Brightly colored flowers are of utmost interest to my little one and on this recent summer’s eve, he got a hold of a deep purple pansy and a shockingly bright orange lily. After he explored their texture and taste with great focus, we continued on our way, me careening his contraption recklessly over buckled sidewalks, him loosely holding onto his flowers with his arms out to either side in a T position.

Then something changed for him, for after a few moments, he quickly and with no apparent afterthought, dropped the flowers.

I paused briefly, wanting to scoop the flowers up – they were SO beautiful! – in order to hand them back to him so he could enjoy them again. But I am learning that I can trust his decisions and how important it is to be respectful of his choices. He would have communicated a preference to go back if he had dropped them accidentally or, more to the point, he simply would have kept holding on.

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I have been holding on to Get There From Here through a period of time when it has not been my preference. And not just this business, but this coaching profession, too. And my identity as a coach.

As a matter of fact, in my mind and in private conversations, I have dropped this most beautiful flower repeatedly to see how if felt, only to quickly scoop it back up again, not fully aware of my deep wants and needs and not willing to release what is still beautiful.

I am ready to let go now.

When I first deeply and fully admitted that to myself, I felt the huge tidal wave of relief that shows up when truth is both spoken and heard. Indeed, I have felt such a deep sense of freedom over the course of the last month or so that I know I am moving in the right direction.

Concurrent with freedom, however, has been disorienting panic. For about two years I have been receiving internal and external messages that a new path awaited me and whenever I’ve had the courage to consider those messages, I always felt reassured that my current path would gradually merge with the next one; in fact, I have assumed it would be a pretty obvious and clean cut evolution. As of yet, that has not happened. I have very little clarity about what’s next and by choosing to bow to the internal truth that it’s time to lay aside this particular way of professionally operating in the world prior to knowing which professional way will open up next before me has meant that my ego has had to take a hit.

I am hopeful, however, and believe alongside Parker Palmer that:

“We have arrived at the heart of a paradox: each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up. All we need to do is stop pounding on the door that just closed, turn around – which puts the door behind us – and welcome the largeness of life that now lies open to our souls.”

As of September 25 (exactly six years to the day that I began my coach training), the doors of Get There From Here will officially close. This website will remain indefinitely and I can be found at the same email address for some time. If you’re looking for coaching, I can recommend some of the most talented and heart-centered coaches out there.

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In closing, let me tell you what a joy it has been to love and to serve in this capacity over the last six years, to dialogue with those of you have been my readers and to coach those of you who have been my clients. The training and practice of coaching has prepared me well for this move but it has been the lessons I have learned alongside my clients and the gift of bearing witness as they’ve owned their own truths that has so powerfully reinforced the importance of continuing to live into the life that calls to me.

Thank you for the many rich gifts you’ve brought to my table and blessings to you as you continue to create and respond to the stories that bring meaning to your life. I’m so glad to be beside you in this good and necessary work.

With Love,

I never intended for over four weeks to drift by before publishing part two of this three-part series. Especially since I’d written a draft about one week after the first. So what’s been the hold-up?

Well, as the italicized box says above, I promised a personal development reflection from childbirth. And, as I said, I wrote one. In it I drew parallels between staying present through 50+ hours of unmedicated labor and staying present to the difficult circumstances of our life. This draft had a lot going for it: humor, pathos, nuggets of wisdom. You probably would have liked it. But what I wrote just wasn’t true. Sure, my points were valid and cogent and I wasn’t wrong…I just wasn’t really in the right, either. Because I wasn’t speaking my deep, soulful truth.

Childbirth – for me, at this point – cannot be boiled down to a blog post about staying present. I do not want my “nuggets of wisdom” to be the first, and possibly last public words I offer on the subject. The entire birthing experience was so transformative, so impactful, so highest-of-the-highs and lowest-of-the-lows, so personal and messy and intimate, that I may never write much about it publically at all. To be sure, I will not write about it unless and until what I can write is true. Authentic. Offered from my soul.

The takeaway for me in this is pretty simple: be real. And if I can’t be real, I need to stop talking, or writing. I need to wait. To listen. If there is something to give voice to, there will be a time and a place and way to give it voice.

I suppose that this reflection does indeed connect to my experience of childbirth. Because childbirth – at least the kind I experienced – strips you of any pretense. It’s just you – the real, earthy, bodily you – wading through the ancient waters of all humanity to bring forth the voice of your baby. Which, for the moment, is all the truth I have to offer on the subject.

You know how pregnancy happens, right? In general, there’s a man and a woman and, if you watch too much TV, some Axe body spray, some Wild Turkey Bourbon and then presto! Nine months later a baby appears.

