Welcome to
LifeWalkerCoach.com!
I can’t even begin to tell you how
excited I am to announce that LifeWalkerCoach.com is live and to welcome you to
my site! As some of you already know, there
are many firsts involved in this endeavor: my first website, first blog, and
first business…
And you know
what? I’m having a GREAT time!
This new path as a life coach is
something I am passionate about and feel very strongly can be helpful to many
people regardless of age, career stage, or life circumstance. All it takes is
openness and honesty and we’re both on a new journey together. I find that very
exciting and fulfilling, which makes this work a joy to do.
My path here has been somewhat tumultuous because I had to get through many of the issues that, as a life coach, I now coach others through. But in the end, it makes me a better and more in-tune coach than I otherwise probably would have been.
My path here has been somewhat tumultuous because I had to get through many of the issues that, as a life coach, I now coach others through. But in the end, it makes me a better and more in-tune coach than I otherwise probably would have been.
Ever have life get in the way of your plans?
I did and it blew my world apart! Within a period of 18 months:
- My husband was laid off from his job as a civil engineer
- We endured nearly 8 months of his unemployment
- He relocated back to California for work (we were in Louisiana for my faculty position at the time)
- I stayed behind to finish the academic year
- His mother died of melanoma
- I left my faculty position early to return to California to reunite with my husband and care for my terminally ill mother
- My mother died of complications from breast cancer
- We bought our house here in Anaheim Hills
- I dealt with resolving my mom's estate
- We sold our Louisiana house and mom's house
Holy Crap! What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
right?
I knew the odds of finding a permanent
full-time faculty position within a reasonable commuting distance of my
husband's work were very low given the nature of the academic job market, so I
had to decide whether to pursue it anyway or find another way.
After a year as an adjunct at a local university and much
soul-searching, I realized I couldn’t continue in academia in this way. It was
too painful for me to no longer teach full-time and be a full faculty
member. In addition, I had serious ethical issues with the trend in higher
education to replace tenure line positions with adjunct positions to save money
and avoid paying benefits (a process I refer to as the "WalMartization of
Higher Education", but that's a whole other blog...).
So I decided to leave academia and had to figure out a new path.
It took a lot of crying, grieving, anger, fear, and hopelessness, but I did
eventually work my way through it all to a happy and healthy place. And when I did,
the solution presented itself as if by magic, which, as I have come to learn, is pretty much the way the
universe works when you let go and let it do its thing!
In fact, life seemed to have been leading me here all
along…
The answer was life coaching, and my previous life as a professor
and advisor gave me plenty of unofficial training and experience that prepared
me well for this path. To formalize my training I signed up for, and recently completed, 9 months of phenomenal life coach training through the Martha Beck Institute, and hung my shingle "LifeWalker Coach is open for business".
If I had known about life coaching while I was going through the
year and half from hell with all of its transitions and traumas, and then
having to eventually reinvent myself, my path here would have been much
smoother.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t have gone through the grief, anger,
fear, hopelessness, and crying, but there would have been a hell of a lot less
of it and over a much shorter period of time. Sometimes my stubbornness is
definitely not an asset!
Rather than let others struggle as I did, my mission is to help you avoid some of the pitfalls I fell into and make the process easier, even
if just a bit. That is what LifeWalker Coach is all about and why I am doing
what I’m doing. I can help.
It’s Your Path
Find it. Live it. Love it.
Find it. Live it. Love it.