Étiquette : life coach

Publié dans Coaching, Goal Setting, Health, Mental Health, Reflections, Sam's adventures

Passion: Finding and Pursuing it

Publié le par Snowrose

I’ve been listening to the audiobook “Prudence” by Fr. Gregory Pine OP recently. This, combined with life circumstances for myself and friends, has led me to think. I’ve been reflecting on the importance of pursuing your passion. While I believe there is an inherent need to work for the sake of supporting yourself or your family, I think it is wrong to settle. I don’t mean to be critical here, but I want to encourage true flourishing. In my opinion, it is a disservice to yourself and others to stagnate when you could be living a more genuine and fruitful life.

Why find your passion?

This is an important question to address. There is a trend these days to wanting to “live your best life”, but social media does not give a foothold on what this really means. In my opinion, living your best life is one where you live a life full of meaning (and the psychological sciences tend to back me on this). If you are living life, looking to the future for some place of happiness and contentment, you are missing the point. Life exists here and now in the present moment. When you are living out your passion, meaning is vibrant and service is life-giving. You may have hard days, but they don’t wear you down, leaving you empty.

What is your passion?

Some people have a clear idea of their passion, but not everyone does. Your vocational needs and state in life impact how you can live out your passion, but neither prevents you from finding it nor pursuing it when the time is right. There are many ways you can choose to live life and serve through work. Sometimes you will need to work for the sake of work, and finding your passion will come from reflecting on those experiences. In short, I believe your passion is the intersection of your interests and talents. In practice, this is actually a pretty broad space that will need discernment and reflection to narrow down.

A Venn Diagram of the intersection of Interest and Tallent showing Passion.

There are resources you can use to help you identify where you will flourish most, like the amazing work of Patrick Lencioni: 6 Types of Working Genius. I think this is an excellent tool to help you discover your passion and how to live it out most fruitfully. In general, though, if you take time to explore and really think about your interests and talents, you should find an area of overlap. The options of work that crop up from that overlap are where you are most likely to find something truly life-giving and meaningful.

A personal example:

After years of tumult accompanying my husband’s journey through mental illness and a career change, I found my passion, and he has found his. I personally realized that I am most interested in psychology, helping others, theology, and the arts. These have intersected with my talent for teaching, synthesizing information, art, and supporting others in this beautiful, budding business. I absolutely love this work and find it refilling.

My husband, after working in crime prevention, hoped to one day be a police officer, and looked at what he had enjoyed most in his jobs when he realized that was not a realistic option. He chose driving and went into the trucking industry. I can say long-distance trucking is NOT a family-oriented career, but he has finally found a position that he LOVES that suits our family’s needs. From wanting to clean up the streets of crime, he has discovered that his interests and talents overlap beautifully, keeping the streets clean… of garbage. He comes home satisfied even after a hard and messy day.

Want help finding yours?

If you aren’t sure where to start, come and see! As a coach, I can help you live out your best life and move towards flourishing and wellness.

Find out more!
Publié dans Coaching, Goal Setting, Health, Mental Health, Sam's adventures, Stress Management

Exciting update: Grow Your Happiness

Publié le par Snowrose

Publishing soon!

Over the past two years, I have been steadily working on a book titled “Grow Your Happiness.” In this book, I offer a method of increasing your baseline happiness through intentional gratitude. The front matter explores the scientific literature on dispositional happiness (the day-to-day baseline happy feeling you return to after ups and downs) and how gratitude can increase that.

The book is almost ready for publication and will be published in September!

In “Grow Your Happiness”, I have made the scientific information accessible and easy to read, despite citing over 20 studies and primary sources. You will learn the real impacts of this virtue on the happiness you experience. Next, after exploring how gratitude can make you a happier person, you will find 365 prompts. These prompts were intentionally chosen to increase the breadth and depth of this important virtue steadily over time.

A sneak peek inside:

I’ve given the book a sunflower theme, with earth tone colours. There will be a Kindle edition in plain text for anyone who wants to use their preferred journal. I chose the sunflower theme to symbolize the journey of growing happiness. Sunflowers are beautiful plants whose blossoms always look towards the sun. After all, they need direct sunlight and grow into huge flowers that brighten up any space they are planted in. Accordingly, I hope that everyone who uses this journal can also look at the proverbial sun of gratitude and blossom into happier people!

