[My OWWL Journey] Sharing a deep sorrow

I want to share a deep sorrow from my personal life that I don’t know how to handle. I feel that it is important for you to know that as coaches, we have “life happens” all the time. Some of it is big like a divorce or death or child custody battles, and some of it is smaller like a new home or fear of filling a program, but either way, life happens. You all know this from your personal lives.

What we must do as coaches is to get the support we need and work through our emotions and breakdowns and keep going toward our commitment to ourselves. That is what I am doing now.

I set a very big goal for this month, and something has happened to derail me from that and from my commitment. I just learned last week that my granddaughter is in crisis and has been cutting herself on purpose. She has been living in another city with her father and stepmother, so I was not aware of all this. She came to visit my daughter last week and ended up in an ambulance and in a psychiatric ward. I learned that she has other dissociative behavior patterns too. I am sick with grief, both for her and for my daughter and my other granddaughter who found her on the floor in a pool of blood. As a coach and mom and grandma, I want to help. As the daughter of a mother who committed suicide, I am triggered. I have reached out to my client, who is a therapist, to help me understand all of this. I have also reached out to my husband and two of my dear friends to get the emotional support I need. I am crying on and off and being with the emotions as they come up. And I am still committed to my business and to my goals while I learn how to deal with this crisis.

So the reason I’m sharing (or oversharing maybe) is that I want you to know we don’t always have to have our lives perfect to be coaches. We don’t always have to know what to do to help people. All we have to do is to show up and be loving and compassionate and be committed to being the best we can be. As I write this to you, I am reminding myself to do that very thing: show up, be loving, be compassionate, and be committed to being the best I can be.

Please hold me and my family in your hearts with love.

Sincerely,