Melissa Walker of Heyday Coaching pens a monthly blog with tips for helping you achieve your own peak success, happiness, and vigor.
Many people are also thinking deeply about what they want their lives to look like after the pandemic. I hear it from some of my clients. They do not want to go back to the “old normal” when many of them were over-scheduled, overworked, and overwhelmed. As one client told me, “The Covid shutdowns have taught me that rest is good, hyper busy is bad.”
This pandemic has prompted me to reflect a lot on the name of my business: Heyday Coaching. . . . Then we were hit by a global pandemic and the accompanying economic collapse. Like most everyone I knew, I felt (and sometimes still feel) mired in a state of limbo. What happens when a heyday is not possible? I realized that there are lots of time when achieving your “best life,” your ideal life, is impossible. For people navigating cancer treatment or a divorce, caring for an elderly loved one, struggling to survive a personal economic crisis, and lots of other challenges, I wonder if my language about helping someone achieve a personal heyday feels like one more impossible aspiration. Should I really be calling my business “Heyday”?
As a life coach, I’m particularly fascinated by the ways people harness their gifts to carve out unique and meaningful careers. Sherrill is one example of that. I also thought that many of you would be interested in knowing more about graphic recording whether you’re interested in trying it out or in bringing a graphic recorder into an organization where you work. I asked Sherrill to share a bit about her work.
My friends at Hub City Writers Project asked me to contribute a post for their Sheltering in Place blog. I wrote about the mental health benefits of walking and my own walks during the Covid19 shutdown. You can read my post here. I’m sharing some of the photos I snapped on my pandemic walks.
Not all questions are created equal, of course. Some kinds of questions are very directive. They tend to invoke narrow perspectives or even to make the person who is questioned feel defensive. Open-ended questions, on the other hand, invite a person to approach a problem from a new direction or to use a new lens to look at a situation. Open-ended questions are powerful, so powerful that in coaching, we call them “powerful questions.”
This week I’ve been trying to keep my focus on the things that haven’t changed—on the points of continuity in my life. Life will go on. This too shall pass. In the words of the fourteenth century saint, Julian of Norwich, who witnessed an outbreak of the Black Death: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
In the past few weeks, two of the thinkers who have influenced me most have given me a new perspective on that word. Writer Parker J. Palmer and journalist Krista Tippett have both talked in podcasts about the Greek origins of the word apocalypse. The Greek word apokaluptein meant to uncover or to reveal. (Thus the English translation title of the last book in the Christian New Testament is Revelations.)
How is everyone doing? Thursday of week two seems like a good time to check in. And if you’re like me, it’s been a week of ups and downs. Little ups and pretty big downs. I’ve had spells when I was weepy, spells when I was restless and couldn’t focus on anything, and spells when existential anxieties threatened to take over my mind.
It feels like life has stopped. We were living our lives, moving from one thing on the schedule to the next. We were taking steps to achieve some important goals—maybe haltingly or maybe swiftly and confidently. And now this. And it feels like whatever progress we’ve made these past months has been swallowed up in a sea of uncertainty.
I’ve written before about my tendency to expect the worst, so it won’t surprise my readers to know that I’m struggling to cope with the uncertainty and fear generated by COVID19. And I know that’s true for just about every one of you, too. And one of the things I do best is curate information to share with you, so I thought that might be one way I could help you (and me) cope. This special edition of the blog is a compilation of the best advice I’ve seen over the past few days. There are lots of resources here, so you may want to digest one or two at a time. Dip into all the collective wisdom here.
That title is a play on words, and you have to read on to learn the meaning. Last spring, some of the folks who responded to my reader survey asked for some stories from real clients. So here you go: an interview with a pair of clients I worked with in 2017 and 2018. Many of my clients come to me via word-of-mouth, but a few—like Julie and Jed—are folks I’ve been acquainted with in the past.
Photo by Karin Endert
I'm pretty organized. That skill enables me to plan ahead, and most of the time, I can get the work finished in a timely manner. But sometimes the best-laid plans go awry. I had most of this newsletter ready a week or so ago with plans to get a blog post done this week. And then life happened. It's been a busy month with new clients and a number of workshops to facilitate. And then a tornado hit my town.
