Becoming the Real You

In the early days of TransformU Coaching my intention was to be a beacon of hope and guru of personal change management. I was going to transform the world! I wanted my blog and business to be all about how I could apply my expertise to help you transform your life and become the amazingly successful person you dream of being. People would love me for it.

The cycles of life (the Universe, the Creator, God) seemed to have a different plan. How inconvenient.

Instead of launching this wonderful coaching business I was taken through my own desert wanderings, like the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. The realisation now is that the desert journey is a learning journey. It transforms the wanderer from frightened escapee to seasoned traveller, from lost in a desert to found in one’s own internal oasis.

Women, more than anyone else (namely, men) are inherently attuned to cycles. As well as the obvious monthly cycles there are other phases of your life that you cycle through. Each one of these stages brings its own set of challenges and victories.

Upon leaving childhood you formed romantic and intimate relationships and transformed into “partner, companion”. When you entered the workforce you assumed a professional role and formed a workplace identity. The arrival of your first child transformed the girl into a mother and you found yourself having to adjust to that huge new role. When your children reached adolescence you navigated another shift in the person you were becoming as your mother-child relationship took on a new form. Eventually your children began to grow into their own personhood and you felt your role turning again. Before you knew it your baby was making a baby and your budding grandparenthood begins to bloom, maybe shaky at first, but eventually it became your new world. You’ve come full circle and begin to relive the experiences of your mothering role with a different perspective - wiser, more assured, better informed.

Through each of the phases of your life you’ve had to adjust your relationships to the people around you, develop new understanding about issues, practice different skills and face new challenges. You’re constantly changing and transforming. It’s hard work, this growing up business. Humans, as a rule, avoid change. Neurologically speaking change = danger. We hate it. It’s uncomfortable, even scary, sometimes hellish, but it’s unavoidable.

And you, my lady, are an expert in transformation. You know it’s pains and you’ve experienced it’s joys. You’ve survived some nasty storms.

TransformU, in its current stage of development, will celebrate all the phases of life and explore the lessons learned in our collective deserts. Where I once sought a broad audience I now want to converse with my sisters. TransformU will be unashamedly focused on you, the divine feminine.

I watched a documentary recently about food (no surprises there) and in one particular episode the host, a talented chef, talked about salt. She said that when you add salt to any dish it brings out its inherent flavours, boosting them and giving you a fuller experience of them. Salted caramel, for example. Caramel is formed by a slight “burning” of the sugar, a chemical transformation. The addition of salt, in just the right quantity, rounds out the flavour and makes it burst on your mouth by stimulating the salt receptors as well as the sweet. Boom! Mouth orgasm!

Good people are sometimes described as the salt of the earth. Is it because, just by their presence, they help to bring out the good in others? Let’s be the salt to one another’s lives. Let’s transform our days that feel flat and flavour-less into experiences that lead to great joy.

The land flowing with milk and honey is in you, my sister. It always has been. We can find it together as women have done since the dawn of time. We are endowed with the gifts of procreation and nurture. There is a deep knowing, a wisdom, an eternal connection. We are stronger than we were lead to believe and more powerful than we know. Each one of us hold the keys to our own transformation, to cycles and to new growth.

My tagline has always been “Transform You, Transform Your World”. That still stands but my understanding of the process now is that YOU can transform you when you know that someone has got your back and believes in you. That’s the real role of a coach.