This past week I have done a few things to move me closer to a thriving coaching practice.

I got telecourse titles and times decided and planned with my partners (see below).

I helped draft the outlines for each of the telecourses.

I worked on some of the marketing copy for one of the v-groups with one of my partners.

I used newly learned skills in basic mind-mapping to help look at different ways to structure my blog-zine.

I listened to a call on executive coaching and got the chance to hear it compared to small business coaching to help me decide I will probably take small business coaching first, maybe early next year.

I wrapped up three successful months of coaching with my first “practice” client, who felt like she accomplished many of her goals and has great new skills and ways of approaching important decisions in her life.

In keeping with the original spirit of this blog—Barbara Sher encouraging people to post our successes and steps forward—I will not detail the areas where I didn’t make the progress I wanted or didn’t do anything at all!

Below is a list of all the v-groups being offered by members of my introductory coaching class:

V-Groups for MCP103

CREATING COMMUNITY
Wednesday, October 3rd at 8:00PM (Eastern)
Presenters: Sarah Sharp and Steve Coxsey
Contact: steve@stevecoxsey.com

THE SPIRITUAL LAWS OF PARENTING
Monday, October 8th at 1:00PM (Eastern)
Presenters: Donna Allen and Irma Best
Contact: igbest@bellsouth.net

THE FERRIS BUELLER APPROACH TO CAREER CHOICE:
Freeing Yourself To Choose The Work You Love
Tuesday, October 9th at 8:00PM (Eastern)
Presenters: Steve Coxsey and Henry Packer
Contact: steve@stevecoxsey.com

SIMPLIFY YOUR LIFE: Shaping Your Day-To-Day Around Your Personal Vision
Wednesday, October 10th at 8:00PM (Eastern)
Presenter: Sarah Sharp
Contact: scandelon@aol.com

NAVIGATING THE GENERATIONAL DIVIDE WITH YOUR CLIENTS
Thursday, October 11th at 8:00PM (Eastern)
Presenters: Dee Covey and Kyle Kinder
Contact: deecovey@dsprinc.com

LEARNED OPTIMISM: An Introduction To The Basics of Positive Psychology
Friday, October 19th at 12:00PM
Presenters: Betty Reinsch and David Litton
Contact: david@davidlitton.com

CHANGING CAREERS
Friday, October 19th at 1:00PM
Presenter: Doris Muniz
Contact: dmuniz@sbcglobal.net

Please sign up if you are able! They are free but on bridge lines that require a PIN to access so e-mail the presenter for more information or to enroll.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

As we approach the end of our personal coaching introductory course, our class is learning about doing virtual groups for training and for ongoing coaching. As a project we are encouraged to plan and present a one-hour telecourse alone or with a partner, which will be announced to students and alumni of the training organization.

After I had a partner for one v-group (virtual group) I had another classmate ask if I wanted to partner for a group. I decided to do two groups to get more experience and move me closer to a thriving coaching practice.

One partner has a great idea for doing a presentation on finding enjoyable work in a creative way. He calls it the “Ferris Bueller” approach to career choice and it’s a fantastic idea. I’ll be able to bring along things I’ve learned in my career change group at Fast Track Your Dream, plus books I’ve read and telecourses I’ve attended or heard by recording that focus on finding your true calling and designing work around your passions and gifts. It’s going to be exciting pulling the information together and coming up with some interactive exercises to get participants involved. This topic is one of my great passions and has been for about three years.

My other partner was eager to do a presentation on building true community and connection in groups. Another one of my great passions! It prompted me to buy Scott Peck’s The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace all over again. I read it first many years ago but wound up giving it away and not replacing it. It’s helped me remember that I had plans for a career built around bringing people into genuine, cooperative community while I was working as a therapist. It’s also helping me remember that for a time I was very energized by books from people who brought together psychology or psychiatry, philosophy, and spirituality to inspire and transform people.

Man, it’s frustrating! I spent a lot of time doing thought exercises and thinking about my interests in childhood and young adulthood to reconnect to what I really want to do in my life—and now I remember I was thinking about this same path a few years ago! I didn’t have the idea of coaching people back then. I could only see the path the authors of books had taken—have a lengthy career as a therapist, then write inspirational and wise books based in those experiences. I didn’t have the foundation to think I could pursue that career and be successful at that point in my life.