No one in town was seriously injured or killed, and my husband and I are among the lucky ones. Our power is out, and we have an unfinished basement full of water. There's going to be some annoying and time-consuming clean-up in the next week or so. But lots of our neighbors have trees on their houses or cars, so I'm not going to complain.
Once I found some wifi, I had planned to churn out a blog post today (Saturday), just in time for Monday's newsletter. But as I struggled to write, I stepped back to remember the advice I give my clients when life happens: give yourself a break, admit you can't do it all all the time, and move on.
So I'm doing just that. Signing off and hoping you'll be satisfied with a cute picture of my cat.
Image by Jean P Mouffe from Pixabay
What have I learned this year? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself each December since I began coaching.
To answer that question, I spend some time reflecting. A lot of my reflection is sort of stream-of-consciousness thinking as I go about my day, but each year, I do a little journaling around specific questions. My list of questions evolves a little each year. Here are the questions I’m asking myself this year:
What were the best things in my life this year?
When did I have the most fun?
What accomplishment from this year am I most proud of?
What task(s) did I take on this year that I wish I had not taken on? Why do I regret it?
Who were the people who energized me and fed my soul this year?
Who were the people who drained me?
What were the things I wanted to do this year and didn’t? Why didn’t I do them?
Sometimes I work on these questions over several days because as they percolate in my head and my heart, new things occur to me. After some time thinking about all these questions, I begin trying to draw out the lessons from the year.
As I write this post, I’m still in the middle of reflecting, but I’ll share a few of the lessons that are bubbling up for me.
Just because I can do something capably doesn’t mean that I should do it. Some tasks drain me instead of replenishing me. I want to give back to a world that has given me a lot, but I need to give back in the ways that are nourishing for me, not in the ways that drain me.
I am not my work. Most of the best parts of my year had nothing to do with my work.
Nonetheless, my work does feed my soul. Many of the most energizing people in my life this year were clients.
I’m a slow learner when it comes to not overcommitting myself, but I am learning.
Spending more time petting the cat is good for both of us.
How about you? What have you learned this year? I’d love to hear from you in the comments section. And in the meantime, I’m going to shut down the computer and pet the cat. Happy holidays!
Right now, I’m working with two clients who are on the verge of launching their own businesses. Both of them have carefully crafted business plans. Each is highly trained in her field and has spent years building a solid base of experience. Both have taken wise steps to lay the groundwork to enable them to hit the ground running. They’ve done their research, consulted trusted advisors, and organized their finances. They are eager and committed. They are ready. Yet both have recently said to me, “I’m afraid I’m making the wrong decision.”
A few weeks ago, I asked an accomplished client who is feeling stuck in her current job, “What are your dreams for your life?” “That’s the problem,” she said. “I just don’t know.”
Recently another client explained that she didn’t have a clear sense of her next career move. This client is also quite accomplished. Throughout her career, she has taken the right steps to move forward—the right degrees, the right jobs, the right decisions for her family. But somewhere along the way, she has lost the ability to hear that inner voice that whispers her personal dreams.
Coaching is about helping clients find their own answers to the dilemmas they face. Asking—rather than telling—is central to helping people listen to their “inner teachers” and find their own answers. That’s why one of the first skills you learn in coach’s training is that of asking powerful questions. A powerful question is one that invites the client look at the situation in a new way and discover new possibilities and fresh insights.
During July, one of my yoga teachers encouraged her students to stop at least once each day to savor the delights of everyday experiences—eating an ice cream cone, smelling fresh cut grass, the feel of clean sheets. Katy urged us to link this practice to our five senses. I’ve loved this idea, and ever since, I find myself pausing several times each day to savor an everyday delight.
In How Women Rise, Helgesen and Goldsmith identify twelve behaviors that often prevent female professionals from achieving their goals including expecting others to spontaneously notice and reward your contributions, overvaluing expertise, and ruminating over setbacks, feedback, and interactions. They offer concrete strategies for adapting behavior in ways that better serves women and those they are leading.
A few months ago, I listened to one of my favorite podcasts, “Women at Work” which is produced by the Harvard Business Review. In this particular episode, the hosts were interviewing Therese Huston, the author of How Women Decide, a book I reviewed on my blog a couple of years back.
Huston discussed the challenges women face in making decisions—particularly the various double binds we face--and she offered some strategies to help women make challenging decisions. One of those strategies was the 10-10-10 method.
