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Category Archives: Coach

Fear and sitting

I’ve been deep in the middle of work on my “tea stories” and my coaching business. It’s incredibly exciting and energizing. And, at the same time, I’ll be honest–a lot of fear comes up: the fierce fear of failure that comes up when I go for my dreams.

Along with looking fear in the face, I’m watching my baby grow–and out of this mix come certain thoughts. Here are a few from the period (a few months ago) when William was learning to sit.

Sitting

My baby is learning to sit. At first he sat precariously posed like a little frog–his arms and hands splayed out to keep from toppling over. He wobbled there for a moment, and then, in slow motion, tipped over.

Sometimes, after toppling to the floor, he cries. At other times he tumbles over without complaint, only to find himself on his stomach–and then begins to cry.

Feeling

Each time he cries, I remember a lesson I’ve learned over the years: how important it is to feel my feelings. Whenever I try to stifle fear, frustration, or other “negative” feelings, they go underground, where they sabotage me in other ways: Instead of writing or working on my business, I fritter away time on administrative tasks. I hyperfocus on some minor issue until it drains my emotional energy, read articles on the web for hours, get sidetracked by Facebook, or spend the day “researching” with a barely-relevant historical novel. But when I actually let myself feel my feelings, they run through me. I’m borne along in their intensity, drenched in the storm. And then, when the storm passes, I feel a deep, clean calm.

This is what I see in William. When he’s upset, he cries. He doesn’t suppress his feelings. He doesn’t stew. He lets his feelings out, and then he moves on.

Failure

He keeps trying, keeps failing, and keeps learning. As he learns, I learn too. There’s the obvious lesson: he’s learning because he’s willing to fail again and again. There’s another lesson: even though every attempt to sit ends in failure (he always topples over eventually), in the overall scheme of things, he is succeeding. As time passes, he sits for longer and longer without wobbling–longer and longer before he tumbles to the floor. Day by day, he’s transforming from a baby who can’t sit to one who can.

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Why play? How one workaholic became a convert

Over the years, I’ve realized that to feel fully alive, I need to play.

I wasn’t always someone who thought about play. For years my life had centered on work. College at Princeton, grad school at Columbia, building a writing career and a comfortable life as a freelance writer… I’d pursued my goals with a fierce, unbending work ethic.

Then came the winter of 2007. I had just ended a five-year relationship. It was December, and the days were dark. Except for long overtime hours at a freelance job, I was holed up in my apartment. In every spare moment, I was clearing out clutter, assembling new furniture, reading books on how to recover from a break-up—working obsessively, as it were, to heal and move on.

I couldn’t bring myself to spend time with my friends: the last thing I wanted was a deep talk about my feelings or my life. All I wanted was to hibernate until the pain had passed.

Then, one day in January, I got an e-mail. It was from a meetup for Harry Potter fans, a group I’d joined during the hoopla around the seventh book release—and later forgotten.

“Ice Skating in Bryant Park: Put on your best themed fineries or character costume, wrap that striped scarf around your neck, and join us at The Pond!”

Somehow, that appealed. Quirky. Fun. No strings attached.

There’d be no need to talk about heavy topics with a group of total strangers, and if I didn’t like them, I never had to see them again.

But, I did like them. They were friendly, down-to-earth, and not afraid to have fun. Nothing like the social maladjusts I’d imagined each time I saw those robed, witch-hatted adults outside bookstores, lined up for the midnight release of the latest Harry Potter book.

Over the next weeks and months, I fell in love. Not with a person, but with the fun I was having. We followed a screening of Sweeney Todd with an excursion to a Lower East Side meat pie shop. We commemorated Harry’s disastrous Valentine’s Day date by taking high tea in elegant dress. We played Quidditch, sliding through mud and tackling each other to catch the Golden Snitch.

And one afternoon in March, I realized I was happy. Not just going through the motions of recovery or managing to forget my misery for one afternoon or evening… but genuinely, fully happy. Standing in my kitchen, alone, with the clear spring light coming through the windows of my apartment, I loved my life.

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