About Me - The Longer,
More Intimate Version

"If you could see the path, it wouldn't be yours."
Joseph Campbell

A Seeker

While some young people actually can answer the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I definitely wasn't one of them.  Growing up in the 1960's, slogans like "Question authority," "Don't trust anyone over thirty," and "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle" called out to me from posters, T-shirts and bumper stickers, suggesting that the rigid social structures of my parents' generation were changing.  Tantalized by intimations of new possibilities, I was frustrated beause I couldn't see where I would fit into any of it.  An insecure introvert, I opted to be a follower rather than a leader, watching enviously as my high school friends joined consciousness-raising groups and anti-Vietnam War protests, sometimes tagging along for the ride, but sensing a clear difference between my vague questioning and their firm convictions.  It was the Age of Identity, though, and something in me drove me to find out who I was.

East?

Raised in a traditional Jewish family, it's not surprising that my first step towards self-discovery led me to Israel.  Deferring my acceptance to college, I boarded a plane for Jerusalem when I was 17 years old.  I lived as a religious Jew at an all-girls seminary, worked in the laundry room of a kibbutz, and was known by my Hebrew name of Leah.  All this taught me that I was truly an American; Jewish-identified but not observant; and didn't want or need to change my name.  At least I knew who I wasn't!

No, West.

Though I entered Northwestern University when I got back to the States (majoring in psychology, the only field I had any interest in), the truth was I secretly had other plans.  Soon after returning from Israel, I'd read a book called The Primal Scream, written by Los angeles psychologist Arthur Janov.  Convinced that his free-wheeling, emotion-centered psychotherapy held the "answer" to what I saw as my repressive, overly-rationalistic upbringing, I was simply biding my time.  Just before my 21st birthday, I dropped out of school and took off for L.A., knowing no one, but ready to be "cured," as Janov described the outcome of his unique therapeutic method.

Adventurous Women

Whatever else I got from Primal Therapy, I immediately grasped that therapy offered a place to talk about myself for the first time in my life.  At the urging of an L.A. roommate who liked a poem I had written, I discovered another form of self-expression when I took my first writing class at The Woman's Building, a feminist art center in downtown Los Angeles. Always tentative about what I half-jokingly referred to as "taking up space," I loved walking into that cavernous wood-floored, white-walled buildilng where an eclectic group of women brazenly displayed themselves and their art.   From their personal presentation (everything from shaved heads to long untamed locks, overalls to lacy peasant skirts) to the subject of their art (including performance pieces based on experiences of childhood molestation), no form of expression was taboo.  Yet it was the simple moment of one 19-year-old girl holding up a painting and proudly talking about "her work" that struck me most poignantly.  I longed to experience that kind of pride in something I had produced, but didn't see how it was possible. 

Back to School

Several years later, bored by a series of dead-end secretarial jobs, convinced that writing was merely an interesting hobby, the only thing I knew for sure was that I needed to finish college.  Though psychology had been my major, I couldn't imagine what I would do with it after graduation: becoming a therapist seemed impossible for someone as confused as myself.  Opting for the "practical" route, I decided to go for a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration.  This time, I committed to finishing, no matter what.  Plowing through two mind-numbing years of management and accounting classes, I proved to myself that I could get A's when I put my mind to it, but only confirmed what I would have known if I could have seen myself more clearly - traditional business was never going to become my life's work.  (Yet again, I had to learn who I wasn't).  I compromised by taking a position as a personnel recruiter at a life insurance company when I graduated.

The Fog Clears - A Little

While racking up all those accounting and business credits, I worked as a remedial reading teacher for a private reading program.  The method worked, and I delighted in those light bulb moments when a student who had previously stumbled through a three-syllable word found she could now read an entire page with ease and comprehension.  I even took a little credit for the results!  Personnel held the same kind of feeling for me.  I cared very little (O.K., not at all) about life insurance, but talking to the job applicants, finding out who they were and seeing that I instinctively knew who could work with whom was where the payoff was.

Psychology Redux

After a few years at the life insurance company, with corporate burnout setting in, I had lunch with a friend who had recently completed his Ph.D. in psychology.  "It's time," a little voice in my head said.  "You should be doing that."  No lightning bolt struck; it was just a quiet moment of clarity.  I knew what I was supposed to be doing and finally possessed enough - if only just enough - courage to pursue it.

Disabused of the notion that Primal Therapy was "the answer," I was now open to other kinds of therapies, and began to get interested in psychoanalysis.  Thus began a long journey through my own psychoanalysis, getting the Master's and Ph.D. required to become a Clinical Psychologist, and working in a variety of internships until I set up my own private practice.

