I believe that a life well lived involves a lot of personal growth. Certainly life provides many challenges. What I try to remember is that the key to happiness lies in a willingness to sincerely ask  “What can I learn here?” when life throws us a curveball. You will see as you read further how coaching has brought together for me my  passions of personal growth, nutrition, and working with teens. 

My journey with health and nutrition has been a long one.  When I was 18 I started to feel so run down, tired, and moody. I had been a healthy child but my first year living on a college campus, living in the dorms and eating cafeteria food was a disaster. I really did not feel that I had anyone to talk to about this. I did not have a good experience with the campus health clinic when I went in a few weeks earlier. I felt like the doctor was talking down to me. She was the educated one and I was just a freshman in college. What did I know about my own body? And this was just when I asked about the side effects of the prednisone shot that they wanted to give me for poison ivy.

Well it turns out that I know quite a bit about my body.  I started to pay attention. And it definitely became clear that my poor health was due to my food choices. Full of desire to get my vitality back I started to read and experiment. I soon realized that the paradigm that I was raised with around food is entirely upside down. We need to be eating whole unprocessed food to support  health and vitality. 

I am amazed over and over again how  food choices affect the quality of life. I have experienced how ailments as diverse as skin rashes, tendonitis, arthritis, low energy, IBS, and muscle spasms can be vastly improved if not cured by experimenting with diet. 

Professionally I was a passionate and enthusiastic High School/Middle School Science teacher before I became a coach. I love the subject and desperately sought to engage my students. Class pets, messy experiments, edible projects, and engaging games were all a part of the daily class  experience. But the truth was that despite all of this about 25% of my students every year did not thrive in my class. They were passive, rarely volunteering or engaging beyond the bare minimum. Many passed the class but they did not really learn. They stood on the sidelines and would only occasionally dip their toe into the exciting pool of knowledge that we were exploring as a class. 

I desperately wanted to reach these kids. I tried different tactics every year. But in the end all of my encouraging, motivational talks,  study tips, and even bribery did little to change the situation.

It was my curiosity about why some kids are pulled forward to learn and others are content to be passive that led me to coaching. As a Coach I have the exquisite opportunity to help my clients of all ages to drop habits, fears, and beliefs that no longer serve them. Without this excess baggage they can boldly step into a new version of themselves that is in alignment with who they want to be.