Success Stories
Below are the success stories of some of my clients. I have changed their names to protect their privacy.
From Misery as CPA to Fulfillment as a Student
Christine
My client, I’ll call her Christine, came to me at age 32. She is 6 feet tall, attractive, brunette, with kind brown eyes and was 15 pounds over weight. She was miserable at her job as a CPA. She didn’t like her boss – he wouldn’t look her in the face when he talked to her, she didn’t have a romantic relationship and she wasn’t clear about her values.
Christine didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life and she knew she didn’t want to be a CPA and do tax work the rest of her life.
She was making a lot of money and that wasn’t the most important thing to her.
She was very firm in her beliefs of God and love but she didn’t love herself. Her first husband had been emotionally abusive to her and she was hurt and afraid to recommit.
Quieting the Critical Voice
At first Christine was very reserved. She is highly intelligent and smart and as a result had a very smart gremlin / ego that kept her stuck. I never gave up and I worked to help her quiet that critical voice and eventually she started to trust herself and me and opened up.
We coached to help her stop being so hard on herself. She began to understand that she was a fabulous woman, and that she didn’t have to stay forever in a job she hated.
However, she didn’t know what exactly she wanted to do. We kept working on helping clear out all the gremlin voices that stopped her from exploring other options.
During tax season she was under incredible stress. They were short-staffed, she was working seven days a week with no breaks, and she would get on the phone and cry. I remember I kept asking her if she could last until April 15th. She took it one day at a time, sometimes one hour at a time.
A Miracle Happens
Then the most amazing thing occurred. In the middle of all the tax season chaos she came on the phone one day and told me what she was supposed to do with the rest of her life.
She was going to quit her job and get a masters in education. She made it through tax season, applied and got accepted to a great school. She quit her job working full-time for a major accounting firm, moved to a new city, shared a condo with a friend, and got a part time job making $85,000 a year.
Loving Her New Life
She is loving her new life. She’s doing brilliantly at school and definitely made the right choice to trust herself and God (her belief) and while she doesn’t have a serious romantic relationship, she is dating and in fact sent a man she was dating to start coaching with me.
Once she got clear on her values, stopped beating herself up – emotionally – like her husband had done, trusted the divine guidance she was receiving, her life – with her effort – totally changed.
From “No Life” to ” Wow, is this my life!!”
Sally
The second client I want to tell you about is a friend of Christine’s named Sally. When she started coaching with me she was miserable. She had “no life.” She was 47, a petite redhead, a workaholic and made a lot of money and had no personal life. She was very funny, but when we first started coaching, she would just cry because she was so unhappy.
Boundary Setting
The first thing I helped Sally with was boundary setting. That meant she had to start leaving the office at a decent time – 6 or 7 pm and not work every weekend. I actually had to tell her she had to take four days off or I couldn’t coach her. She was exhausted and couldn’t think. The company she worked for thrived on taking advantage of people who would work all the time. And her boss set the pace. Plus the type of job she had – project related – demanded unusually long hours.
Anyway, she took four days off and so we really got into coaching. She basically had no friends and no social life at all. She took everything personally and would cry all the time. And what was worse, she didn’t value herself and looked to others to value her.
It Was No Laughing Matter, But Laughter Helped
She had a fabulous sense of humor and an ability to laugh at herself. She finally went to a doctor and got her health back in order – her thyroid was so low it was amazing she was functioning at all.
Value Yourself
Then little by little through reading and lots of coaching she began to realize that other people couldn’t value her if she didn’t value herself. She stopped taking things personally when she realized that other people had problems too.
She asked for and received a $25,000 raise. She became really good at setting boundaries. She started leaving work at a decent hour and joined a gym, started exercising and getting massages regularly and even took a three week vacation to Tuscany that included a week long bike trip!
Love
She started dating and even fell in love and survived the guy withdrawing and leaving her without any explanation and refusing to return her phone calls. She wrote him apologizing if she had done anything wrong and realized through our coaching that he had problems that had nothing to do with her. She was very successful and educated and he had a different background and didn’t make nearly the same amount of money that she did.
She survived it and is now meeting new men that are a
better fit; and doing creative, fun projects to fulfill her creative side.
She is a different person today than she was a year ago and she’s still working with me.
From a Broken Heart to a Wise Heart
Sam
Sam was a real challenge. He came to me after a girlfriend broke up with him and broke his heart.
He had a wall of safety built around him that kept him isolated. He acted aloof and, at times, indifferent to other people’s feelings.
He was smart, successful, handsome, in great shape, and alone.
The great thing he had going for him was he was very smart, a fast reader and comprehended at a level that few people can.
New Information
Sam read every book (“Power of Now”, “Seat of the Soul”, “The Four Agreements”, “Love Without Conditions”, “The Tao of Leadership”, “Everyday Grace”) I recommended and more. All this new information gave him a new way of looking at the world. He began to understand that his gremlin /ego had kept him trapped in fear.
Through this understanding and coaching to reach his heart, he began to break open his shell and reveal that he was terrified of rejection. Here was this handsome man who literally thought he would die if a woman rejected him.
Most people, especially women, don’t realize that many men are afraid of rejection.
Through our coaching he was able to see where he was hard on himself and that he had been critical of the women in his life because it kept him safe.
Shame Transcended
We looked at how his mother had been very critical of him and how he had so much SHAME!As he read the books about shame he began to understand his pattern and started choosing to love himself as opposed to criticizing himself.
He stopped being so judgmental of himself and others. Stopped taking everything personally. His heart softened and this sweet soul emerged. A man with a kind, wise heart.
Risking Rejection
He really felt the loss from the woman who broke up with him and little by little he got the courage up to contact her and try to apologize.
Eventually he risked going to see her to try to apologize in person. And while the first meeting went well the subsequent follow up phone call was a disaster. He realized he had given it his best. He had taken the biggest RISK he could – he faced rejection, got it and survived it. He was free of the devastating fear of rejection.
Her anger – while it made him sad – wasn’t something he could change. She refused to forgive him and that, he realized, was her choice.
Open Heart
Sam is now dating other women and in the mean time he is starting another business with his friends that will offer all of them an opportunity to make extra money and have fun while they are doing it and allow each one of them to contribute their special talent.
He is happy and at peace with himself and it’s only a matter of time before he meets another wonderful woman and falls in love and experiences his new way of being and risking in the world.
If you want to excel in your career please go to the next page CAREER RESULTS to learn how coaching can help you excel in your career.