Life Coaching and Counseling

Life Coaching
Coaching can help you become the architect of your life, and reverse the well-worn path of circumstances that has been pulling you along. What does coaching include?

• assessment of the important aspects of your life today
• exploring options for change
• weighing decisions that are realistic and healthy for you
• designing goals that will lead to fulfillment for you

When is Life Coaching useful?

 

Life Transitions
Sudden crisis, death of a loved one, job loss, relocation, even an empty nest and growing older: these are times when support and understanding go a long way. A willing listener, seasoned and experienced, ushers you through the transition, and offers the guidance that life coaching can offer.

Downsizing -Embarking on a move to a smaller home
This is becoming a widespread phenomenon, especially among baby boomers and seniors.

The challenge comes in deciding how to deal with 40-some years of accumulated treasures, furnishings, and memorabilia. These things must be organized and incorporated into a new configuration, and the remainder sold, donated, discarded, or stored. It’s a daunting task, overwhelming and often filled with emotion.

It’s important to approach this with both sensitivity and a plan. Evaluation of what is most important to the individual’s dreams, goals, and heart helps to begin the selection process. Some form of inventory starts the organizing process.

Step by step the household is categorized into stay, go, and maybe. When possible, an in depth look at the new home allows the person to envision, in a concrete way, how to integrate possessions, where to store things, how to make it home.

I am uniquely qualified to assist with these decisions, utilizing both coaching principles and experience helping clients who are facing difficult life transitions. I have made moves of my own household and liquidated the households of elderly relatives. I am qualified to provide the thinking and decision support needed for downsizing. The packing and physical transport is left to professional movers.

Coaching for Women
With many years of experience in the area of women’s psychology, I understand the difficult decisions that women encounter, as they try to fulfill many obligations, while aspiring toward personal growth and self-manifestation. Balancing their own needs and others’ often results in women relinquishing dreams and talents in favor of service.

When a woman reaches the crossroads between focusing on others vs. her own aspirations, it’s useful to step back, evaluate the beliefs and rules that she has imposed on herself. Often, it’s helpful for an objective person to act as a sounding board and evaluate the legitimacy and fairness of these assumptions. Frequently women feel that it’s selfish to take time and space for themselves, and this is lethal to their own accomplishments.

Women seeking a transition to fullness and blossoming of their imaginings are ideal candidates to work with a coach who is steeped in the nuances of psychology/sociology/biology/culture/history. This is an intensely interesting and important area to me.

As your Life Coach, it would be my pleasure to assist in whatever your journey may be.

Coaching for creative expression
Creativity in itself is a broad concept, not limited to popular definitions. You could be a musician, sculptor, or writer. Or your creativity may take the shape of aesthetic movement, healing, guiding others, or whatever your imagination and soul bring forth.

When you are being creative, you may feel a direct connection with your deepest self. No one needs to give you an instruction book. In many instances, it wells from you uncalled, and is immediately recognized as fresh and right. Creating from your center is a spiritual moment, whatever your beliefs. If you yearn for this and are at an unproductive point, a shift may be needed for you to approach or return to that inspired state. This change may take the form of place, peers, silence, freedom from demands, or some other uniquely personal choice.

There is some truth in the idea that environment can influence the suppression or outpouring of creativity. For example, one may take a risk and depart from the mainstream of local norms, and meet with judgment, rejection, and isolation. The experiment may be abandoned at that point. Conversely, artists, seekers, or healers who are surrounded by creative peers, are stimulated to new ideas and adventures that are welcomed.

Thus, as you search for tactics to get your juices flowing, look carefully at where you are and what comrades can be found.

Coaching is intended to help in the discovery of your needs and wants, to assess how well you are addressing them, and to support changes that will lead to incorporating these elements into your life. In coaching for creativity, the question is, “What can you do to nourish the connection between you, your spiritual self, and the inspiration that emerges joyfully from you?”

Counseling

Relationships
Communication may have deteriorated; concern and respect seem to have disappeared. A fresh understanding of each other could potentially make a difference; or it may seem hopeless. This is where a counselor can help you decide if something can be changed, or if it’s best to end the relationship with the least harm to everyone.

At times, what began as love evolves into something very different. When a marriage or long-term relationship flounders or dissolves, there are feelings of loss, loneliness, anger, and regret. Counseling can help with self-evaluation, understanding what went wrong, and healing.

Abuse is an unfortunate element in some relationships. Women in abusive relationships may feel confused, embarrassed, and believe there is no choice. Adult victims of childhood abuse may experience profound impact years later. Counseling can help clients sort out feelings, improve self-esteem, and learn to make healthy and safe decisions.

Individual Counseling and Life Coaching:

P.O. Box 274 Guilford CT 06437
Contact: WhitmanLPC@aol.com

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