coaching – unabashedly female

September 30, 2011September 30, 2011

The Coaching Blueprint, Kate Courageous & Me

Happy Friday!

Today’s the last day of September. It’s hard for me to believe we are three quarters of the way through 2011.

And, on this last day of September, you’ll find me over at Your Courageous Life with Kate Courageous (Swoboda), a woman and friend I am so grateful to know.

Kate interviewed me for her brand new, soon-to-be-released product, The Coaching Blueprint, and today she’s released a short portion of our interview. I’d love for you to stop by her place to check it out. It was a joy to be interviewed by her. In turn, I interviewed her and that interview will be released next week.

The Coaching Blueprint is nothing short of brilliant. For all of you coaches, and other professionals that provide a similar service, The Coaching Blueprint will be your guide to set up your practice the way it needs to be for you…for who you are as a person, as a coach or provider, and as a business owner.

How I wish I’d had The Coaching Blueprint when I was just beginning.

Kate has included interviews with other great coaches, too, such as Tanya Geisler, Jamie Ridler, Dyana Valentine, Michael Bungay Stanier, Pam Slim, Tara Sophia Mohr, Tara Gentile, Jennifer Lee and Michelle Ward. Also, Intuitive Counselor Bridget Pilloud shares how sheâ€™s differentiated her practice from Coaching and counselor Steve Bearman talks about the experience of training other people to become Coaches and counselors.

I am an affiliate for The Coaching Blueprint. If you’d like to purchase it through me, there’s an affiliate link to your right. If you’d like to purchase it directly from Kate, you’ll find a link on her site.

Have a beautiful weekend.

December 29, 2010

Nothing is Wasted; Everything is in Order; It’s All Sacred

Reverb10 Day 29
Prompt: Defining moment. Describe a defining moment or series of events that has affected your life this year.

I had a couple of very strongÂ realizations just a few weeks ago that have shifted how I see myself and my work in the world.

The End of a Chapter

I am done with a period in my life that’s been very internal.

Since 2002, I’ve been engaged with learning my new line of work: that as coach, teacher and writer. I spent many years as a systems analyst for a financial institution. Then I went back to school. I studied many things, and focused on designing experiences, mostly of the interactive digital kind.

When I left school, I knew that what I had just been educated to do, was not my calling. In other words, the tools I gained are directly useful in my new work, but being an interaction designer was not how I was to share my gift.

I spent some time after school grieving a lot of things I hadn’t yet grieved. Like dirty dishes, grief doesn’t go away on its own. It wants to be invited in to sit a spell until it has been fully integrated.

Then, I began to train in my new chosen field: that of teacher of creativity and personal coaching. I wanted to really know the coaching profession, to become well qualified to do this work. When people entrusted me to walk with them as they turned to look within, to unearth their deepest longings and to move through the painful ways they keep themselves stuck, I wanted to be able to be of service to the unfolding of their true self and the gift they are here to give. Fully. I’ve followed this desire as it took me through years of training and education and my own deep work.

Suddenly, after a great deal of training this year, I could feel that I am done. I know my work.

And, I am done with a more internal focus. It had not yet felt right to be moving into the world in a more visible way. And now it does.

The moment when I came to see this was so clear.

There is No Separation

I am a very lucky woman to have two daughters and three grandchildren, with one more on the way. As I was working to deepen my coaching and teaching abilities, I kept feeling pulled between my personal and professional worlds.

I am blessed to have both my daughters and their families close by. Completely blessed. And, I am the one grandparent here, which means much of the grandparent duties fall on me. I’ve loved this and I’ve felt torn between these two parts of my life.

In another moment of clear seeing, I finally could see, in a very real and palpable way, that these are not two separate things, but rather than one infuses the other. My work with women is enriched by my deep love for my children and grandchildren, and the time I spend with them informs my work. My work with women enriches my time with my children and grandchildren.

And, finally, my writing has been infused with much wisdom I have gained from my experiences with my family.

Of course they are all intertwined. How could I not have seen this? Sometimes these insights are so simple, yet so very profound.

Now, I feel integrated and ready for what life has in store for me, for where life will call me to go, for who life wants me to be with.