If you’re like me – and lots of you are – you pretend you can control your life. If you’re like me and you’ve done the pregnancy thing, this control thing extends to the entirety of the conception process. There’s the food you eat, the supplements you take, the underwear your partner wears, the correlation with ovulation, the good thoughts you think, the symptoms you’re certain you feel.

The misery you make.

I made myself miserable for most of the nine months we “tried” to get pregnant. On one level, I knew better. Conception is a mystery. Well, not from a scientific standpoint. But the fact that a physical body begins it’s journey in another person’s physical body as the result of a physical (and hopefully loving) act still blows my mind away. The fact that these physical bodies also harbor souls is even more outrageous. Nonetheless, I chucked all that mystery out the window and felt increasingly deflated each month I wasn’t pregnant. So we stopped trying. At which point I got pregnant. To this day, I shake my fist at the gods and roll my eyes at the irony.

Not being in control is a lesson I’ll likely be learning all my life. Here’s the heart of what I’ve learned so far: we are responsible for showing up – something that, yes, often means we prepare and arrange and influence – but we cannot control the outcome. We cannot control whether we get a job or find a spouse or recover from an illness or have a baby. We cannot control our future. Or even our present.

Thankfully for me, the control reflex I struggled so hard with through the conception process greatly diminished once I became pregnant. I entered a sacred space of waiting and preparing. And it is here that I embodied  this concept of not being in control. I really didn’t need to do a damn thing aside from being generally healthy (and even the parameters around that are rather lax) and my body automatically fostered the growth of a child. It also fostered intense nausea and food aversions, 40 lbs of weight gain, overwhelming fatigue, increased blood volume, flawless skin and fluctuating hormones…none of which I could control had I tried.

(Me, 8 months pregnant, unable to control my need to eat half a hoagie a mere two hours after breakfast.)

This experience of myself through conception and pregnancy is changing the way I view my clients and their goals. Being so obviously outside of control has informed my understanding of what it means to create, to transform – or rather, to be transformed – and I’m left asking you: Can you allow that you might not be in control of the life or business or even art you long to create? That you are responsible for showing up, for waiting and preparing, whatever that might mean, but that you cannot force a desired outcome?

Shortly after I gave birth, I was talking with a friend who had a baby around the same age. Marveling at our beautiful newborns, she said, “Can you believe we did this?” I smiled, agreeing, before realizing that I don’t actually believe I did do this, not in the fullest sense. I was never in control of this process or responsible for the outcome. The Great Mystery brought forth another being – “life’s longing for itself,” in the words of Kahlil Gibran.

All I did was show up.

Here’s a peak at me with my son, Sevi, during those early weeks:

The most amazing thing about spending time with my son has been watching him rapidly evolve from a sleepy, totally-freaked-out-by-this-new-world-outside-the-womb newborn into a social, delighted and fairly organized three and half month old. Yes, he cries, he fusses, he gets bored but the hallmark of this last month has been joy. Pure, unabashed joy. This kid smiles like there’s no tomorrow!

At first I thought this joyful nature might just be some evolutionary tool built in to ensure parents don’t abandon their kids. Infant care is, well, a lot, and if kids didn’t progress from sleepy, fussy lumps into engaged, social creatures with smiles that win their parent’s hearts, we might have a shortage of toddlers in the world, if you know what I mean.

I’ve since come to another conclusion. Yes, a child’s first smile is no doubt timed just right to keep parents healthily attached, but when those smiles unfold into a picture of that pure, unabashed joy I was talking about, I think it’s actually pointing to something deeply important about who we fundamentally are. Our inherent nature is one of joy.  All the time we spend worrying and fretting and organizing and controlling and forcing and accomplishing is understandable. But on one level it is not even real. It is certainly not essential.

Of course, I write all of this in the midst of my own anxieties about combining work with being a breastfeeding mother and having a child who is somewhat bottle-adverse. My husband and I are trying to sort out childcare and I was up every two hours last night. I’ve felt somewhat miserable all day. That’s not to mention that most of my pants still don’t fit and I have existential concerns about the life and death and well-being of my child. Sometimes it’s hard to feel remotely sane, let alone joyful.

I am also aware that with each year, Sevi will have experiences that hurt him and wound him. Like all people, he will feel the need to erect walls for protection. He won’t smile quite so frequently as he gets older and that open, trusting stance will become damaged. He will undoubtedly move away from his own most essential nature and need to work to reconnect with it.

