Coaching Topics
I help clients who are facing a wide variety of circumstances. These topics touch on the main situations I come across, but it is by no-means the total extent of how I can help you.
Topics
Couples (ELI assessment):
Is your relationship running on fumes? Have you stopped fighting, or does everything start a fight? Are you feeling like a glorified roommate who does the cooking/cleaning/chauffeuring/etc? With CLARITY COACHING I will help you understand how your energy or moods are potentially contributing to the break down of your relationship and potentially sabotaging it. You will learn/develop tools and skills to help change the cycle of your relationship and to help you begin to genuinely thrive for possibly the first time in your relationship.
I believe we are all perfectly imperfect and what that means is that you CHOOSE who you want to be with and you can choose to love them in a healthy way that allows you both to thrive and to have both of your needs to be met. It takes intention and it takes purpose to have a healthy relationship. Thriving relationships do not happen by accident, they happen because you choose to show up consistently and you put in the time, effort and vulnerability.
Working with me will allow you to walk away from our coaching sessions with a tool basket full of techniques and skills to help you look at your relationship with a totally different perspective. It will give you the ability, if you choose, to have a relationship that is mutually fulfilling, thriving and happy, where you both work to meet one another’s needs and as a result you will find a dynamic you never realized you could have, one that is built around mutual respect, care and love.
Communication:
Do you ever walk away from conversations feeling like the other person totally misunderstood what you were trying to say? Or that you get defensive while talking with someone and that wasn’t your intention, but you don’t know why that’s happening? Maybe you find you keep on hitting a wall trying to convey your thoughts and feelings and people don’t seem to understand you.
When you work with Clarity Coaching, I will be very respectful but I will be honest, I will help to work with you on how your words/tone of voice/body language is perhaps sabotaging you unintentionally while communicating with others. I will work with you to figure out where the blocks are occurring. You will also learn to convey your thoughts and feelings in a more logical way.
Learning to find the break downs that are happening in your conversations so that you can interact with others more clearly and articulately, to enjoy peaceful interactions, logical confrontations. And the last important piece is understanding better why and when you get defensive and whether or not it serves you, to then be able to remove it or to work with it using logic, and being clear.
Boundaries:
Do you find you are coming away from social gatherings exhausted, or mad? Or you find people keep taking advantage of you? Maybe you feel you’re constantly giving more of yourself than you intended and that leaves you feeling drained, exhausted and/or manipulated, you might need some lessons in developing healthy boundaries. Although these situations are all too normal in our society, they do not have to be YOUR norm.
Boundaries are a very natural and normal part of life. However, the reality is sometimes they can be very hard to understand, tough to put into practice and intimidating if you aren’t confident with them. The very people we need to put boundaries in place for are usually the people who will challenge and push back against those boundaries the most when you try to implement them.
This negative response makes it very discouraging to implement boundaries and very intimidating to stand your ground. But your voice deserves to be heard. You deserve to be part of the relationship in a mutually respectful way and that includes having your needs met and your boundaries respected. Developing healthy boundaries is challenging, but it is EXTREMELY rewarding. They eliminate unwanted drama, toxic relationships and it gives you back the power to be treated how you want to be treated. Implementing healthy boundaries removes the toxic – one situation at a time, one person at a time.
Think about when you clean your house, you can’t snap your fingers and all of a sudden the house is clean. But if you start in the kitchen, before you know it the kitchen will be clean, and you move on to another room and before you know it THAT room is also clean and before long you look up, you turn around and your whole house is clean. Did it happen immediately once you decided to clean it? No. Did it take effort, stick-to-itiveness and intentionality?
Yes! Boundaries are the exact same. It doesn’t happen right away, it takes time, hard work and effort. But before long, if you are consistent, you will look around and realize, there is peace and calm in your life and relationships, for perhaps the first time.
Self Advocacy/Healthy Confrontation:
Do you ever find you walk away from conversations feeling like you’ve been emotionally steam rolled? Or talking to yourself about what you might have said or what you’ll say next time? Or maybe you experience a deluge of self-loathing thoughts and frustrations that you cannot seem to stand up for yourself.