Now I’m back to pursuing those goals but in ways that are more comfortable and natural to me. It’s a little strange—I had therapists as role models who transformed themselves into inspirational writers and speakers on life transformation above and beyond emotional healing. I thought I had to follow them through the therapy path until I had “earned” enough wisdom and clout. Now I see I want to teach and inspire and mentor people on personal growth, and I don’t want it to flow from or be based on being a therapist. I had to let go of being a therapist and find a different identity more aligned with my gifts and my calling. Now the new identity and the old vision are going to intersect. Wow!

The v-groups will each be a one-hour telecourse offered in October. I’ll post the information when we have them planned. The v-groups will be free but registration will be necessary. Participants will be welcomed heartily!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

I took a leap this past week, and anyone reading this post shortly after it goes up will know what I mean. I had been redirecting my ChasingWisdom.com URL to this blog. I decided to purchase hosting for the site and upload WordPress so I can use it to start building an e-zine. Right now, there’s nothing there but a post telling people to find my blog here. By September, I hope to be putting up an informative post from time to time. Click here to see how I’m doing.

Things seem to be coming together for my mentorship and coaching business. Mostly that’s because I seem to be coming together. I’m working on the text for my coaching website and I expect to have it ready to update in September. In my coaching course we’re learning about the logistics of running virtual groups by doing an exercise to develop and present a free one-hour teleclass with a partner. I’ve decided to do two different groups with two different partners—and I’m excited! I hope to be able to use the research, the writing, and the presentation experience to help me develop teleclasses I can offer for a fee in the future. I’ll certainly have the template and the experience to develop and present other topics.

I accepted a coaching challenge during practice coaching with a classmate, Sarah. She asked me on August 6 if I would commit to having my marketing message for a coaching website outlined and in rough draft form in two weeks. That was last Monday, the 20th, and I spent a lot of time working on it. I wound up pulling out old notes and ideas I’ve collected for a long time, including marketing consultant ideas I’d drafted for similar businesses, and everything I could find that I had written down over the past couple of years for marketing my therapy practice (which I ended), my consultant practice (which is on hold but not forgotten), and my coaching practice.

I have a clear vision of what I want my business, Discovery Partners, to be. I see how training and personal growth coaching fit into my model, and have an idea for a support community themed around mentorship and encouragement.

I have a good draft of the changes I will be making to my general website, www.SteveCoxsey.com, and how that will integrate with my coaching website and later my training and resources websites.

My remaining “practice” coaching client has accomplished some important goals and transitioned to maintenance for a few more weeks. This means I will be focusing some of my time on adding a few more clients and spending the rest of my time developing my virtual group presentations and finishing and editing the text for my website updates.

My current coaching course will end in November. My plan for next year is to focus on creative ideas to build my coaching practice and to take one or two courses to advance my coaching skills. A year from the end of this initial coaching course, Foundations, I expect to have a small but growing business focused on mentorship for personal growth and developing community.

To pull it all together, today I received a wonderful quote from Fast Track Your Dream:

Life isn’t about finding yourself.
Life is about creating yourself.

~ George Bernard Shaw

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

On July 8 I posted an entry I titled “Homage.” It was a showcase of people who are in different stages of career transition and are blogging their progress. All of them were women. I wrote:

“All of these women are changing their lives and taking steps towards work that reflects their deepest, truest nature. I honor them and encourage them.

And I’m going to look EVEN HARDER for men who are doing the same.”

I met all these women through a creative career change forum through FastTrack Your Dream at Changing Course. There are many men who are FTYD members, but few post on the forum and usually just ask for information on a specific topic, get some answers, and then fade away for a while.

But I overlooked one FTYD member who has posted several helpful ideas, useful pieces of information, and words of encouragement, especially in the spring. He’s been working on his new career and so is not on the forum very often these days. I think that’s why I overlooked him in my list.

His name is Ken Robert, and he trained to become a certified Creative Career Consultant through Changing Course. He wrote a dynamic article called “Are You on the Wrong Bus?” Click on the title and you can read the article at his web site dedicated to creative career change.

