Episode Details

This is another, I wanted to wait until I was ready, kind of post.

One of my friends referenced the opening line of my very first essay over here at substack during class last week. The sentiment resonated with her, and many of our peers. 

I decided to become a life coach shortly after starting this blog. I hit publish on my very first post over here in May, and started class at the end of June.

It isn’t something I’ve been building up to for a while. It isn’t something I even fully had a grasp on before I started researching it. There are definitely times in my life when I’ve thought of coaching as a little out there and made up. I couldn’t have been farther from the truth.

For the last few months, as I’ve gone on these two journeys, I’ve wondered, “okay, how am I going to write about life coaching? How should I talk about it? Will people think it’s bad that I only started a few months ago? Does that discredit me somehow? Should I hide the fact that I just got certified?”

No, I shouldn’t. Because that wouldn’t be authentic in the slightest. It wouldn’t be very wild, cozy, or free. My cocktail party, representative self doesn’t get to tell the story of why I became a life coach, and when I became a life coach. 

“How am I going to prove myself?”

I’m not here to prove myself. I’m just here to tell the truth.

The truth is, if you had told me that I was going to be a life coach at any point before mid-June of this year, I would not have believed you.

Somewhere around this time, my mother announced that she and my dad had decided that I should go to grad school. Not those exact words, but that was the gist. I’m sure she remembers the conversation differently, and has a much different take, and will text me to say so the minute she reads this.

Me: “I don’t think I want to.”

Her: “Maybe just go anyway.”

For many reasons, I decided that it would be easier to entertain this idea than to shut it down. I’m a recovering people pleaser. It’s what we do best. 

And yet, the idea of giving away my freedom (dramatic, I know.) and going back to school willingly for grad school was absolutely a non-starter unless I LOVED what I was studying and could really see a career advantage. 

Essentially, I needed a compelling reason to invest the time and money. And my parents’ thinking that I should go was certainly not a compelling enough reason.

Right around the time that my mom eventually independently realized that “maybe I shouldn’t go to grad school if I wasn’t 100% committed”, I ironically took a trip to surprise one of my friends at her graduate school graduation ceremony. 

It was an incredibly emotional, beautiful, fun weekend. And also incredibly exhausting. I felt like a CIA agent trying to pull off the surprise and coordinate things in the exact right way. Later on in the weekend, once we were reflecting on the surprise and all the logistics that went into things, my friend's fiancé (another close friend - we all went to college together!) jokingly admitted that he decided to stop responding to my texts at some point, while we were planning. Honestly, I support that decision. I was trying to plan things on a granular level, down to the exact minute we would surprise my friend, and the exact words we would say.

After the graduation festivities were over, I decided to stay in Chicago for a few extra days. The timing of the trip worked out really perfectly, because another friend of mine was actually starring in a production of Pippin at the time! I asked if I could stay with her, and she recommended that I stay with her parents who live in the neighborhood and have more space as emp