Do you know Martha Beck?
I’ll never forget the day Martha was coaching me.
I had my knickers in a double doozy of a knot.
“What kind of lawyer becomes a life coach?”
That was the question that kept swirling in my head. Martha’s response?
“I guess you’ll just have to figure out another way to be a lawyer.”
Wait. What?
That was it. That’s all she said.
Time’s up. Now go figure it out, Lin.
That’s Martha’s brilliantly simple style of coaching and once I got over pretending I “didn’t know” what that meant or what I was “supposed to do,” I set out to figure it out, or rather, I set out to figure ME out.
It took a while.
Emotional growth spurts are funny that way: at first you feel like you’re navigating through quicksand and then, one day, EUREKA! It all makes sense.
I knew exactly how to be a lawyer who is also a life coach.
The reason it took so long to figure out was because I was all hung up on what people would say, which I imagined was some version of:
HAS SHE LOST ALL HER MARBLES?
I was also hung up on defining what it meant to be a lawyer who was also a life coach.
But what if there was no definition?
What if I was the definition? Me! You’re looking at the definition.
I am the definition of a lawyer who embraces the fact that she is a life coach and her lawyer brain, combined with her coaching skills, makes her clients experience transformations that are not only life altering but also exciting, fun, invigorating, put-a-spring-in-my-stiletto-step-as-soon-as-I-jump-out-of-bed kind of transformations. (I sleep in stilettos, btw.)
Maybe I had lost my marbles. But I kept all the HOT PINK ones!
The rest were simply not worth keeping… the kind of (boring-colored) marbles that made other people happy as long as I conformed to their definitions of who I should be.
This story is almost a decade old and I have never forgotten it. (Thank you Martha.) It reminds of the time I decided to become a lawyer, a life-long dream EXCEPT who goes to law school after having 4 kids?
Who goes to law school when she already has a successful career in television news?
IS THE WOMAN A CERTIFIABLE HOT MESS?
No. Don’t be silly. I am a certifiable HOT PINK mess.
There’s a BIG difference.
My dear gutsy GirlFriends… make shit up. Do it your way. Don’t worry about defining yourself as much as being yourself.
Lin xo
Hey Coach… have you read the preview copy of my book, GUTSY GLORIOUS BUSINESS WOMAN?