"What's your niche?" is a question I'm asked often. My short and often unsatisfying response is, "My niche is humans." Most coaching schools teach you to build your business by deciding on a niche and marketing it aggressively. But if this system works, why is the average global Professional Life Coach salary only $47,000? I propose we base our choice of which Life Coach to work with less on their marketing niche and more on their behavioral one.

In my work, limiting beliefs around money are some of the hardest to unearth and transform. Most of us are still carrying around our great grandparents’ beliefs about money and allowing them to decide our present day to day actions.

Some people have interesting lives. And some have happy lives. So, what’s the difference?

So many of us believe that if we slow down our thinking, we will come to a dead stop or fall off the cliff or maybe we’ll just lie on the couch all day and lose the thread of our lives forever, intoxicated by Netflix and chips! I’m here to tell you the contrary.

A Morning Practice is the most life-changing tool in your operating system. Like a sturdy foundation supporting a tall building or deep roots anchoring an oak tree, how you spend your mornings determines how you spend your days—and ultimately, your life. When you understand that you have a high degree of control over how your day unfolds through a consistent morning practice, you stop seeing it as a chore and start seeing it as a powerful tool for clarity, focus, and productivity.

Imagine yourself on the morning of January 1st 2023. You’re holding a cup of your morning potion of choice as you sit or stand in your favorite spot. Reflecting on the last 4 months of your life, you are overcome with thoughts and feelings of deep gratitude and pride.

I’m often asked to explain what makes for a “great” Life Coach, as well as the reverse. So here's my list of 9 things a great coach can help her clients with and 7 things she/he can leave to other professions.

It’s humbling to know and publicly admit that I’ve never had an original idea, including the one I’m going to share today. It’s also liberating beyond measure. Most of us are raised to believe that unless we create something original, our offer is not valuable, or even worse, that we are plagiarizing! When wanting to start a new business, writing a book, or embarking on a new adventure, how many times have we heard…

"You're killing my soul!", I whined to my Coach, more than once. You'd think he was asking me to take action that put my life at risk. What he was asking me to do—repeatedly, and time after time—was to block time in my calendar for all the things that matter to me, and then honor my calendar. It seems like an easy enough request and really, what was at risk?

What's the state of your Life Buckets? When was the last time you checked to see how empty or full each one is? One of the first exercises I introduce my clients to, is the process defining your 3-4 Life Buckets. Once we identify our Core Life Values (a separate exercise), we can then decide on the areas of our life that are of priority.

Last week, I explained how thoughts come and go, as often as they please, and although I shared steps for managing our thoughts, I want to be clear about the difference between thoughts and feelings. I don’t know where thoughts come from, and although many years of therapy felt helpful in the moment, they didn’t help me become the Master of Positive Thoughts I was striving for.

With due respect and understanding for the challenges of this moment, I'd like to share some of the learnings my clients are gaining and sharing with me during our coaching conversations. The quotes are directly from them and and as always, I hope these insights will serve and inspire you to live life with just a little more joy and ease.

I come from a family of high achievers. My work as a Life and Leadership Coach has me in constant conversation with leaders who would proudly carry this label. But in pushing the borders of exploring what it means to live a happy life, it has become clear to me that being a high achiever is no longer a badge of honor or a marker of life satisfaction.

I used to be really angry. I thought it was my personality because, well, I come from a long line of angry people. I can feel them getting angry as they read these words. But I soothe myself with the belief that most members of my beloved family don’t actually read much of what I write. And now I’m getting a little angry!

Trying to be relentlessly positive is exhausting and often useless. I work with ambitious, deep-thinking people who spent a lifetime 'being positive' and it hasn't brought them closer to clarity or purposeful action. It's shaped them into nice, agreeable members of society, but left them asking, 'Is this all there is?' When gratitude becomes a weapon and reframing becomes a prison, it's time to shift from positivity to possibility.

What does it mean, 'to belong'? This is a question that comes up so often in my work with young adults, and I only wish I could help them understand and actually believe that the rest of us 'adults' also struggle with this feeling. Although intellectually most of us realize we are unique, we continue to search for our special tribes and communities.

"Wait, I'm confused….." How often have you started a difficult conversation by feigning confusion? It was certainly my default response when I was actually angry and hurt but didn't have the language to express myself. When we regularly replace unwelcome feelings by feigning confusion, we slowly turn into an emotional version of the boy who cried wolf.

If you're not yet familiar with the concept of Quarter Life Crisis, you're not alone. It's also likely that you are not a Millennial. As a Professional Transition Coach, a number of my clients are emerging adults between the ages of 18 and 25, facing very real challenges as they transition to independence and build their careers.