Three more ways crappy theology causes suffering.

Open gate leading to sun-filled meadow

Last week I wrote about three ways I see crappy theology cause suffering for my clients. These lies, taught to us by (usually) well-meaning people, are in there so deep we don’t recognize them as made-up ideas that just aren’t true.

We know they’re not true because they cause us to suffer.

In case you missed it, here are the first three lies.

Lie #1: Jesus died for your sins. On the contrary, God and Jesus aren’t concerned about how you in your wickedness are breaking their rules. What they are concerned about is how much you love yourself, each other, and the world. The only sin is failing to love.

Lie #2: God despises the world and “things of the flesh.” On the contrary, God IS the world. The world is made of God. As the bumper sticker puts it: The Earth is my church. My body is the altar.

Lie #3: God has a plan for your life, and your job is to figure it out and follow it. On the contrary, Creator God is always at work, and all She wants from you is to be the fullest version of yourself you can be, right now, at this moment.

Three more lies:

Lie #4: You need to be perfect, as God is perfect.  On the contrary, beloved, God wants you to be yourself in all your miraculous messiness. God loves your messiness.

The word translated as “perfect” in many versions of the Bible (Matthew 5:48) would be better translated as “whole.” (I like Eugene Peterson’s rendering in The Message: “In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”)

Being human is messy and unpredictable, and you’re making yourself crazy and miserable when you try to be perfect. As Anne Lamott says: “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life ….” Be whole instead, beloved. Be whole.

Lie #5: Following your heart and your desires is evil, and being “selfish” is bad. On the contrary, beloved, your desires are holy and necessary. God wants you to want what you want.

When we believe that wanting something is bad, we fight against ourselves and our deepest longings. Instead of honoring our soul’s yearnings, we talk ourselves out of them and we lose ourselves in the process. This is an especially insidious one for women, who are expected to be the caretakers of the world while staffing bake sales, cleaning toilets, and never ever saying NO. (I am NOT saying to act out every desire you have. What I am saying is that every desire has wisdom for you. Honor that wisdom. Listen for it.)

It’s a cliché, I know, and it’s still true: Put on your own oxygen mask first. Only then will you be full enough to give when it’s your turn to give.

Lie #6: God is outside of you, “up there” somewhere, separate from this messy world and its pain. On the contrary, beloved, God is Mother, here with us.

God is not “the man upstairs” or the spirit in the sky. God is not our Father in Heaven. 

When we believe this lie, we make the disembodied sacred and the bodied profane. We make spirit good and flesh bad. We then look outside ourselves for guidance and answers, and we avoid our adult responsibility to listen for the Wisdom within. We’re incapable of giving our gifts freely, because we’ve forgotten who we are.

God your Mother inhabits your everyday moments. She is as common as dirt. And She loves your body like a mother.

Oh, my beloveds. These lies cause so much suffering. They leave us contorted and stuck and so self-critical we’re paralyzed with shame and self-loathing.

You can feel their destructive power when you hold them in your body. Try saying one lie and notice how your body feels. Now say the truth (use my “On the contrary … “ formulation or your own words) and notice how your body feels. Lies cause suffering. Can you feel how you stop suffering when you disbelieve the lies causing you to suffer?

Beloved, you are not called to suffer. Being human on Earth is full of pain. Being human on Earth is full of joy, too.

Please take your suffering seriously. Look underneath your suffering and find the crappy theology causing it. We can do that together if you want to.

Heal crappy theology and you heal yourself.

We need you whole, healthy, and healed. We need you telling the truth. We need you raising your voice in the wilderness so we can find each other.

PS. A deep bow of gratitude to you voices in the wilderness who joined our inaugural Community Conversation on June 17. We were witnesses for each other’s pain and joy, and we formed deep community almost from the first moment. I’m so grateful to meet you “face to face,” and look forward to our next gathering on Tuesday, July 13, at 2:00 pm Pacific. Newsletter subscribers will get the Zoom link the day before. Missed the first one? No worries. You can join anytime.

PPS. I’ll be sending emails only to my weekly letter list beginning on July 1st. Email subscribers will get new content, current offerings, and notifications of upcoming events delivered straight to their inbox. You can subscribe here, and thanks!