Lately, Ken’s been focusing on an additional direction. Because he love’s brainstorming and creative thinking he’s developed a site called Creativity Man. The format he uses has me very interested. It’s basically a blog where he posts articles related to creativity, puzzles, and processes for organizing thoughts like mind mapping. It’s like an e-zine archive that gets regular updates.

I’m planning to find a way to utilize this format when I start “Chasing Wisdom” as an e-zine. I had thought previously about writing an article at a time and sending a teaser or an overview to my list, then sending the complete e-zine monthly. I also thought about sending one article a week to my list and then posting a complete newsletter to an archive page monthly. Now I’m thinking about using a blog format similar to Ken’s and building a monthly newsletter as I go, adding an article every few days.

One of the most appealing aspects of Ken’s format is that when you get an e-mail, it’s about one article only, his latest blog post. Instead of scanning through 3 or 4 titles and finding time to read them all, you just have one entry to consider. With some e-zines and newsletters I skip parts if I don’t feel I have time to read it all, saving it in my inbox for a few days before losing track or deleting it. With Ken’s newsletter there is less time required to read one article so I’m more likely to read each one.

I encourage you to check out Creativity Man and sign up for the articles. You’ll get a feel for the rhythm (regular but not at regimented intervals) and the chance to see how easy it is to ready a lower-demand format—one article at a time. [Blogger’s Note: moving this post to the new site today 10/27/2008 I discovered the links do not work and Ken’s site is down. I will update this post if and when I find his new site.]

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Thursday I was at a meeting for The Parenting Center in Fort Worth. I’ve just joined the Client Services Committee and I’m slowly learning the details of what the organization accomplishes as different programs are reviewed at each meeting. Lots of information was shared, but I was having a hard time concentrating because I walked in the door almost late from driving around trying to find a parking space.

A huge piece of construction equipment was blocking most of one parking lot. It was like an oversized forklift and cherry picker combined. I walked in the door and was overpowered by the smell of glue, maybe epoxy. A new air conditioning system was being installed. Bangs and clangs interrupted our conversations at times, and the glue smell followed anyone in the door who came to give a report. Change is sometimes noisy and messy even though it’s necessary.

That evening driving home I passed what used to be a couple of older homes and open pasture land. It’s been graded and partly paved for a while and a lot of work has been going on with a bridge and two ponds. One house has been built and landscaped very quickly, taking just a couple of days. As I drove by I saw cars parked all the way around the curving road around the center pond and rows of people headed to the house. It was apparently a grand opening for the housing addition, which will have a total of 20 houses within a year or two. They’re building a stone and wrought iron fence around the property, which is the very odd but consistent choice of people who say they love this town because of the “open feel of the land.” Sometimes change is the loss of the old and the comfortable and rightly brings skepticism of the new.

Today coming back from lunch at my favorite Vietnamese restaurant I drove by a church that looked like a tornado had hit. Then I saw the sign and realized the sanctuary was left intact on purpose and the office and classroom building attached to it looked blown apart because it is being demolished for renovation and expansion. Sometimes change is ugly and disruptive and needs a lot of hope and vision to make it tolerable.

Change is coming here. I started this blog in January accepting Barbara Sher’s challenge to her newsletter subscribers to keep a record of the career change steps we are taking and put it out for others to see. I used the name Chasing Wisdom which I had already chosen as the name of a newsletter or e-zine. I knew a time would come when I needed to start building my archive of articles and creating the Chasing Wisdom newsletter/e-zine, and I knew that would mean having an additional writing project and separating the blog from the newsletter.

I’m pretty sure that time is coming. I will continue to post my weekly update of my progress and plans here, mostly to keep myself accountable and moving forward, and also to share my journey with other people who are thinking about career change. When I have the newsletter ready to launch, I will keep a link to this blog on that site.

That means some day hopefully soon, when you click on www.ChasingWisdom.com you will go to the site for the newsletter. When I get closer to ready (and have more certainty and courage) I will set a date for that change and let you know.

