Today, I want to share with you the 5 Things that almost ALL of my coaching clients are grappling with right now, one way or another. 

It’s such a privilege to have a backstage pass to the circumstances of so many other people’s lives. Although I never would have expected this when I originally trained as a developmental coach, the tremendous gift of doing this work is feeling so so SO much less alone in the things I am going through, too.  Not only that, but the conversations I have week in and week out allow me to track the trends in our experiences as ever-evolving women and help others feel less alone as well.  So, my intention in sharing these things with you today is to point to our commonalities in the hopes that you can find your place among us who are all, in our own ways, muddling through.

Here we go:  5 Things My Clients Are Grappling With Right Now

1) Losing themselves and finding themselves again in motherhood.  They are grieving what no longer feels possible – at least right now – because of the demands of early motherhood.  They are trying like hell to discern what to hold on to:  can I still have the career I desire?  Can I still drink hot coffee in the morning?  Can I write?  Can I rest?  They are reckoning with the fact that there are some parts of themselves they’ve been longing for that are like the shed snakeskin; the burst-open chrysalis:  no longer able to contain their bigness.  They are mapping out the edges of that bigness:  what is possible now?

2) Feeling the onslaught of midlife.  They are walking the initiatory fires of the middle years which (I am also realizing myself) have a way of being relentless.  It’s a parent in hospital and a kid having a mental health crisis and a troubling new health issue and the rollercoaster of perimenopause.  Those of us who are the children of Boomers Who Didn’t Talk About These Things are feeling gobsmacked by the at-times-impossibleness of modern midlife.  No one told us.  Like the new mothers in my practice, the midlife women I work with are being called to become big enough to hold the complexity and immense difficulty they’re facing.  They’re realizing that all the tools and the resources and the resilience they’ve learned over the years doesn’t hold a match to the storms of these middle years, and that instead they must learn to come undone and remake themselves, again and again and again.

3) Realizing they can’t keep pace with capitalist, patriarchal white supremacy anymore.  The things that they used to be able to do – and even want to do – without a second thought are becoming impossible.  It’s becoming impossible to juggle it all, have it all, do it all, be it all.  And though us rebelhearted ones might like to think that it’s empowering to give those systems of oppression the finger, the truth is: we live in those systems and we were raised by those systems.  Saying no, choosing rest, setting boundaries, disappointing people or letting go of dreams is hard.  There can be tremendous grief as we realize that we can no longer survive (let alone thrive) in the only environments, relationships, workplaces or communities we’ve ever known.

4) Learning to trust themselves.  We all have a Knowing.  Some of us have more access to it than others.  Most of us are denied access to it in a culture that dominates our brains and bodies with information and expectations.  And not enough of us are surrounded by people who will honour and uplift our wisdom.  Though we’re separated by a screen and sometimes by thousands of kilometres, I imagine myself with an ear pressed to my clients’ hearts, with my eyes scanning between the lines of what they share with me, listening closely for their Knowing.  “I hear you there. I hear your clarity.  What do you already know?  How do you know it?” is the chorus of so many of our sessions.

5) They’re learning how to live in an increasingly unrecognizable world.  No one can deny it any longer:  the world we expected to live in, to raise our kids in and to grow old in, is crumbling before our eyes.  It’s hard to know what matters anymore; what will matter in ten or twenty years.  Every single one of my clients is simultaneously broken and broken-open by this.  This time is unprecedented in so many ways: it’s difficult and it’s grief-filled, AND, as with all edge-times in our world and in our lives, it is filled with generativity and potential.  My clients are radically reprioritizing their lives, they’re doing work that makes a difference, they’re raising kids who don’t fit into the status quo, they’re advocating for justice and liberation within the causes they’re passionate about, they’re unsubscribing from the paradigms and ideologies that have harmed them.

All of this sounds hard, and it sounds heavy – and it’s true that most people come to me when life has gotten to be more than they alone can hold.  But it’s my job to also see all the ways that these things are not just breaking us – they’re making us.  It’s my job not to bypass the challenges that face me and all of us – but to set out every day with a search light, looking for what glimmers in the dark.

That’s the prayer that I whisper as the candle I light before every client session sputters to life; that’s the intention that I set for myself and for all of us as I walk through the woods or before I set my feet on the ground for the day.

May it be so.

And please know that if you’re experiencing any (or all) of these five things in your life, take my word for it:  you’re not alone.  You’re in good company.

May we find all the others who are walking this path too; may we link arms and walk it together.

The post 5 Things ALL My Clients Are Grappling With Right Now appeared first on Jessie Harrold.