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Why don’t you trust your desires?

I’m sharing a sister coach’s writing today. This is Karen “KJ Sassypants” Hawkwood, from 2018. KJ expresses beautifully and cogently the fourth healing shift I teach my clients: More Creator, Less Victim. I hope you enjoy KJ’s take on trusting our desires.

“I think we have created a crisis of agency. I could say a LOT about this (and probably will over time) because there are so many angles to it, but that’s what they add up to.

We. Do. Not. Trust. Our. Own. Desires. Much less our ability and right to ACT on those desires.

(If you were socialized as a female being, this is times eleventy-billion.)

Among one of these angles, I’ve become increasingly troubled by the spiritual approaches that essentially advocate for “total surrender” (to whatever/Whoever.)

The premise for this seems to be that anything we try to do for ourselves is “just ego” or “just selfishness,” etc., and therefore is to be 100% distrusted and dismissed.

Instead, we’re supposed to let “God(s)” or “the Universe” or “our guides” or [whatever] tell us what to do. How to live our lives. How to make our choices.

This bothers me because I’ve finally realized it’s the stance of a child. *We* can’t be trusted, *we* clearly don’t make good decisions, *we* are adrift and misguided, so someone/something else is going to have to take the wheel.

It’s also a reflection of the OBSESSION we have – especially in modern Westernized cultures – with NEVER MAKING MISTAKES. Never getting it wrong.

Whatever “mistake” or “wrong” actually means. But even when we don’t know what it means we fear it with sweaty, trembling, vomitous terror.

Believe me, I know what it feels like to make choices that have turned me pale green when I look back on them. I know what it feels like to choose from fear, from insecurity, from desperation, from the greed that layers like mold over all those things.

But to have that shatter our trust in ourselves, so that we have to shamefully hand over the reins of our lives to ANY other force that we believe somehow won’t do that?

I’m really not OK with that anymore.

Since surely someone will bring this up, I’m also obviously (I hope anyway) not advocating for the just-as-shitty mirror image – the patriarchal, white, capitalist, Western attitude that “I am the captain of my destiny and all before me is mine for the taking.”

I don’t think I have to say more about why that’s a problem.

But we’ve gone too far in the other direction. And that’s becoming just as much of a problem, in my eyes.

My teacher’s work has influenced me strongly on this, and he talks about moving through life as an “active participant” – and further, approaching life as a process of “call and response.”

I find this stance, this footing, to be FAR more alive, more generative, more effective, and just more *real* than this “leaf on a stream” thing.

I think most of us are scared absolutely shitless of what would happen if we actually OWNED what we WANT and set about bringing it forth, all the while paying careful and wise attention to the conversation with All That Is. We’re so terrified of our own strength, our own clarity, our own potency that it’s easier to just skip all that and believe we can’t trust ourselves.

Our job is to call, and then listen for the response, and *decide for ourselves* what we want to do in turn. But we need to CALL, not whisper, not whimper or beg or tentatively see if it might be OK if. And then we need to stay standing up straight to hear the answer, even if we don’t at all like what we hear, and then call again. And we need to not take that response as a Command From On High or Infallible Guidance From Somewhere That Knows Better Than Us.

And we need to understand the interlocking truths that: 1) this does NOT mean we will not faceplant, sometimes horrifically, and 2) those faceplants do not mean we cannot trust ourselves or give us an excuse to abdicate our own sovereignty.

What would it look like to move through Life as an EQUAL to it?”

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Deconstruction 101

Open hands holding a yellow daisy

What exactly is this thing we’re calling “deconstruction”? And, if you choose to deconstruct your faith, how exactly do you do it? These are the questions I’m asking right now, mainly because you’ve been asking them of me.

“Deconstruction” implies that the thing we’re taking apart was constructed at some time by some one. The thing we’re deconstructing wasn’t delivered whole and entire in one piece from on high. Someone made it up. Someone built it.

We usually think of deconstruction as demolishing. That when we’ve taken something apart, all we’ll be left with is a pile of rubble. If we’re feeling anger toward the thing, that demolition might feel really good. But what many of us are feeling when we think about deconstructing our faith, along with a little or a lot of anger, are grief and fear. If I take this thing apart, what will I be left with to shelter me? And what about the parts of it I love and that do nurture me? If I blow the thing up, those pieces are smashed to smithereens.