One small but significant change I made already. Last week I closed my post with my mission statement. I kept coming back to it over the week and decided to revise it to be clearer:

To be a catalyst for personal growth and development through genuine relationships
that expand to create welcoming and supportive communites

May You Know the Joys of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

I’m a difficult coaching client. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m a pain in the butt. Fortunately for the coaches, right now I rotate every couple of weeks as we do coaching exercises in my class through MentorCoach.

I don’t get stuck on the “how to” part. I can help anyone breakdown a goal into small steps that are easy to accomplish—one of the reasons I really enjoying coaching others. For myself, I get stuck on the “what to,” which usually boils down to “why to.” Or more fluidly: “To what end?”

It’s the underlying philosophy, the ideology, that I keep returning to with these questions. I think about starting a free-subscription newsletter with articles on personal growth and goal achievement. I know “how to.” But I stop and think, “Why would I start that now? What will it accomplish? How does it serve my ultimate mission and purpose? To what end?”

Thank goodness I’m making progress in building a philosophical foundation. And thank goodness I started reading Deep Change by Robert E. Quinn.

The book is about coaching leaders on the idea that greatly transforming the business or organization requires personal transformation of the leaders. Quinn brings in Joseph Campbell’s writings on the Hero’s journey, which flow in part from Carl Jung’s study of the archetypes of mythology, one of my favorite “mind candies.”

Quinn uses the Hero’s journey as a template for personal growth, not just radical transformation through developmental stages. In his model, whenever a person has to test his or her abilities and tackle new challenges, some self-discovery occurs and understanding of the self changes with increased abilities.

Previously I had used the Hero’s journey as a myth for great change—including leaving the familiar world for the unfamiliar, the idea of the new land as undiscovered parts of the self and the collective unconscious (I’m a bit of a psychology nerd so that’s delightful to me), and the idea of the cave or lair of the “enemy” as a place of shadow where one learns one’s power and abilities and gains new understanding that frees and empowers.

I just hadn’t scaled the Hero’s journey down to a point where it is a mythological template for the kind of incremental personal growth people experience more often than once or twice in a lifetime.

This idea bridges a gap for me. Before I would struggle with ideas like, If a coaching client needs help organizing a goal into steps and overcoming some fear or worry in order to take action, how does that relate to deeper personal growth? Deeper personal growth is a more important mission to me than accomplishing tasks.

Quinn’s model shows me how. Learning skills of goal-setting and time management ARE quest objects for some people. Facing a fear or worry, like the fear of failure or of success or worrying that focusing on one goal will be consuming and mean the loss of other goals, has elements of a heroic quest. Taking steps towards goals that seem a little out of reach extend a person’s understanding of the self. Accomplishing things that always seemed difficult before, and learning the way to do that with future goals, is transformative, although in a smaller way.

I understand now that being coached through one goal or series of actions may not be as big as a villain-vanquishing journey to the underworld with a “dark night of the soul” and complete transformation in understanding of the self, but it’s easily an important task along the way.

My work with coaching clients will usually be helping with a smaller quest that prepares for a Great Quest down the road. Some of the quests will be straightforward and simple at the time, but will help a client learn something that may be applied to a future quest in a hugely transformative way. It may even be one of the pieces of information that help the client be successful with the Great Quest.

In great tales of the Hero’s journey, the Hero (male or female) gathers helpers for portions of the journey and learns skills, adds understanding, picks up useful tools or weapons (connecting with the collective unconscious), and grows the self until the idea of facing the Villain has changed from outrageous and impossible to necessary but overwhelming. The Hero has grown to the point of being prepared for the Showdown of the Great Quest, but the Showdown itself is the ultimate transformation, requiring the Hero to use all of his or her skills, learning, and wisdom (secret learning, special weapons, and ancient lore) to come up with a way to victory.

Often the way to victory requires that the Hero combine all the prior accomplishments and discoveries in one great moment of realization of humility and submission. The Hero understands that transcendant needs matter more than personal goals and is willing to give up the personal for the communal, the temporal for the eternal. In so choosing the Hero discovers the weakness of the Villain, who is the embodiment of elevating personal goals and wants at the expense of the needs of others.