Here is an example of the journal theme:

I hope that this book will reach many people. I believe it will make a dramatic impact if used intentionally. Gratitude is such an important virtue! Although this book focuses on increasing dispositional happiness, the research shows much more. There is research coming out showing that gratitude can positively impact your relationships, health, and more!

Publié dans ADHD, Coaching, Goal Setting, Sam's adventures

Captured busy!

Publié le par Snowrose

My goodness! My well-intentioned goal of writing and contributing to this blog weekly has most certainly fallen through! This is a great place for my own self-reflection on the past season and look ahead to how I can do things differently next time.

First things first: why am I sharing my own pitfalls with you, dear reader? Well, to show that even if you look put-together, life is a process of learning and growing… for EVERYONE! I think what caught me off guard with this particular goal was a divide in my focus. In establishing this business, I’ve been working at the turtle’s pace, bit by bit. It started as homework for my Master’s degree in my “flourishing and development plan”, as a simple portfolio of my art, and has slowly blossomed into something bigger– and a little more immediate than my eventual goal of becoming a fully licensed psychologist. In the last few months though, I’ve had a lot of clarity for the direction I want to take this up-and-coming business to really hit the ground running. That’s where I stumbled: too many ideas at once.

Maintaining Balance

It’s always tricky with ADHD to see where the balance in that divided attention can be maintained. I’ve personally found my many interests and ability to hyper-focus to outweigh the impact of diminished executive function, especially when I take the steps needed for the support I require. In this case, I definitely bit off more than I could chew. So what now? Well, I’ll use a very helpful tool that DMU (Divine Mercy University) introduced me to in that same “flourishing and development plan” homework. WOOP!

No, no, I don’t mean to just exclaim exuberantly, though really it is a sound I make when I’m excited. WOOP is a really helpful system designed to take goal setting to the next level. It stands for:

So let’s WOOP my goal together:

Your WOOP Summary
Your Wish: Have an active blog
Your best Outcome: I’d write posts at least once a week
Your inner Obstacle: Getting distracted by other priorities
Your Plan: If “Getting distracted by other priorities” then I will “Choose a day to write and that be the business task”

Want to WOOP your goals too? Here is the practice space!

Publié dans Coaching, Goal Setting

What is life coaching?

Publié le par Snowrose

Unlike sports, where a coach directs the team to encourage growth and hopefully skill within the rules of a game, life comes without such clear cut direction. A life coach is someone who is given the opportunity to ask questions that facilitate growth while maintaining accountability in the direction that is right for you!

Do you feel satisfied in your life? Are you driven to accomplish your goals? Do you have motivation to fulfill your inner calling? If you answered no to any of these, a life coach can be of great assistance! Working together, we can sweep away the confusion of the demands of modern life and open a path to fulfilling your goals and achieving your dreams.

In a one-on-one context, a life coach can work with you to uncover what is stirring in your heart as a priority for this season of life, and give that fine tuned attention. In a group, you benefit from witnessing breakthroughs in each other and additional accountability towards the goals you have set for yourself. No matter your age and stage, a life coach can help you flourish and grow!

Have any questions? Want to work with me? Contact me! I’d love to hear from you. 😀

Let’s art the journey together!

Publié dans Reflections, Sam's adventures

Why “Snowrose blossom”?

Publié le par Snowrose

Some people choose business names that are catchy, others use their names, others still use something related to the product or service they are offering. So, why “snowrose blossom” for a life coach, herbalist and aspiring psychologist? On the surface, it is to represent the blossoming of the human person into flourishing and wellness, a blossoming of sorts. Snowrose, now that has more of a story!

Long long ago, in middle school, I got permission from my school principal to take high school language classes Saturday mornings at a high school. I was obsessed with Japanese culture and history, and jumped at it the moment I learned that I could take classes to learn Japanese. Yes, I was, in fact, that much of a nerd that I got up every Saturday morning and went to learn Japanese for 5 whole years. How much do I remember after not using it for a decade? Not a whole lot, but that is ok!