Deconstruction can be thoughtful and nonviolent, if we choose to do it that way. Deconstruction can honor your history, your tender heart, and your anger.

Why take our faith apart? To get to the deep structure. The Ground of Being. The unconditional. The treasure beneath all the religious trappings.

Here’s how I’m currently deconstructing my faith:

1. Let the structure fall down. Let it go. Stop spending valuable energy propping up what needs to be allowed to fall. You have more important work to do. Make the decision to tear it down.

2. Collect the pieces in a pile. Cover them with a tarp and walk away for awhile. Wander into the closest wildflower meadow, maybe. Lie back and watch the clouds. Put your feet in the nearest creek.

3. When you’re ready, sift through the pieces for usable and beautiful remnants. Hold each piece in your hands and feel your body’s truth. Keep only what makes you feel open and free.

Jesus is a keeper, for me. His essence, his stories, his life and his death – these are all life-giving for me. I’m keeping the mystics – Hildegard, Julian, Margery, Claire and Francis, Meister Eckhart. I’ll keep Harriet Tubman and Oscar Romero. I’ll keep the Beguines, abolitionists, and Catholic Workers. I’m keeping all the preschools, soup kitchens, and twelve-step groups in church basements. I’ll keep English cathedral organs and choirs. I’m keeping cloisters, too.

But “sin” I’m letting go. The masculine god “up there,” separate from Earth? I’m letting Him go, too. The rules about who’s in and who’s out? Nope.

This isn’t a rational process. It’s more like the KonMari method for deciding what to keep and what to let go of: “Does this spark joy?” If not, out it goes.

4. Take your time rebuilding. You have time. Let this emptiness be a gift. It’s okay to be unsheltered for a while. Receive the “gift of the goo,” as one client put it recently. This is where finding your community can be incredibly helpful. Feeling unsheltered is scary. It helps to have friends out here in this empty place.

You may find that you use very little from your former shelter. You may find that you need to move completely and start over from bare Earth. You may find that you’re mostly good where you are, and that just a few tweaks are necessary. I know and love many Christians who are perfectly content living in the shelter of the traditional church.

I’m also hearing from more and more people who are simply no longer willing to tolerate the church’s refusal to listen and change. Your stories of leaving church are heart-breaking, and your courageous walks into the empty spaces in search of a nurturing, whole faith are inspiring.

By doing this process, you’ll be able to identify what’s healthy and healing for you because it sparks joy, and what makes your body feel awful and you won’t tolerate it anymore.

Why deconstruct? To return to the Source, the Living Water.

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There’s no such thing as heresy.

Little girl sitting in the forest with sun shining on her

There is no such thing as heresy. “Heresy” is just someone’s opinion. If your spiritual practice hurts your soul, please stop doing it. Let it go.

Thank you, dear readers, for your responses to my story of leaving church. You thanked me for my bravery, saying that now you feel more brave. You shared your own stories of leaving church. Turns out it’s a common story. And you wanted to know more about how to do this work of “deconstructing faith.”

First of all, let’s be very clear. You get to do this work. You have the right to do your own theology. You do not need permission from any external authority to deconstruct a faith that’s not working for you. If your religion is harmful to any part of you, you have permission to tear it down as needed. Not only do you have permission, we all benefit when you do this work.

You have a right and a responsibility, if only to yourself, to do this work – the work of creating a spiritual structure in which you can live in wholeness and integrity. With passion and joy. A faith that shelters and empowers all of you, including your pain and your messiness.  

And you know how to do this work. You just have to remember who you are at your core.

When I was a young girl, my parents took us every Sunday to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Prescott, Arizona. I liked going to church. So, one sunny morning when I was eight or so, I felt inspired to take a Book of Common Prayer to the forest behind our house and have church. This was before my parents divorced, when my still-intact family lived in the house my parents built on a piece of land covered with Ponderosa Pine, manzanita, and granite, bordered on one side by Aspen Creek and on the other by National Forest.