If I help my client gather one piece of “ancient lore” that helps make sense of challenges, one bit of understanding that leads to the discovery of a “magical weapon” the client carries with the blessing of a community, or one set of skills that make the Great Quest seem just a little less impossible, my work will tie in with my mission:

To be a catalyst for personal growth and development through genuine relationships in welcoming and supportive communites

May You Know the Joys of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

I stood in line for about 20 minutes at a grocery store to get the new Harry Potter book last Friday midnight, and people were on their cell phones with friends in lines at Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart hearing about much longer waits. It only set my mowing back one day—I was done by 10:30 pm on Saturday, slept late on Sunday, and got back on track mowing. Distractions resolved (and horcruxes revealed), I focus again on my new business.

I’ve discovered something important during coaching homework assignments with a couple of classmates. For the lasts three weeks, our class has specifically been asked to focus our practice sessions with classmates on our progress at setting up a coaching practice.

I was working with Dee, a classmate, when I realized that I wanted to pick one thing, individual coaching, from my many ideas for a possible business and focus on it. However, my next session with Dee I realized I was resisting and starting to feel “trapped” by the idea of having a set number of coaching clients and coaching sessions each week. Dee helped me understand that I want a more open structure so I can give clients more time when they need it and less when that’s enough, without parsing the minutes. Her coaching prompted me to think in terms of how much time I wanted to set aside for a coaching practice, and how much of that time would be for things like a group call for community support, time for additional brief follow-up calls and e-mail, and managing an online forum.

So I thought I was making some headway when I started talking with Sarah. The assignment for her as my coach was to help move me forward in setting short-term goals. I wound up completely lost again.

I keep returning to a different kind of vision for the service I want to provide. It’s not a straightforward coaching practice, where someone can buy a certain amount of my time for a set fee (4 sessions a month for 30 minutes each). It’s a broader view that provides information and comfortably paced conversation (maybe virtually, such as through e-mail and forums) for people who are starting to look at ways to bring personal growth and meaningful community into their own lives. It’s a view that includes providing information through books or training sessions. It’s a view that includes individual and group coaching for people who are ready to commit some time and effort to planning and implementing changes. And it’s a view of an ongoing community for people who have been through some targeted changes but still want company and connection as they continue to grow and learn things at a slower pace.

Here’s where it gets pretty silly, and humbling to admit. I set a goal to build my individual coaching practice and then felt like that would trap me—because it seemed like I would be abandoning all my other plans. Pretty goofy, isn’t it? But that’s the way reactions tend to be when they’re preconscious, or unconscious. They aren’t logical. They just point to our deeper values in a protective way.

Talking with Sarah, I realized two things: 1) I don’t have to choose one thing to commit to right now, to the exclusion of others, so I can give time and energy to adding coaching clients without “forsaking” my other plans; and 2) focusing on one thing felt like leaving behind the other things, like I was choosing “either/or.” It wasn’t rational and it wasn’t correct, but it was what my unconscious mind was thinking. And that was holding me back from committing to it.

As long as I remember to give some time each week to considering and planning those other goals, I feel free to focus time and energy on adding coaching clients. I’ve also realized that I’ll still have the freedom to plan my time, even if I have a few coaching clients. If I discover something about the idea of teaching or building a support community that grabs my attention and calls for my time, I can transition more time to it by not adding new coaching clients. As a client reaches his or her goals and moves on, I can allot that time to developing the other ideas. I can keep adding time to working on the other goals instead of adding new coaching clients for as long as I need to, eventually focusing all my time if I decide to. And I can add more coaching clients again after I develop those other ideas.

Thank you, Dee, for helping me realize I don’t have to format my practice in a traditional way. Dee told me, “Ironically, if you want to get out of the box, just build your own. And paint it however you want to.” She helped me embrace a vision that will serve more people at different levels of need.

And thank you, Sarah, for helping me see that my resistance to a traditionally formatted coaching practice comes from my sense that I don’t want my service to be narrowly defined and time-limited. I want ongoing and recurring interactions with people at different stages of change. I want to be able to follow them through focused episodes of bigger change, and also through the slow, deliberative, thoughtful transformations of spirit that occur when dynamic communities of people welcome and nurture each other.