There was no question in my mind that I was finally doing "my work."  When people outside the field asked the inevitable, "How can you sit and listen to people's problems all day?" I'd laugh because that description was a million miles from my experience.  Plumbing the depths of the unconscious, whether my own or those of my patients, brought the ultimate satisfaction.

It never occurred to me that that could change.  Until it did.  For years perfectly comfortable digging through the past, I started to feel restless.  The internal, private world of psychotherapy began to seem too limiting.

What's A Life Coach?

Much more confident now about both my ability and desire to have an impact on people's lives but looking for a different way to express that gift, I explored the field of mediation (and even got another degree in conflict resolution).  I developed new skills and worked in fascinating settings, but interestingly I was now the one saying I've had enough of focusing on "problems."

By this point I had heard of Life Coaching but approached it with suspicion.  After all, I was a psychologist, I'd trained to be a psychoanalyst, coaching was a relatively new and unregulated field, it sounded like just one more variation on the countless self-help fads that come and go every year.  Being older and wiser, however, I decided to do some research.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that a prominent psychiatrist/psychoanalyst who I'd quoted years ealier in my doctoral dissertation had since become a Life Coach!  Hmm...maybe there was something to this coaching business, after all.

There's Something About Maria
(or How I Finally Learned to "Give up Hope
and Take Action")

I explored the coaching field and looked into a number of coach training programs, but meeting Maria Nemeth of The Academy for Coaching Excellence sealed the deal for me.  Maria's extensive background in both psychotherapy and coaching were impressive, but that was just the beginning.

The first time I heard Maria speak she asked the audience the rather startling question: "Would it be alright with you if life got easier?"  (Gee, I'm not sure...) She went on to say that the meaningful life consisted of having "games worth playing and goals worth playing for."  I had to hear more. 

Listening to Maria brought back the words of a friend from my Primal Therapy days.  He'd just taken the EST training (a personal growth seminar developed by Werner Erhard in the late '70's) and declared: "I've discovered what we Primal patients have been missing.  You've got to give up hope and take action."

Having been in therapy a few years by then, I knew that when my friend referred to "giving up hope," he meant the hope that a lot of us had that if we only showed up for enough therapy sessions, somehow our lives would be magically transformed.  I knew he was onto something important, but at the time I didn't know exactly what it was.

It wasn't until I heard Maria Nemeth present her elegantly clear model for bringing hopes and dreams to life by taking "authentic" actions towards meaningful, well-defined goals (as well as how to keep going when the inevitable obstacles arose) that the final piece clicked.  It wasn't about "giving up" anything; it was about learning to focus energy so that hopes and dreams became real.

Nothing Maria said negated the value of psychotherapy.  In fact she stressed its usefulness for working through grief and healing emotional pain.  What she offered, though, was a set of non-psychological, practical tools that people who consistently experience success and satisfaction in their lives use almost instinctively.  The beauty of being a coach is that I not only share these tools with my clients, I also apply them to my own life.

A Place at the Table

April 16, 2008.  I deliver my 10th speech to the 25 members of Century City Toastmasters in Los Angeles.  It's a 10-minute inspirational talk called "A Place at the Table."  Club members cheer and clap as they hand me the blue ribbon for "Best Speech" of the day and - more importantly - the red ribbon with the letters "CC" embossed in gold.  I am now officially a "Competent Communicator."

Friends who've known me for years congratulate me on this accomplishment but universaly say, "You've always been a competent communicator!"  Maybe so.  But there's a difference between chatting around the dinner table and getting up in front of a group to present a prepared speech.  (Have you ever heard the phrase, "The fear of public speaking is greater than the fear of death?")  The fact that I had identified something very important to me - being an effective communicator - finally moved it from the realm of "Someday I'll join Toastmasters to work on public speaking" to actually giving those 10 speeches was the great achievement.

Appropriately, my talk was about the experience of chairing a Toastmasters speech contest.  The work, the worry, the doubt, the panic dream I had of sitting around a conference table with an empty chair at the head and suddenly realizing "I'm supposed to be sitting there!  I'm supposed to be leading this meeting!"  The "deer in the headlights" moment when I actually had to get the contest started.  And the phenomenal satisfaction that came from seeing that I was able to shift my attention from the doubt to the goal.  The coaching skills I've learned allowed me to see that I was willing to be an effective leader even if I didn't know exactly how to do it.  I saw my "place at the table" and was willing to claim it.

Are you ready to claim yours?