I dutifully set the prayer book on a lectern-shaped piece of lichen-covered granite sheltered by a stand of Gambel Oak, and began to read. Almost instantly the prayer book words became irrelevant, and all I could do was gaze at the sky. Sun and clouds and true blue dream of sky broke in and filled my awareness. No barrier between little girl me and God. Rather than having to be good to earn love, in that moment I knew I was loved because there was only me and Love. No separation.

This memory has never faded. It’s vivid still. But I forgot its meaning and tried valiantly for many years to make myself fit into the church box.

You have experiences like this buried in your memories, too.

You know how to do this work. Remember who you are underneath all the façades you’ve accumulated. Reclaim your original blessing. Recommit to living a life of integrity with your soul.

Here’s a step-by-step way to remember, reclaim, and recommit.

1. Bring to mind an early experience of deep knowing, peace, awe, holiness, oneness, the numinous. This might be a church experience.

2. Inhabit this experience fully. Be in your body as much as you can be. Be that kid again, bathed in joy, resting in peace and belonging.

3. Notice how your body feels. Choose three to five words to describe this feeling. (Mine are “awe, loved, peaceful.”) Put these words everywhere. They’re important.

4. This feeling is your soul’s voice. Listen to it. Follow it. Amplify it.

5. Single voices are beautiful. So are choirs. Share your voice in community, if you choose to, when you’re ready.

Know what you know. Feel what you feel. Say what you mean. Do what you want.

You will find your way. You will create a sanctuary for your soul, and we will all be stronger for the work you’ve done.

PS. I’m planning a series of Zoom conversations in June. More details will be forthcoming in my weekly newsletter. You can subscribe here. Thanks!

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It’s scary to make changes others don’t like.

Breaching whale

“The problem with living from your soul is that other people don’t like it.”

Last week I got a little more real about what living from soul rather than façade is looking like for me, boots on the ground. I told you that I’ve quit church, and how my brain is afraid that some of my Episcopal priest husband’s parishioners will be angry with me.

It’s scary to make changes that others don’t like.

So how do we do this hard thing? How do we resist the “change back attacks,” as Martha Beck calls them, that will inevitably follow when we make real change? Change that threatens the status quo. Change that rocks the family boat. Change that makes other people feel judged and defensive.***

Here are some suggestions, most inspired by Martha’s new book, The Way of Integrity.  

1. Remember that your body, being wordless, cannot lie. Imagine staying with the status quo, capitulating to the change back attack. Now imagine living your truth. Which feels better in your body?

2. If living from your soul, living your life based on your truth, feels better, ask yourself: “Why would I make choices that feel bad to me?” Then really listen to your brain’s responses. Question the truth of the thoughts causing you to suffer.

3. Know your values. When the going gets rough, when the grief hits, when loved ones and even strangers tell you to stop it already, know why you’re doing this hard thing. Write those values and put them where you’ll see them often. Make them part of your morning ritual. Do what you need to do to ground yourself in your values.

4. Create a mission statement to remind you of your intention and your values. Short is best. Strive for two or three words.

5. Make 1% shifts toward soul. Small shifts add up over time.

6. You can always choose to maintain the outward status quo. This is a perfectly valid choice. If you choose this course of action, you must always tell yourself the truth. You don’t have to make any outward changes at all, as long as you stop lying to yourself, and you intentionally choose incongruency between inner truth and outer life. Be warned, though. This is a costly choice to make. Incongruence will inevitably drain your energy and affect your wellbeing.  

7. Find your community. Despite your brain’s message that if you make changes others don’t like you’ll die alone on the savannah, your community exists. You find your community when you speak authentically.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes speaks to this phenomenon in Women Who Run With the Wolves when she quotes poet Charles Simic (pronouns changed): “She who cannot howl, will not find her pack.”

And from Sue Monk Kidd, in The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, her memoir exploring her spiritual journey from evangelical Christianity (façade) to the sacred feminine (soul):

“The reason I went ahead and wrote this book is difficult to express, so I will try to explain it this way. While I was writing it, a nature show came on television, a special about whales. I watched them on the screen as they flung themselves out of the sea, arced into the air, then fell back into the water. The behavior, the narrator said, is called breaching. He also said it may be the whales’ way of communicating when the seas get high and wild. He speculated it was a tracking system for rough weather, some kind of urgent and powerful ballet that allowed the whales to follow one another’s vibrations and not get lost. With each lunge, the whales marked their course, letting the others know where they were.