Perhaps the gift of  parenting an infant – at least this infant (my mother will tell you horror stories about my oldest brother who cried for six months straight) – is demonstrated in the fact that I can walk down the hall, pick Sevi up and get immediately high off of one of his delicious smiles. I have easy access to this reminder of my own essential nature and therefore I have easier access to a way of peeling back the layers, letting go and experiencing the fountain of joy within.

For that – and for Sevi – I give immeasurable thanks!

Over recent months, I’ve gradually pared back my professional activities, choosing to  follow my intuitive awareness that I needed extra space to integrate and consciously sink into this new reality. I ceased new business development in May and wrapped up existing client work earlier this month. And since then? Since then I’ve largely been dragging my heels. I have this excellent to-do list written on the back of an envelope of final tasks I need to complete prior to taking a maternity leave. But for days and weeks I’ve found complete inertia when it comes to checking these items off the list. I just haven’t been ready to temporarily close shop. Or to have a baby, for that matter.

I look ready!

But now it’s time. 85% of babies are born in the two weeks before or after the official “due date” and I am now less than two weeks away from my own due date. While most first time mothers go a bit late, my own mother always went early and there’s really no telling whether labor will begin for me today or in three weeks. Importantly, rumor has it the baby won’t wait simply because I’ve resisted setting up my email auto-responder or changing my outgoing voicemail greeting. But I also (thankfully!) now feel ready. There’s been both a physical and emotional shift in the last week and I’ve had the desire and focus to tackle my list.

So as of the end of this week, consider me on hiatus. I intend to be entirely out of commission for August and September and very possibly October, depending on how my body, mind and spirit respond to this experience of bringing a child into the world.

May these upcoming weeks for you be filled with light and goodness. I look forward with anticipation to establishing the next chapter of Get There From Here with you all upon my return!

Journaling has never worked for me. I see the value, I love writing, and the potential for self-discovery is alluring, but I just never took to it. And yet, my logophile type-A self longed for a way to organize my thoughts by putting words on paper.

Enter: creative non-fiction, a.k.a. the personal essay. Free writing in a journal left me unsatisfied, but working to polish an essay of my own design felt productive and gratifying. I found the real magic happened in the revising, a critical component that was missing with journal writing. During revision is when I can examine my own thinking, challenge myself, and gently force myself to settle on some clarity. It’s where the beauty would bubble up as I played with the sounds of words and construction of sentences.

Even better, by shifting my attention from drafting to editing, writer’s block evaporated. It doesn’t matter what lands on the page the first time around, because the bulk of the discovery comes in crossing out phrases and tweaking my word choice and adding specific details that bring everything to life. The draft is just the creation of raw material that facilitates the alchemy.

This process of self-discovery through personal essay proved so rewarding that I created a business around it. As a teacher working with high school students, I saw too many of my kids dreading the college essay, putting it off and stressing out about getting it perfect and finding the whole ordeal dreadfully dull. That doesn’t fly with me. Writing should be exciting.

When they gripe about not knowing what to say, I remind them that that’s the whole point of writing in the first place. It’s not to dazzle the admissions committee (or your boss or your audience) with the number of “fancy” words you know; it’s the process of figuring it all out. Knowing everything at the beginning would be boring; exploration and the discovery of some unexpected truth is electrifying.

So we make an attempt. (The secondary definition of essay, by the way, is to attempt or try. Perfect, no?) We spew out words and see how they arrange themselves, and then we go back and see what they tell us. We add and subtract and transform, and by the end, we uncover the why or the what that prompted exploration in the first place. We essay the discovery.

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Olivia Lindquist Bowen is the Founder and Director of Education for the Royston Writing Institute. She founded RWI to help students find and express their most compelling stories in their college application essays, while learning the mechanics of great writing that will carry them through college and beyond.

A client of mine happens to be in education and is facing this exact conundrum this summer. How does she tackle the big chunks related to her deeper dreams that the academic year doesn’t allow for while honoring her deep need for fun? She expressed heightened anxiety related to this and so I offered her the following thoughts via email.  You might find them useful, too.

See if you can release the outcome(s) at all. In other words, be responsible for putting in the effort to work toward your goals without being attached to whether or not they are reached.

Consider breaking down your goals into much smaller chunks so that they are manageable. Keep breaking down each goal/interest aread until it’s actually something you could check off a list in a day.

Experiment with creating a daily/weekly schedule. Perhaps Mondays and Fridays are play days. You can be flexible with it, but if it keeps you focused and keeps the anxiety at bay, it’s worth sticking with it.

Be willing to let some thing(s) go. Look at your list of goals/tasks and sit with it meditatively. Center in and ask your heart what experiences it is truly longing for. Only keep those items that naturally rise to the surface. If they all rise to the surface, ask your heart how you can honor those wishes.

