I am a coach who loves to help people make a difference in the world.
I’m exploring something new that will allow me to help more people do transformative work.
My ideal clients are people who:
- are beginning to recognize their own giftedness and creativity but haven’t fully figured out how they’re meant to use them;
- are edge-walkers, feeling like they almost always fit outside of society, but knowing they have a gift for seeing beyond the confines of conformity;
- believe deeply in the transformative power of community and want to serve as community-catalysts;
- have vision and imagination, believe they have a role in making the world a better place, and need support in clarifying that role;
- see the beauty and potential in the middle of the chaos and believe they have the potential to help lead change;
- have a connection to the sacred and are seeking creative spiritual practices that will deepen that connection;
- long to live more authentic lives, despite the way our society tends to reward Hollywood-inspired falseness; and/or
- are already transformative leaders who want to stretch their capacity even further.
Like most coaches, I ask a lot of good, exploratory questions that help you find your truth. I’m also trained in narrative coaching, so one of the things we do in sessions will be to peal back the layers of the stories you tell yourselves and help you tell new stories that get closer to your authentic life. Beyond that, one of the most powerful and unique aspects in my coaching is the work I do in helping you develop your own creative practice (such as mandalas) to dig deeper into your subconscious and find truths that may remain illusive in conversation or in limited left-brain thinking. My approach to coaching is wholehearted, whole-brained, creative, and holistic.
I love this work and I want to grow it even further.
The challenge that I have, though, is that often the people I most want to work with are people who live at the edges of the financial economy (usually by choice) and do not have a lot of money for the kind of coaching that would help them grow their work.
Like me, my clients tend to self-identify as the “imaginal cells” in the butterfly transformation – the cells that hold the future life as a butterfly in their imagination and help the other cells in the chrysalis find their way through the transformation. These are not always the kind of people who find financial success in a world that is still attached to its life as a caterpillar.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to a gift economy lately (inspired by books such as The Gift, Sacred Economics, and Walk Out Walk On), and I believe that the future of our world might see us move beyond the financial economy based solely on money exchange toward something where gift is more at the core of how we interact with each other. I believe this can be transformative in bringing us back into community and in transforming our damaged relationships with Mother Earth. As Charles Eisenstein says in Sacred Economics, our relationship with money has resulted in separation from the things that matter, and we need to figure out how to turn that around.
Not long ago, a client gifted me with a week at ALIA. She was so deeply appreciative of the coaching work we’d done together, that the gift flowed freely from her. I’d been to ALIA twice before, but this time was very different. It was remarkable how being there in the gratitude of the gift helped transform the experience for me. I felt much more free to offer my own personal gifts to other people that week, with no strings attached. It seems to me that when we move beyond purely exchanged-based transactions (where X is worth Y dollars), we can open a world of possibilities that are beyond our imagination.
Since then, I’ve been experimenting with how I might live more fully in a gift economy. I started a little personal campaign called “A Dozen Acts of Kindness” and began to extend anonymous gifts to people. That action inspired me to do more and now I’ve decided to extend my acts of kindness to my business.
Here’s what I want to do… I want to transform my business model to free myself up to offer more gifts, and thereby free other people to offer their gifts as well. That doesn’t mean I will give away all of my services (I still need to make a sustainable income that will feed my family and keep a roof over our heads), but it means that I will accept and give gifts more freely to help more people serve as imaginal cells to transform the world.
If you see yourself in the above list of my ideal clients, and you believe that coaching sessions with me would help you live more authentically and grow your work, then I want to coach you whether or not you are financially able to pay. I believe in you and I want to offer you a gift so that you will feel more free to give your gift to the world. The world needs more gift-givers.
These are my options for coaching:
- Standard: If you feel financially able, you can pay my rate of $100/hour (or $250 for three sessions, or $450 for 1 session/month for six months) for coaching.
- Standard + Gift: If you have been blessed with financial abundance, you can contribute to the gift economy by paying more than my rate for your coaching session. In that way, I can serve you as well as other edge-walkers, transformative leaders, and imaginal cells in their work.
- Gift Recipient: If you could benefit from my coaching, but aren’t financially able to pay for it, you can receive it as a gift with no strings attached. The only thing I ask is that you set an intention to use whatever you gain from our sessions to more freely offer your own gift in the transformation of the world.
- Gift Extender: If you have no need of coaching, but you believe in the work of the edge-walkers, leaders, and imaginal cells around you, you can freely offer a financial gift so that I will be able to extend my coaching to someone else (either someone you identify or an anonymous person).
I do most of my sessions by Skype or phone, so I can coach you no matter where you live in the world.
Whichever way you choose, I hope that you will consider being part of my gift economy. If coaching isn’t your thing, perhaps you’d like to participate in another way. I am extending this business model to my other offerings, so you can participate in the same way for Lead with Your Wild Heart, or Creative Writing for Self-Discovery in-person (Winnipeg).
Speaking of gifts… If you’d like to learn more about being an edgewalker, I’d like to give you the gift of an e-book I created last year, called A Path for Wanderers and Edge-Walkers. It’s a beautiful book, full of some of my favourite writing and photography, as well as interviews with 12 other wanderers and edge-walkers. Click here to download it.
If you’re ready to book a coaching session and pay for it (for yourself or as a gift), use the first menu to pay for sessions, and/or use the donate button to add a gift of your choosing to the gift economy. (You’re welcome to contact me for a free exploratory session, if you’re undecided.)
If you wish to be a gift recipient, send me a note, tell me a bit about yourself and why you think coaching with me would be a good idea, and we’ll book a session (or 2 or 3).
Or choose how much you’d like to donate to the gift economy:
This is such beautiful and transformational work you are doing. I take my hat off to you and others like you. =)
I agree in your idea of a gift economy. It just brings about so much abundance for everyone. I used to have a very problematic relationship with money (I still have struggles now, but I am thankfully improving bit by bit), but when I went on a backpacking trip for 7 weeks, I experienced just how abundant the world can be. I lived mostly on the kindness of strangers-turned-friends/family. Kindness and trust, not money, was the currency.
I also remember when I wrote about my experience in a breathing workshop – my teacher loved the article so much that he offered a scholarship on my behalf. I gave it to my friend who needed to take the breathing workshop but did not have the means. So I, my teacher, and my friend all felt blessed.
I am still finding my place in this world, crafting my key message as a writer, and trying to make a difference while sustaining myself and my needs. I hope to arrive in the place where you are now. =)