Since becoming a life coach my conversations have changed. Or they change when I tell people what I do. The original conversation is all “Hey! How are you?”, “Everything is great”, “the kids are doing wonderfully”, “my husband’s the best”, “I am so happy being single right now”, “we’re going on trip!”, “my job is going so well!”

The real conversation that happens after I tell them I want to help people get real so they can live a life of more is, “I am so tired”, “I’m feeling really impatient with my kids”, “I’m overwhelmed by what I have to do”, “my job is sucking the life out of me”,” I’m just not happy”, “it feels like something is missing”, “money feels really tight” etc.

I want to have the second conversation. I want to have the real conversation. Those conversations are harder but there is something special in them because you can’t change anything about your life if you are unwilling to look at what’s really going on.

I stayed in a marriage for a decade because I couldn’t admit to myself or to anyone that I wasn’t happy. The fall-out from acknowledging that seemed way too big. I couldn’t even look at it. Because if it was true then I might have to do something about it.

My husband and I hardly fought. I made sure that I made myself small enough so that he never had a reason to be mad at me, I worked really hard to avoid any conflict. But we weren’t doing well and our son wasn’t doing well either. And although I couldn’t change things for myself, I had the courage to change things for him (one of many gifts from my kids).

I made appointments for counselling for all of us but for various reasons I often ended up at the appointments alone. And during one of those appointments I had the first honest conversation about my marriage. And I’ll never forget the psychologist said to me “you are stuck…you aren’t really in this thing but you also won’t go” and she challenged me to do one thing, to just tell my husband that I wasn’t happy. That was it. Just look at. Name it. Address it. Call it what it is.

And I did.

It was so scary but it was a HUGE relief and once it was out of my mouth there was no turning back. I realized as we stood there talking that I was done. I was done being small. I was done managing everyone’s feelings in hopes that it would keep everyone else happy and that their happiness would somehow make me happy.

That was a big way to learn a small lesson but I come back to it again and again. The first step is to get real. To really look at it. The avoiding was actually more painful than the doing. And when something in my life feels out of whack…I know the first thing I have to do is really look at it. Sometimes we just have to remind ourselves to get real.

Are you ready?
Kate