May You Know the Joys of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

We live on a parcel of land in what once was rural countryside. Slowly suburbia creeps closer, and occasionally sends out runners like an aggressive vine, adding a cluster of mini mansions crammed so closely there’s no sunlight for grass to grow in between. There’s plenty of “green space” around the perimeter of the cluster of houses, and often an ornamental pond or two with concrete walkways twisting so much they look like they were poured by drunken men chasing each other. Usually they throw a stone wall around the “subdivision” to set it apart and give it the feeling of exclusivity. It’s odd to hear people say they want to move to this area because of the open feel of the land, and then build stone walls to block it off.

But we have open land! Open land means trees here and there, a pond to the north and a pond to the south, and cows to the west. Open land also means a lot of mowing. I have a zero radius mower to mow my parcel. Taking out the areas we leave wild and the pond, I probably mow about 4 acres. Here in Texas we had a lengthy drought followed by months of ongoing rains, so mowing has been tricky. I was able to get everything adequately mowed between rainfalls so I could take my mower in for its annual service. It took more than a week and the rains have been intermittent since I got it back. That means that the area outside our fenced yard is very tall, so parts of the grass rise above my knees when I drive the mower through.

Because of this I had to plan 2 levels of mowing. I cut with the mower set very high to shear off the top part of the grass, still leaving it lengthy and rough looking. I will have to go back over it at a lower setting to get a nice clean cut. If the rain holds off. I got a cool breeze and then a chilly wind with sprinkles of rain from some very dark clouds while I was making my first run through half the pasture.

Having to mow, and then mow again, seemed frustrating at first. But when I thought it through it sounded a lot like my career path lately. I have to take steps of preparation in order to take the next steps for the next level of preparation. I can’t just walk through a door and have a thriving coaching/personal growth counseling practice. I have to complete the coursework, I have to have a couple of practice clients, and then I have to build up a paying clientele one client at a time.

It’s the same with the mowing. I can’t just set the mower on “nice low even cut” and zip around for a few hours and be done. I have to mow the wild pasture down to a manageable level. Then I have to wait a few days and mow it at a lower level, which will leave clumps of cut grass that will turn brown and ugly. Then I have to wait until the grass has grown back a little and mow it evenly to get everything to look right.

Mowing has to be done on a regular basis. Around here, that’s from some time in March until maybe October or November. Then there’s a break. But when the grass starts growing again, I have to try to stay on schedule or it gets out of hand and grows taller than my knees. Sometimes the schedule gets messed up because of rain. Sometimes the schedule gets messed up because I’m out of town for a while. But usually the schedule with the mower gets messed up because I forget to respect the regular cycle of the grass when I get busy doing other things. I’ll miss my regular time to mow and look out a couple of days later and realize I need to get it done soon. And then I’ll start trying to figure out when, in my crowded schedule, I can get to it without waiting until my next regular mowing time.

Grass doesn’t reschedule. It doesn’t agree to postpone the project because things came up. It doesn’t wait for a time that’s convenient for both of us. It just grows when it’s supposed to grow and really doesn’t care if I stay caught up!

My pasture teaches me lots of lessons when I’m willing to pay attention. Some of them I even remember! This one I’m slow to act on, though. The new Harry Potter book comes out tonight and I’m heading to Kroger or Wal-Mart to buy it. The back half of the pasture may wind up as tall as my shoulders before I take time to do the first rough cut. Maybe I’ll finish the book over the weekend and find a couple of hours on Monday to go out and learn some more things from my pasture.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

I’ve had a lot of ideas brainflooding me in the past few weeks about ways to incorporate e-books, seminars, videos, audios, group coaching, individual coaching, and a membership site for online community and support in my business model.

It’s freakin’ me out!

I have a large vision of where I can eventually take my business and how I can have multiple profit centers and a lot of variety in my work but stay focused on the themes of community building, mentorship, and advocating personal growth.

It’s such a big vision it has stunned me, like a deer in the headlights.

I procrastinated writing this blog entry because I felt completely adrift, not knowing what to do next.

Which is a pretty sad thing, since coaching, more than anything else, is about finding direction and taking practical steps. But I was lost!