忘

れ

ま

す

During my classes, my friends and I came up with some OC (original characters) based off of their and my favorite anime at the time (Cough… Inuyasha… Cough… though I think they were watching Naruto). My OC’s name? 雪 薔薇 (Snow Rose). I chose this name combing two of my favorite things in nature, snow and roses. Creative, eh?

Yes, those are in fact images I created in photoshop as a teenager to show the mystery of this OC… and the made up magical flower known as the snowrose. From that point on, my gamer tag was either Yuki Bara or Snowrose and I embraced this as an expression of a facet of myself.

Fast forward to the year I turned 30, and I learned that what I had thought was a made up flower that imbued the essence of snow into a rose shape… was actually the name of a real flower!

Serrissa Japonica: the Snow Rose

Photo: NCU. “Serrissa Japonica; Snowrose”. https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/serissa-japonica/

This revelation genuinely blew my mind. Not only was this flower delightfully beautiful, it was a real, bonified, not made up flower… native to JAPAN! To top it off, it was not just a flower, it was a SHRUB! Now, to those unfamiliar with the British Comedian group known as Monty Python, go find them on youtube and have a good laugh. To those who are familiar, I was OBESSESSED with “The Holy Grail” in high school… and in particular, the knights who say NEE, or rather, the knights who now say Ikikipootangzoopoing.

Photo: Reddit. Mame Serissa Japonica (Snow Rose) – My First Bloom! https://www.reddit.com/r/Bonsai/comments/r8fb6n/mame_serissa_japonica_snow_rose_my_first_bloom/?rdt=53973

My new favorite flower then became the ACTUAL snow rose, Serrissa Japanica. This name represents my own journey to blossoming and flourishing, living out my life’s calling to help others bloom into the proverbial flowers they were made to be!

Let’s journey together and BLOSSOM like springtime!

Publié dans ADHD, Goal Setting, Mental Health, Sam's adventures

What am I all about?

Publié le par Snowrose

If there is one thing that I am passionate about, it is helping an individual heal, grow and flourish. I can’t say that I have been on this road for very long, but the more I travel it, the more I realize, “yep, this is for me”. Over the last 4 years, I have had the privilege of accompanying my husband on his healing journey battling mental illness. Let’s be clear, I am no spring chicken, I’ve had my fair share having gone through major depression caused by chronic illness in my mid-twenties, and Post-Partum depression after my son was born… but there is something different walking with someone else. Was it easy? No. Was it fun? Eh, not really. Was it worth it to get to the other side and really experience them beginning to flourish and grow? You bet.

My husband and I both came into our marriage knowing we had no idea what the heck we were doing. We grew up in broken families, with divorced and remarried parents, stability wasn’t really our forte. I can’t say we did it right, but I can say we tried our best in the first years. After miscarrying twice, we had our son, our little rainbow baby. That’s when my husband’s mental health took a turn for the worse. You see, he had been working shift work for more than a decade by that point, had undiagnosed sleep apnea and the physical implications of that were really starting to hit the fan. Add in a little munchkin bundle of joy? Well, I learned that you start reliving your experiences of childhood… and either embrace them and grow or repress them and get pretty stuck in who you are. For my husband, mixing those with a toxic work environment, some added family struggles helping extended relatives, a little COVID Isolation, and well, it was enough to reach the breaking point.

It was this journey of accompanying him that set me on the path I am on now, determined to be there and accompany those who are ready to take the next active step in their lives. It took us 4 years, many hurdles and hardships, a lot of grit and even more grace, to get here, and I will never look back. Now that he has been symptom-free for almost a year, we are building a healthy home based on accountability, forgiveness, gratitude and trust; we are learning as we go and overcoming obstacles along the way. I am homeschooling our son, studying to reach my goals, and building my business.

I have to say that starting a business based on art, healing, growing and flourishing, is also not easy, but, it is oh so worth the efforts. I am loving coaching, and making art. It may be a small start, but it is the right direction and I look forward to meeting all the beautiful people who will come and join me on this path.