When you work with me we will use several different styles and methods to encourage you to build your confidence in standing up for yourself and learning healthy confrontation skills in a way that feels safe and authentic for you to be able to use your voice and have your feelings/thoughts/opinions heard and not disregarded or invalidated.
Life Transitions:
Life transitions can mean anything from being a parent who’s child is becoming a teenager, to starting a new job, to separation, to the loss of a parent/loved one. It could mean developing a new food allergy that is going to change your whole dietary world, to moving to a different country and having no friends or family.
Life transitions happen often (whether big or small) and they can take on many different forms. The thing they all have in common is that they can cause tremendous stress and upset to your day-to-day flow. Having someone walk through these transitions with you and help you find excitement, opportunities and positive challenges, instead of stress, problems and complications will change the entire outcome of how you view and remember these pivotal times in your life.
You can remember them with optimism and embrace them and the self growth opportunities they bring, or you can resist, you can go through them stressed out and in a cloud of emotion and miss the growth potential, the opportunities and the positive, fun moments.
Life can become so monotonous, and so routine. When new opportunities come along to shake things up and get a little creative you have the opportunity to seize these opportunities with big eyes, open hearts and out stretched arms, OR you have the ability to get scared, become stressed out and emotional and in turn become frazzled, racing through the transition without purpose, or enjoyment. How would you prefer to experience transitions that life brings your way?
Growing Your Business:
Whether big or small, full or part time, solo-preneur or corporation, starting and growing a business takes a lot of time, effort and discipline. There can be SO many moving parts that you feel you need to address all at once that it can be extremely intimidating and overwhelming to know what to tackle first, what things are important and what things you can hire out.
When you work with me, I can help flesh out the important things, we can create manageable plans of action from week to week, and I can help you with big picture goals of what you are wanting long term and how to get there.
Complex Family Dynamics:
Do you always feel stress or anxiety when you have to go to a family function? Do arguments and fights always break out and you find yourself in the middle of it?
Family dynamics can be extremely challenging and complicated for SO many different reasons. The main thing to remember is that IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE! Learning skills and strategies to combat and be proactive against complex personalities and dynamics is a must in order to genuinely enjoy, not only family members but family gatherings.
Toxic Relationships:
As we age, friends and acquaintances tend to get a bit more complicated. Life/kids/partners/jobs etc start to change the tone of people and how they are able to interact with others. A friend who was bubbly, happy and supportive in high school might become tainted, cynical and bitter into adulthood depending on what is happening in her life and her circumstances to make her become a bit more jaded and negative.
Recognizing when seasons of friendship might be over, or when friends have stopped adding benefit or positivity to your life is very sad and confusing but it can be very helpful and can provide you with a great opportunity. We do not have space in our busy lives for innumerable friends, so therefore, if you don’t have space for everyone, that naturally means you have space for a specific number. If you are holding space for someone who is negative, or tares you down, discourages you or makes you feel less than to build themselves up, that person is holding space of a potential friend that could be supportive, encouraging, adventurous and a light of optimism and happiness for you.
If you only have space for say 3 really great friends would you rather them be negative, discouraging and toxic or would you want them all to be encouraging, supportive and uplifting? I think most people would choose the latter. Unfortunately though, sometimes there are those negative ones that get through the door, or maybe they started out being great and become more negative as life dealt them a few hard hands.
What do you do? Do you allow those people to stay? Do you allow their negativity and hurt to bleed all over you and your life happiness and wins? Do you take actions/steps to say “I care for you, but I cannot allow this behaviour to influence or affect me anymore?” Cleaning house of toxic relationships is extremely challenging, it takes time and a lot of intentional effort, it IS extremely worth it in the end though.
Learning to remove toxic relationships is rewarding, empowering and the tools you learn, you will take with you for life and they will help you respond faster in the future before allowing these people into your life in the first place. You will start to see these people more clearly immediately, and you will learn to fiercely guard that inner sanctum for those who earn their place because they love you, they encourage you and you are a better person for having them in your life.