I never quite understand the nuances of the saying, “he couldn’t see the forest for the trees.” But I think it means the overwhelming details are blinding you to the big picture. Well, I got that reversed. I couldn’t see the trees for the forest.

My next step is to build my coaching practice. I don’t have to build a web site yet that includes products and seminars and a membership site. I just need something focused on helping potential clients get to know me.

The other things I can add in the future, but my focus now is on telling people I have a coaching practice and learning about getting referrals.

I love working with people exploring their calling. I love working with creative people. I love working with people who want to mentor and guide others. The message has to get a little more focused and specific to be useful in helping people learn how I can help them.

So that’s my goal: focus the message and start letting people know I have slots available for coaching clients. Until I get to a steady level (I have no idea how many that will be yet) I won’t worry about classes or group coaching or e-books. One purpose, until it’s established and fairly consistent. One goal. One focus.

It’s time to act.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

When you look to the left at the top of my blog page you see “Blogs from Friends Custom Designing Their Own Lives.” I included those a while back because they reflect the purpose of this blog when I started it: to track my journey to meaningful and enjoyable work and the discoveries along the way.

Today I want to celebrate these people and encourage everyone to click the links and see their blogs.

Arts, Tiles, and Mosaics is a blog by RMW about her zealous, joyful passion for painted tiles. She loves making them, she loves teaching about making them, and she loves studying ancient tiles. She’s trying to shift her life a little bit so tiles can be a bigger part, incorporated in her work and not just something for free time. See her work and you will know she can do it.

Della’s New Look Designs is by Della P. She has a knack for home staging, organizing, and decorating but is just beginning to explore those options. The excitement on her blog is she has discovered gifts and passions by doing volunteer work with a special youth ministry through her church and it is giving her confidence and joy. She is changing and growing, not sure where she will end up, but thrilled to be moving forward.

New Moon Angel’s blog is by Armelle, a French woman who until recently lived and worked in Ireland. She left that position to pursue more creative work and moved back to France as part of her journey. But she returned in time to join a pilgrimage walking through Spain and just spent about a month doing that. She is a writer by nature and looking for ways to include that in her new life. Her blog is full of the richness of her craft and amazing discoveries she has made by having the courage to make changes and take risks.

Rambling and Writing is by Stella, who loves to head out on weekends and drive the back roads and discover places. She is thinking of ways to use her unique perspective on discovering places to incorporate into weekend travel recommendations. Stella helped me realize that my own road will be twisty and uncertain sometimes, but the discovery of the new town can be more exciting than rushing straight for a distant goal and missing the journey along the way.

Storytellers and Writers is by Jane VerDow. She is author of Dear Daisy and started a small publishing company. Her prose is lyrical and she also puts poetry on her blog at times. She has a great deal of wisdom and insight and shares her own journey in a courageous and transparent way.

Travel with the Kids is a happy idea by Travel Cat (Catherine). Cat is using her blog to practice putting together great ideas for weekend outings or sites to see in different towns for people traveling with children. She includes reviews of places showing how children will experience and enjoy them and usually has price and contact information. This is a window on the development of a creative business idea, since in the future she may have a published guide or on-line resource with many listings. It’s fun to see the process of building up lots of information by writing one piece at a time.

Wendy V’s Ponderings is from Wendy, who recently moved from St. Paul, Minnesota to Nashville, Tennessee. She is a fan and advocate of musicians and has made guiding and coaching new musicians part of her career. She moved to Nashville to be closer to the music and the musicians. It’s a bumpy ride! She has taken a risk and made a big move. She is having new experience and learning a lot, but also struggling with learning a new place and getting a steady survival income. Hers is a story of courage and dedication to a passion.

What if you believe? is a blog from Kamin Bell, who works as a life coach while maintaining a demanding corporate job. She records her insights and philosophy here. It’s inspirational and spiritual, giving good balance to anyone with a life full of errands and tasks and corporate guidelines.

All of these women are changing their lives and taking steps towards work that reflects their deepest, truest nature. I honor them and encourage them.

And I’m going to look EVEN HARDER for men who are doing the same.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey