Treasure hunt.

All of us are on a treasure hunt, to find what makes us happy. Some are obvious, like money, a job we enjoy, good health.

Some are less obvious. The stuff money can’t buy.

We need a balance of both if we want a joyful, significant life where we flourish and our lives feel valuable to us.

Creating a life that feels good.

Creating a good life can be challenging at times. Each day presents both easy and difficult choices.

We end up being just a series of choices we made over the course of our lives.

Perhaps it’s why we ask ourselves two questions each day. 'What did I achieve today?' 'What did I enjoy today?'

Stop chasing.

We’ve been taught to obsessively chase goals and outcomes. Outcome thinking is a disease in our culture, and people often fail to feel happiness, despite their success.

My work is based on the opposite principle.

Start finding.

Process thinking is learning to enjoy the present moment while we plan for the future, putting our focus, sincerity and care into every step. The quality of the journey becomes the goal.

And the good news.

With this approach, you still reach your goals:)  You’ll just begin to notice it’s a more enjoyable and effective way to move through life.

Life is all about perception - how you feel and react to your circumstances.

We all get into well-worn routines, that don’t serve us and we need to pause, figure out the current landscape and re-adjust.

Sometimes we learn through success.  Sometimes we learn through failure.

Perhaps the most important piece is the insight we get from our experiences and how we move forward with that new information.

The three principles my coaching system is built on.

Mindfulness Whole Life Coaching integrates three principles.

• Mindfulness

  You spend most of your life inside your head. Make it a nice place to be.

•  Fulfillment

  Finding meaning and satisfaction from daily life.

•  Empowerment

  Viewing the world from an empowered stance, making values based choices and taking effective action.

The two pathways my coaching system is built on.

Both paths lead to the same destination - Happiness

1. Being: Internal Personal Growth.

   Your mindfulness compass.

   
   

It’s about happiness, purpose, inspiration, meaning,

Thinking is handy, as it allows us to make plans and solve difficult problems. It is also the source of tremendous anxiety when not used properly.

Our mind get easily lost in endless thinking and worrying. Our thoughts create emotions like fear and sadness. We lie awake at night worrying about what might happen tomorrow. We can't stop thinking about mistakes we made last week. In our minds, we are constantly busy with the future.

These are a few examples of how our minds make life difficult.

Mindfulness helps us create a different relationship with our thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

This leads to a happier state of being.

2. Doing: External Personal Growth.

Your road map.

It’s about your vision, goals, strategies and inspired actions. The journey.

This is empowering action - effectively your road map. Where you take your values into the world and create new opportunities and experiences for yourself.

My method encourages honest reflection – an opportunity to understand, explore, and fine-tune yourself, without the usual distractions, pressures and judgments.

You incubate new ideas and experiment – it’s exciting – and rewarding, even when things don’t go exactly as planned.

We take a deep look into your operating system, and delete any old software that no longer serves you.

It’s about possibilities, big or small that help you live a more enriching life.

The first three months.

We generally focus on 4 foundational areas.*

1. Deep dive discovery process (your map and compass)

2. Mindfulness ( bringing the practice into daily life)

3. Process versus outcome thinking (A better way to achieve results with less stress - enjoy the journey)

4. Values exploration (get clear on your values and your high-level motivators.)

* Coaching includes access to my private secure online coaching portal with a tangible, interactive workspace that facilitates communication, supports performance and gives you productivity tools, inspiration and ideas to guide you holistically during the process.

It also gives you access to your coaching account anytime, from any device and at the end of our work together you receive a complete history of your coaching results and journey.

Benefits of long-term coaching from a client’s perspective.

Robert was running a start-up in California. We worked together for one year. He shares some of his insights below on the process.

What is the single most important benefit or breakthrough you received from working together?

Seeing things more clearly: seeing me as an equal player in the world rather than a diminished player. This was a result of practicing awareness, supplemented by reflection in your journaling process, on our calls, and through your questions. 

What stands out most about the experience as a whole?

You simultaneously held a non-judgmental space for me – accepting me as I was – and pushed me out into the world. You listened well, reflected well, and asked questions that helped get down to the core of issues, giving me a fundamental and clearer understanding of things. I never felt impatience and that was critical to building trust.
I also really appreciated that every call was productive, even if I didn’t have an agenda. You asked great questions that always led to some introspection. You are a master of creating space for exploration; pushing at the right time. Always supportive. 

Some other standouts

1. Weekly meetings: for me, very important. I’ve developed habits over the last 35 years, and I see that constant attention to changing them is what works for me. 

2. Focus on curiosity: a powerful tool for both opening and settling into myself. Tinkering around the edges. An ever-widening circle, and the further I go the more I realize that there is nothing to hold on to, that things are ever-changing, that the human experience is beautiful and diverse and that “I’m perfectly ok as I am, and there is room to grow”

3. Identifying blockers and working to remove them: uncertainty about what I “should” be doing… we explored those issues.

4.. Feeling cared for: I felt that you genuinely cared about me and my growth.

5. Values: identification and development of my values and using them as a framework in my daily decisions
Practicing what I want to become! That is the reality. 

6. Awareness of the preciousness of life: things could end at any moment, so live “fully” now (and I feel that defining “living fully” was what all of our work was about)