Job Satisfaction:
Job satisfaction can be a very challenging life dilemma. It is not something to take lightly or disregard just because it would be tough to change. It IS complicated though, because sometimes getting a better job could mean a pay cut, a lifestyle change or uprooting the family and moving. It’s very important to recognize that there are always things you can do to find that job satisfaction and happiness again.
Staying in it and remaining unhappy and unfulfilled is never a good place to sit and stay, life is too short and our work lives are too long. Find something that make you happy, or create a plan so that you can eventually get to where you want to be.
Life Satisfaction:
There are so many things that can affect our life satisfaction. It could be one major thing, or it could be just a bunch of little things that are all piling up and causing you an immense amount of unhappiness. In a society that changes by the day, and keeping up with the Jones’ is running up everyone’s credit cards, our jobs don’t pay enough and you might be coming home to a messy house with a partner that doesn’t value or appreciate you, it’s SO easy to understand that feeling of extreme disappointment: disappointment in life, disappointment with your partner, disappointment with your job, disappointment with what you have (or don’t have).
It’s so easy to miss all the good, it’s so hard to shift your thinking and it’s so hard to climb yourself out of that hole that feels too deep. With Clarity Coaching, I have tools to see where the discrepancies are, and we can really hone in on those pain points that are robbing you of your daily joy for life. We will talk through what the blocks are and how we can move past or eliminate them and how we can shift your thinking to see things differently so you can get back to a place of peace and satisfaction.
Career Change:
Career change is HUGE, it can be daunting, it can be extremely stressful. As our world has gone through a major pandemic, it has given us a major gift in that, if you weren’t happy at your job before it has allowed people the ability to stop, pause and think about what they would rather be doing. While that last sentence might sound lovely and uplifting, It’s not that simple in reality. The reality is that a career change takes a lot of courage, research, and definitely planning (education etc).
Once we enter the work force it takes up both the majority of our life but also the majority of our youth. It is so important to make sure we love what we do and that if having job fulfillment is important to you, that you seek out a job that serves your values and goals but that it’s also a place you love to be. Life is too short to be another cog in a wheel if you want to be the horse or the wagon. Clarity Coaching will help you talk out what your values are and what is important to you.
You might find its something completely different than job satisfaction, you might find it’s exactly what you thought it was and I can help piece it out and create a plan for transition, you might find you love where you work but want a different role within the organization. There are so many possibilities but having the courage and space to ask questions and be vulnerable may be what you need to explore this topic and create a plan for success, long term.
Retirement:
You are either someone who thinks “who needs help with retirement? I’m literally living for that day and daydreaming of everything I’m going to do.” Or you’re someone who’s thinking “I’m terrified. I could have retired 5 years ago but I have no idea what I’m going to do, how I’m going to fill my time or what will fulfill me. It will feel like such a confirmation that I’m no longer needed or relevant.” These are such big and scary thoughts that plague people going into retirement. It haunts people. It keeps people up at night.
These questions are totally normal, these fears are totally normal, and if you were someone that really felt fulfilled by your job or your title it would make sense that you would continue to work, rather than think about the unknown and all the question marks it would invoke. When you have proudly worn the hat of employee of the month/year, president, social worker, teacher, nurse for sometimes 3-4 decades, and were VERY good at it and were constantly affirmed of that, not only would you not know how to be something else, you wouldn’t WANT to be anything else. This role is familiar, it’s comfortable, you have seniority and respect, you know what to expect, you could walk the halls in your sleep, you know the smells, the sounds, the people, once you think about leaving that role all of a sudden you’re left with big question marks.
You no longer have control, familiarity, you no longer know what to expect and that can be 100% terrifying IF YOU DON’T HAVE A PLAN! Creating a plan can shift your mindset from terror and fear to curiosity, which can then lead to opportunities and it can open you up to a whole new world of things you never realized you were interested in because you had one hat that you held on to so tightly. You will come away with a plan, a new outlook and the ability to slowly and cautiously dip your toe into the world of retirement in a way that feels authentic and optimistic to you not terrifying and/or unattainable.
Journey to Clarity
If anything that I’ve said resonates with, excites or makes you even a little curious, connect with me today so we can schedule a FREE discovery call to begin your journey to CLARITY.
You’re a Rock Star!
Erin