Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/146934
For Rebecca Larson, coaching brought "a much more deliberative approach to planning (her) life versus just reacting to what comes." Larson had been an executive at an energy company for 12 years when she began coaching with Luoma. At 41, the mother of two says she felt "stuck," ready to do something else, but not wanting to simply trade one job for another. "I wanted to make the right step for me," she says, "and I knew I needed someone to help me work through that." After five months of coaching, she realized, "…how I was limiting myself versus seeing what the possibilities were. I was able to break through those limitations to see what my strength and skill sets really were and then apply those toward my ideal job." Today, Larson is the owner of Larson Public Affairs and executive director of a health insurance trade organization. With work she loves and a clear sense of her priorities, Larson calls her coaching experience, "enlightening," and says, "It took me from feeling stuck to a place where I feel like I'm proactive and successful." For Megan Cain, coaching brought similar satisfaction. Now running her own business, the Creative Vegetable Gardener, she credits Luoma's coaching with, "Changing who I was into who I wanted to be." Once "stressed and control-oriented," Cain now feels "relaxed, more trusting of life." She reports that even on bad days there flows an "undercurrent of happiness or contentment. It just feels that there's something deeper that's running through my life." Get Inspired! Hear Darcy Luoma speak at DreamBank Aug. 15, and at the Madison Women's Expo Nov. 22! What my Coaches Helped me Find By Darcy Luoma Life coaching has helped my husband, John Gilbert, and me tremendously in many ways. We have both personally hired and worked with our own individual life coaches over the past 14 years. The experience has brought greater clarity to our unique visions, and helped us establish clear goals and set action plans to accomplish them. My Life Coach I have worked with many personal life coaches in the past, most recently this fall. Being coached was essential in helping me make the tremendous leap to being an entrepreneur and small business owner—especially since John stays home full time with our children and we have no safety net or health insurance. I have always worked for someone else and had total financial stability in that regard, so taking this jump was huge. John called it our "family fiscal cliff" because it coincided with the federal fiscal cliff. My coach really helped me see that since I had found my life's calling and passion, I had to say yes to it and fully jump into coaching full time. My Relationship Coach We have also used relationship coaches in the past a few times. It was fun, and very meaningful. The focus wasn't on our individual goals, but rather on our collective vision for our future as a couple and a family. We did a lot of dreaming about the future, explored our greatest hope and biggest fears, and then worked to intentionally design our actions and decisions so they aligned with what we want for our family. To create the space to look at our lives from a meta-view has been critical to helping us see the bigger picture of how we want to be together in our marriage. Having come through some rocky times in the first few years of our relationship—during which counseling therapy was more appropriate—we were looking for a way to be intentional about creating our future in a positive way and knew that therapy was no longer the right venue. Coaching was the perfect fit for us to continue to work on our relationship through the lens of the future, rather than healing from the past. My Parenting Coach We have hired a parenting coach at several stages. We have found parenting our girls Jadyn, age 5, and Josie, age 7, so tremendously rewarding and yet unbelievably challenging as well. Our parent coach helped us identify what we wanted to consciously take from our own parents—our family of origin—and what things we wanted to leave behind. She helped us to really understand our parenting style differences and get aligned so that we are a team and have a strong foundation for raising the girls together. We are now in the sweet spot and we comment regularly to each other how our investment has paid off over and over. While parenting is still tough, we feel so good about our parenting style, discipline approach and being on the same page to raising respectful daughters. Josie and Jadyn are turning out to be awesome, fun-loving and life-giving girls. What a joy! (And, yes, they still have their moments...as do we!). August 2013 bravamagazine.com 45