There is a truth at the heart of the way life moves. As Kahlil Gibran wrote:

â€Ž“Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only before the truth.” ~ Khalil Gibran

This is my life in all its intricate complexity; yet at the heart of it, it’s all quite simple.

I used to think there was a way life should look and that I would see that way out there, reflected back to me through how the culture shows it.

These two realizations in these past weeks have deepened my faith in my own aibility to trust when to shift, when to move and where to flow to next. Somehwere inside, I knew it wasn’t yet time; and now it is time and life is showing me the way.

Life asks us to flow with it, to follow its lead, to trust in life’s nature.

Everything that has happened in my life has been rich fodder for this gift I’m to give. Nothing was for naught. Everything has informed.

Nothing is wasted, everything is in order, and it’s all sacred.

December 13, 2008December 13, 2008

The Soul of Coaching

On Wednesday evening, I had the pleasure of attending San Francisco Coaches Holiday Party. I was looking forward to attending simply because I love these people, my friends who also happen to coach. From the moment I walked in the door of my first meeting, I felt welcomed and part of something bigger than just me coaching my clients.

The party was intimate and engaging. The guest speaker was Harriet Simon Salinger, one of the founders of SF Coaches. The first meetings were held in Harriet’s home over ten years ago.

This was my first opportunity to meet Harriet, and I found her intelligent, witty and completely accessible. Her talk was centered around holding two questions, a very ‘coach-like’ thing to do. The questions were, “Where do old coaches go?”, which brought quite a round of laughter around the room, and “What is the Soul of Coaching?”. The second question we entertained with our table mates before bringing the discussion back to the room at large.

I found this discussion fascinating. What is the Soul of Coaching? We had numerous ideas and thoughts, just sitting with them all and not trying to actually answer the question. I found this question still intriguing me last night while I worked out. Some fresh insights then entered my realization.

I could feel, at a deep and profound level, that the Soul of Coaching is the immense capacity for human beings to consciously experience the depth and breadth of who and what we are, and in this experiencing and conscious reflection of our experiences, we awaken the parts of ourselves that have been repressed, hurt, or believed to be not good enough. In this awakening through conscious action, we not only create our lives from choices based on that inner compelling pull, but return to the wholeness that always has been present within.

I see this as the Soul of coaching, because it lies at the very foundation of our practice. We hold our clients as whole, and we hold that they have their own answers, and we hold that their awakening to wholeness is a natural and ‘given’ expression of the very nature that they are, that humans are deep at our core. As I coach, I know that every client has their own seed of wisdom that when watered and fed, and loved unconditionally, will express their unique nature.

While coaching started out with an accomplishment and success mindset, I see that goal is still valid. What has changed is what accomplishment and success mean. For me, over the past five plus years I have been coaching, my own notion of what coaching really is has changed and morphed. My work with clients has honed my skills and my vision for what coaching is and can be, and for what I know I am uniquely skilled to offer those clients that are meant to work with me.

What does this have to do with being Unabashedly Female? Everything. I see the wholeness that you are. I see the unique beauty and power that is inherent in women and men. I see the critically important need for all of us, both men and women, to live our unique gifts and to express them in the world. Life is intelligent by design, and each of us has a role to play in this design. If any one of us is living from beliefs that what and who we are is not enough or is bad somewhere deep within, then we are hiding our gifts away, gifts that must be shared for our world to be balanced and in harmony.

Women have been conditioned to believe that we are bad simply by design. That somewhere our design as women is sinful and dirty. I can’t tell you how many women I have spoken with that feel this deep within, but don’t have the consciousness to express it until we work together or at least talk about it. And, many men have spoken of the unconscious beliefs they hold about women, too. These beliefs hurt us all. They hurt both men and women. They are part of the shadow of our culture and world, and are played out every day in violent and degrading scenarios. And it all stems from conditioning. None of it is really true.

The Soul of Coaching is about holding us all as the vibrant, creative deeply loving beings we are by nature. When a coach holds you this way, you begin to hold yourself this way. When a coach calls you forth to be this nature in the world, you begin to express this nature. When you learn effective tools and practices that help you to live this nature, then you begin to live the life you were created to live.

If you are intrigued at all by what this post shares, please contact me at juliedaley at gmail.com. I would love to begin a conversation with you about how to step into this magnificence that you are.