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