I thought to myself that women must have the whale’s instinct. When we set out on a woman’s journey, we are often swimming a high and unruly sea, and we seem to know that the important thing is to swim together—to send out our vibrations, our stories, so no one gets lost. I realized that writing my book was an act of breaching. I hoped my story might help you find or keep your bearings or encourage you to send out your own vibrations.”  

May we swim together, my sisters. May we show each other the way. May we be courage and inspiration and support for each other as we navigate this wild ocean of soul-based living and loving.

***Your actions, of course, don’t make others feel anything. It’s their thoughts about your actions that cause their feelings. You are not in charge of other people’s feelings. Just so we’re clear.

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Blessed are the nice, for they shall be liked.

Girl sitting in a field of flowers with the sun shining on her

The problem with living from your soul is that other people don’t like it.

Last week I wrote to you about the first healing shift I teach my clients: more soul, less façade. I gave you lots of high-falutin’ reasons why soul-based living is better than going through the façade-based motions of living.

But it’s hard at first, isn’t it? Making this shift can be hard because we’re afraid of our loved ones’ reactions. And even strangers’ reactions, to be honest. And we’re all about honesty around here.

If you’re worried about what other people will think or how other people will react when you start living from your soul and telling the truth, you’re not alone. You’re just human, with a human brain.

Culture, a web of constructed social systems, depends on its members caring what other people think. We’re taught to be nice from the cradle. Especially women living in a patriarchy.

Not only are we trained into scoping outward for approval, we’re also hard-wired internally for belonging. Our brains have evolved to fear disapproval and disconnection, because to be cast out of the group back in hunter-gatherer days was almost certainly to die. Our ancestors who cared deeply about belonging to the group lived to reproduce, while those who flouted the group norms were left to die lonely, hungry deaths on the savannah.

Hence our brains that go batshit crazy when they think we’re going to be disapproved of. Disapproval = death, at least to that part of our brains. And that part of our brain screams like a banshee.

Here’s how that shift and its accompanying fear are playing out in my own life right now. I know some of you will relate.

I’ve quit church. This goes deeper than COVID-related church attendance restrictions. I’ve begun checking the “none” box on surveys that ask about religious affiliation, because the “Christian” box no longer fits.

Leaving church has been easier during the pandemic, but the jig is about to be up. Come this fall, when it’s safe to do so, those who want to will be able to attend church in person again. I will not be among them. If history is any guide, this will be “a thing.”

I don’t know why it’s so important to members of my husband’s parish that I attend church. All I know is that when I’ve taken sabbaticals in the past, folks get worked up. I think sometimes this is just affection and concern for my welfare. But when someone I don’t even know asks Jed’s parish administrator, “Is Barb sick? I haven’t seen her lately,” something else is going on. They ask Jed where I am and if I’m okay. Parishioners see me out and about and say how much they’ve missed me. It’s a thing. Maybe it’s more of a thing in my brain than in real life. The result is the same.

My fear of others’ reaction has kept me silently complicit and out of my integrity for years now. My truth: I will no longer sit silently in the pew while God is referred to as “He,” texts are read that perpetuate violence against women, and our holy Earth is denigrated.

My husband does his heroic best to mitigate these messages with his preaching and his presence. He does as much as he can, within the constraints of his ordination. It’s no longer enough for me. Patriarchal, misogynist, dualistic language and doctrines are built into the structure of the institutional church. The institution seems unwilling to look seriously at the damage it’s done and continues to do.

I’m over it. When I imagine sitting inside a church on Sunday morning, my body feels icky – tense, hunched over, closed down. And when I imagine mountain church or river church, I feel strong, free, and peaceful. I feel happy.

Because my happiness matters to me, I choose myself and my priorities over being nice and propping up this harmful system with my presence. By the way, this is the same choice Jesus made – to speak his truth and live his integrity. His choice led him to the cross. Mine only leads to braving my own discomfort and judgment of others.