As I wrapped up my email to this client, I added one final thought: Don’t forget that you can’t do life perfectly. You’ll always be experimenting and recalibrating and finding your way anew.

What measures do you put in place to keep moving forward with your dreams while practicing really solid self-care?

Every night I make a little barricade around myself of pillows, including a small one underneath the side of my belly. As if turning over while this pregnant wasn’t challenging enough, bringing the pillows is a veritable athletic feat. Which is why that doesn’t always happen.

It’s also how I’ve come face-to-face with an internal drive to create stories about this child I have yet to meet. This is how it goes:

• I find myself in the wee hours of the morning, having switched sides one more time, this time having neglected to bring my belly-supporting pillow
• I notice that I’m turned halfway onto my stomach – the belly needs support somehow! – and so everything is a little squished
• I’m uncomfortable
• The babe is moving around like crazy – rapid, strong motions
• I interpret this movement as discomfort

The only real “fact” here is that the baby is moving. But instead of putting a period at the end of that sentence and being done with it, I make meaning out of it, I make up a story: the baby is uncomfortable because there’s not enough room in this position. There’s no way to know if this is true.

Many of the stories we create – and we’re creating them ALL the time – are generally harmless. The slope, however, is slippery. When we insist on maintaining an interpretation of any fact we are creating limits that may not be fair. In my case, I’m already deciding what this child likes and doesn’t like. That may be a relatively innocuous thing to do in utero, but this could easily slide into a rigid understanding of who the child is moving forward. I could make all manner of untrue assumptions that affect how I parent.

The best way I know to move through all of this is with curiosity. Creating narratives is important and natural, but I choose to remain curious about my world and about how I interpret my world (although there really is no difference between those two things). In the case of the active child, I might ask:

• Why else might this child be moving?
• What reason might I have for assuming it’s the result of discomfort?
• Is it possible that only I am uncomfortable?
• How might I experience this movement without constructing a narrative about it?

And you? Where do you tend to create fiction out of fact? Is it useful? Or might it be limiting you or another person? Consider coming up with another interpretation or maybe, just maybe, releasing any interpretation, if only for a moment.

Truth be told, the book is not the easiest to read. I’m missing a lot of historical context and terminology which makes the political maneuvering difficult to comprehend without creating flow charts and keeping a cultural dictionary nearby. Thankfully, however, Orwell keeps much of the narrative focused on the action of war. Toward the end of the book, he reflects upon a skirmish in Barcelona this way:

“When you are taking part in events like these you are, I suppose, in a small way, making history, and you ought by rights to feel like an historical character. But you never do, because at such times the physical details always outweigh everything else…What I was chiefly thinking about was not the rights and wrongs of this miserable internecine scrap, but simply the discomfort and boredom of sitting day and night on that intolerable roof, and the hunger which was growing worse and worse…”

The narrative of our lives is centered in the mundane. It is hard to be conscious of the greater stories unfolding while we are in the midst of them because we must eat and sleep and talk and work and laugh and clean. This does not mean that we are not undergoing transformation or making a significant difference in the world. It simply means we’re human.

Niko is on the left; Malcolm on the right.

Exhibit A: As soon as the nieces and nephews arrive, Malcolm disappears. Hours later I discover him hiding in the dark basement, very willing to be pet by me but clearly asserting that he will not make any appearance on the main floor until the craziness is gone.

Exhibit B: Niko, a much more social cat, tolerates the attentions of all the children, especially the devoted affection of my two year old niece. But after learning his ABCs and retiring into his shoebox for a nap, he proffers a hiss at her smiling face as it moves within inches of his own. She gets the point.

As humans, our boundaries are often not so clear. We are very often much less persistent than cats in the face of internal or external pressures and often our boundaries become overly flexible or overly rigid.


If my cats could speak human, I have a feeling they might offer these few salient points on the topic:

• Be clear on what you really want (e.g., breakfast at 8:00am)

• Communicate that expectation clearly (meow at 7:45am)

• If there is no favorable response, reassert yourself (meow obscenely for 20 minutes)

• If continued roadblocks are encountered, remain clear on what you want, but seek out other avenues (find another being who is able to utilize the can opener or choose to eat tulips and then vomit them up on the dining room table)

I suppose it really boils down to knowing what you want, going after it and treating others who might be involved in loving and respectful ways, even if it means there might be disappointment or hurt (part of being an adult means trusting others to manage their own feelings). Without that, we run the risk of always operating at the whim of others or walling out the people closest to us. In either case, having poor boundaries prevents us from getting to the stuff that matters.

Are your boundaries clear and managed well enough that you’re getting to the important elements in your life?