what I learned from my life coach

How this all happened is honestly the weirdest story.

Oh Joy is a design blog based out of Los Angeles that I read occasionally and last year Joy shared how her life coach had helped her overcome some creative issues. At the end of that post, she offered readers a chance to win two hours with her coach and on a whim I applied. I didn’t end up winning and forgot all about it until a month ago when I received an email.

I assumed it was spam (but opened it to see what sort of spam it was, haha) and it was actually a message from the life coach. She said that my application had stood out to her and wanted to know if I’d still be interested in a two hour session!

While I wasn’t sure what to expect (how does one prepare for a session with a life coach via webcam?) I accepted because I figured it couldn’t do any harm spending two hours with someone who wanted to help me grow. Our first session was more or less getting to know one another, our second session ended in the middle of some major self-discovery, and so in total she gifted me eight hours of her time.

The biggest a-ha moment was this: I thought all of my recent opportunities had nothing to do with me or my work. Like, it was all happening to me instead of because of me. She helped me understand that the doors opening in my life are opening because I’m knocking on them. It was a huge realization that is still causing waves in my life.

Ever since that realization, I’ve shifted away from “I wonder what’s going to happen next” to “I wonder what I’m going to make happen next” and now when I look back on the past few years, I see that the good stuff happened because I put in the work.

Without turning this post into a very long, very wordy self-help essay, I want to share one more insight: the want is more important than the how. We often get overwhelmed because we’re not sure how to achieve something, but we shouldn’t focus too much on the how. Instead we should focus on our want because our want will push us into deeper realms of creative problem solving. The want is more important than the how. Steve Chandler has lots of good stuff on this topic right here.

I’m so thankful for this opportunity and the insight that it gifted me. So many doors have opened this past year and now I understand that it’s because of my talents and abilities. In true I-grew-up-in-church fashion, it reminds me of this Bible verse:

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened.” - Matthew 7:7