Calm mum wannabe

I'm just a calm mum wannabe, muddling on through from tantrum to tantrum, one big deep breath at a time. Ommmm....

Friday 30 March 2012

The miracle of coaching

So, ahem, I promised to tell you about Amanda, my coach, in my last post. That was about seven weeks ago now. Yikes. In my defence, we moved house last month and I've been snowed under with work, your honour.

I didn't know Amanda when she put the word out that she was looking for volunteer coachees for her final year project toward her life coach qualification, but I love a good freebie, me, and when a mutual friend signed up, it piqued my curiosity.

I googled "life coaching" because I didn't really know what it was. The explanation I read said that it could sort out any area of your life that needed improvement. "Ooh," I thought, "I'll have a bit of that for my time management and disorganization issues, thanks very much."

So there I am driving along the motorway to Amanda's, on the evening of our first session, wondering whether I'll be brave enough to broach the subject of my writing dream. I've only told a couple of close friends before, so it's highly unlikely I'll feel comfortable telling this complete stranger whose house I'm going to.

Wrong. As it turns out, Amanda is very easy to talk to, so I blurt out my "dirty secret" in our very first session (and by the way, that was Amanda's term for how I spoke about my writing in the early days).

Less than a week after that first session, I landed my first paid writing job. I kid you not. Coincidence, say the cynics. Maybe.

For the sake of brevity, let's cut to my final session. It's five or six months later and Amanda has now moved back to the UK, so we do the session via Skype.

Our conversation turns into a one-way moan fest, with me blathering on about how I don't have enough time to do all the writing work that comes my way.

Wait a minute! What am I saying? This is the most incredible turnaround from my first session, and Amanda is blown away. I finally stop ranting about my lack of time and how darn hard it all is, and I put my hand over my mouth, gobsmacked. Wow. I now have so much paid writing work that I cannot fit it into my days.

And that -in a nutshell- is the miracle of coaching, folks. From dirty secret to full time work in less than six months. Powerful stuff, eh? And to all you cynics out there, why not just try it? You've got nothing to lose.

If you are interested in getting coached by Amanda, you can contact her at amanda_visagie@hotmail.com or on +44 7803171148. She is available for in-person sessions in the London area, and Skype sessions for people in other parts of the world. But I'm sorry to say her services don't come for free any more, as she's now a fully qualified and very sought-after life coach :-p