So, my friends. This shift from façade to soul with regard to church is scary for me. Jed and I have had some uncomfortable conversations. He supports my decision while also feeling the loss of my presence on Sunday mornings. More uncomfortable conversations are probably heading my way as we emerge from our Covid cocoons. And that’s okay. I can handle them, because I’m confident in my decision. My body is telling me the truth, and I believe her.

These are the trials and the rewards of integrity, of living more from my soul and less from my façade. I feel more scared, while also feeling more powerful, whole, and free. That’s how this goes.

When you make this shift and people don’t like it, that just means you’re doing it right.

PS. Want to talk more about the four healing shifts and coaching together? I offer a free, no-strings-attached clarity call. Contact me here to schedule. I’d love to connect!

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More soul. Less façade.

Girl blowing out candles on a birthday cake

If you want to heal, you must live more from your soul and less from your façade. This is the first of four healing shifts I teach to my coaching clients.

I came face to face with this reality again on our recent Grand Canyon pilgrimage. I saw again, more deeply than before, how my insatiable search for safety after my dad died was driven by my social self. My façade. The part of me that desperately wanted to feel secure, and thought that following the rules and keeping everyone around me happy was the way to do that.

Our façade has many names. Martha Beck calls this part of us, constructed in response to social expectations that begin virtually at birth, our “social self.” Franciscan and prolific author Richard Rohr calls it our “false self.” Jungian James Hollis calls it our “psyche.” Buddhist teacher and psychologist Tara Brach calls it our “spacesuit self.” It’s the part of us that speaks in “should” and “have to.” The part that strives to be nice at all costs.

Our facades will never know peace. Only our souls know peace.

We all have facades. Our facades are necessary. Our social selves keep society’s gears running smoothly. Our social selves help us navigate four-way stops and dentist appointments. Our façade, our social self, the part that looks outside ourselves for direction and approval, has its place.

Maintaining our façade, our social self, requires energy. Façades, because they’re constructed and flimsy like false store fronts in old Western movies, take work to keep up. This is why many of my clients run out of steam in their middle decades. They’ve been working so hard to be who everyone outside themselves expects them to be, that they hit a wall.

The first half of life is often about running around accumulating identities – credentials, careers, achievements. The second half of life is often when we shed this surface stuff, because maintaining it takes energy we just don’t want to expend anymore.

This feeling of running out of steam, of hitting a wall, is commonly known as a “midlife crisis.” It’s when women wake up, look around at the life they’ve created with their choices, and decide to recommit to themselves and their priorities.

What’s the alternative to living from your façade?

Living from your soul. Your soul is sturdy, rooted, and peaceful. Your soul is who you came into this life as. The same teachers listed above also have many names for the soul: “True self.” “Essential self.” “Authentic self.” Your soul says “I want to” and “I yearn for.” Your soul craves real, kind, and good, not nice. 

Parker Palmer calls our soul the “taproot,” the part of us that connects us to what James Hollis calls the Divine Energy. Since my Camino vision of God as a deep Wombish Heart, I imagine my soul as an umbilical cord connecting me to that Divine Energy, my source and nourishment.

Your metaphor for your soul will be personal to you. You may have many metaphors for your soul. I hope you do, because something this foundational is too important to contain with only one label.

How do you know if you’re living from your façade or living from your soul?

They feel different in your body.

When we’re situated in and identified with our social selves, we won’t feel peaceful. When our social selves are driving the bus, we feel graspy. Anxious. Unrooted and ungrounded. And fearful.

Remember a time in your life when you experienced deep peace. What sensations did you feel in your body? That’s your soul’s signature. Hold onto that knowing. 

So what? Why does this matter?

Learning to discern whether you’re living from soul or façade is foundational to healing. When you choose to redirect your precious energy and attention away from maintaining your façade, when you focus instead on relearning the contours of your soul and regaining trust in yourself, you will, inevitably, recommit to your life and your priorities.

When you recommit to your life and your priorities, you bring your authentic, whole, messy self with all her strength, knowledge, and compassion to our shared world.

We don’t need you to be nice. We need you to be who you are, fully and honestly. We need you to bring your gifts to this wild party!

(For a light-hearted cinematic take on this shift, check out “Legally Blonde,” now streaming on Netflix.)

Want to explore this shift more deeply? Contact me to schedule a free, no-strings-attached conversation about coaching together. I’d love to connect! 

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