what they are paying me for.)

But taking responsibility – which tends to take a bad rap because for most of us it implies blame of some sort – also supports taking responsibility for creating the good in your life. You get to take credit for creating your raise, your well-brought up kids, your sterling attendance record, your millions, your wise investments, your learning to deal with the 120 high school students you teach. You and everybody else get to take credit for it all.

Maybe I’ll start a campaign or write a book called Taking Credit which teaches the self-empowerment that comes from taking responsibility for all of it.

 YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Does Everyone Have 'Mother's Intuition'?

Life Coach and Intuition

We all know what it means when someone says they had a hunch or they followed their instinct. This means they were guided by their intuition. You probably have heard of a mother's intuition. Somehow moms just seem to know what to do when something is wrong. Some call it a feeling. Sometimes it appears as a pit of fear in your stomach. Everyone has had those feelings. The difference is how you handle those intuitions and what you do with them. Some people are not confident enough to follow their instincts. Some people will go against all odds on intuition and be right every time.

Intuition is extremely important when choosing a life coach. A life coach needs to be able to count on his or her intuition sometimes to guide the way to help you. A life coach needs to be able to listen to you and pick up on feelings and emotions that are blocking you and sometimes the only clear way they can get to that point is by going on their instincts and feelings. As you work with your coach one of the things that should come to you is the confidence to trust your own intuition.

A while back I decided to send a duplicate of a book I already have to one of my clients. I could not have said why. The book is called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. Amazing! My client is starting her own business after having worked for someone else for her whole adult life. She is flirting with learning how to use the internet to promote her business by starting a blog. As you can see from this blog, blogs work best if you enter posts daily. The other day she was asked by someone at work to do some creative type work on the internet and she heard a little tiny voice tell her, "You're not creative. You can't do this." That's the voice I've been coaching her to listen for and begin to change those self-defeating thoughts. Now back to the Artist's Way. The Artist's Way is a book to help you open your creativity!

Was it coincidence or intuition? What do you think?

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Learning How Not to Be Responsible for My Partner's (and Others')Feelings

My Love Relationship

I am a kind and loving woman.  I  require a love relationship with the ones close to me.  I care about many people and show them and tell them - including my husband. This morning he is here even though it's Monday morning and I usually have quiet to work. My office is right out in the middle of the house and a lot of what I do is write - just like I am writing right now. He went out to get the car smogged and came in while I was writing. I greeted him and thanked him for taking care of the car. I listened for a few minutes while he talked about what was happening in the apartment across the way - and he kept talking to his daughter about stuff that is not important that she know or I listen to at this time. Maybe he wants to spend a little more time before he settles into his working on work-related stuff. However, I need quiet when I write. I requested that he stop and he got a little bent out of shape. Although he stopped talking.

I kept writing for a minute or two and then asked if we could talk a minute. I explained my situation more fully. I did this because I have a nagging need inside for peace. I don't like it when there are ruffled feelings.

Do I go overboard on this - on easing them? I'm not sure. I have a need for  a love relationship. I'm noticing that as I continue to write here, my mind keeps going to the bedroom where he is. I see myself wanting to go make nice or talk or check to make sure he's ok with me. This is all my childhood stuff. Or maybe I'm just hardwired this way. Whatever.

What I know after 29 years with this man is that he is fine; he would let me know if he needed more from me; that this no big deal; and that I will likely just follow my desire to check in with him when I'm done writing this.

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