image by Serge Melki

I’ve written before about how much my experience of life has changed in the last year or so—I fell in love, changed many of my habits, and found a spiritual framework that makes sense to me both intellectually and instinctively. There’s been several components to this sea change, from taking on the practice of meditation, to joining together with friends to start this website, to seeing myself and all of humanity in a huge, evolutionary context. One tremendously important piece of this puzzle has been working with Maia Conty, a dear friend of almost 15 years, and, lucky for me, a gifted life coach.

Tomorrow we’ll feature highlights from an interview that Victoria and I conducted with Maia last week, but today both of us would like to share our experiences of working with Maia and how her coaching is helping us change so that we can create the future we want.

I decided to start working with Maia about a year ago, because although I had a lot of great ideas that really excited me, I was having a tough time getting going with them. One of my strengths as a person is that I am easily able to see the big picture and how I fit into it. But sometimes where I falter is in implementing my vision. Instead of breaking it down step by step so that I can achieve success, my tendency is to obsess on my ideas in so much detail that I get overwhelmed and end up turning away. So I started working with Maia in the hope that she could help bring my big ideas down to the level of the day-to-day. In order to create this amazing thing I see in the future, what do I have to do today and tomorrow and next week? Even beyond that, who do I have to be?

There are many kinds of life coaches out there, with all different kinds of training, from rigorous year-long programs to internet courses for $49.99. Maia’s training fits into the first group, and is called Accomplishment Coaching, or ontological coaching. Ontology is the study of beingness—what does it mean to be a human being?—and is based in the idea that in order to do different things in our lives, we must choose to be different things.

What does this mean? Well, for instance, if I want to help build a movement to create a magnificent future, then who do I have to be? I must be committed, courageous, welcoming, and bold—a true leader—not a circus monkey wanting attention, or a recluse wanting to hide away from the world. Maia’s support helps me live out of the brilliant parts of who I am—my essence—and recognize when I choose to act out old patterns—my survival mechanism. Instead of just seeing myself as “that’s the way I am,” looking at myself in this way makes it clear that in every moment, I have a choice as to who I am. And the more I exercise that choice, the stronger I get at realizing I always have one.

My conversations with Maia continually remind me that I am 100% responsible for my life. Crazy things might happen, great or terrible, but either way I’m responsible for how I engage with them. Maia listens closely when I tell her about what I want to work on each week, and she points to where I might be living within a limiting belief or a sense of victimhood. One small example: my company pays us every 2 weeks, rather than once or twice a month, which I found crazy-making in terms of setting up a budget and sticking to it. Maia pointed out that I was choosing to let this keep me from figuring out a way to achieve my financial goals, and gave me a practice area, or piece of homework, to figure out a way to make it work. Which I did!

This is just one small example—she’s helped me with so much more, from getting some clarity on the slightly crazy things I sometimes do in my close relationships, to deciding to lay down the sadness I’d carried with me since my loss-filled childhood. She helps me connect with my essence in difficult situations, she helps me break down big projects into small, doable goals, and she tells me straight out when she sees me choosing a victimized position. I like the language she uses around this: being at the effect of something rather than being the cause. The goal is to be the cause, even when bad things happen—when I broke my ankle in the fall, she helped me craft and execute a plan for making my 6 weeks of being stuck at home useful and valuable. She reminds me to take care of myself, and to be the woman I want to be.

Every Monday morning when we talk, I end the call feeling fired up and ready to make the week sing. One amazing thing I’ve noticed about this process is that it feels good to grow and create and engage fully with life. And while I continue to have problems and things I want to work on, they feel more like opportunities to continue developing rather than thorns in my side. It’s an entirely new orientation to life for me, one that is both effective and enjoyable.

Since I’ve been working with Maia, I’ve been telling lots of people about how helpful her coaching is to me, and some of my friends have begun working with her, too, including Victoria. Here’s what she has to say about her experience working with Maia.

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I started working with Maia about 3 months ago after talking with Megan about it.  I really didn’t know much about life coaching, but I’ve spoken to a few friends who have worked with coaches and they both had positive experiences.  I was impressed by Maia the first few times we spoke.  I noticed that she was very focused on our conversation and I liked her style of relating new concepts with pictorial images, an easier way for me to understand.

Recently Maia told me that, “If we want to create something new, we [must] be someone new.” This is helping me realize and accept that it is up to me to choose to be someone new.  In order to change my life step by step, I have to change my actions and this takes choosing different things.  Wanting the change and speaking flowery about the change doesn’t create the change.

One thing that is helping me live differently is keeping a well-being chart.  This is a simple chart that Maia helped me with to keep me on track of daily self-care: exercise, meditating, clearing exercise, flossing each night and a regular sleeping schedule. When I complete all of the items, I feel healthy and energetic, which gives me confidence to do it again the next day.

Getting to bed and waking up at consistent times has been a challenge for most of my adult life. After a few weeks where I kept blowing off these two items, she helped me break it down by asking me to be a scientist and find out what’s preventing me from regular sleep.  From observing my thoughts and behaviors around sleep, I realized that I also have assumptions about best times to concentrate.  I thought that I could only concentrate well in the wee hours, a habit I developed during high school and college.  Now I’m noticing that I concentrate just as well during daylight hours.  It’s really all up to me.  When I try this new realization out, I break up my old habits and give myself a chance to live differently.

Being something new means learning to see what the next highest, or intelligent choice is and then to do that thing or speak from that place.  I relate it to jumping over really wide puddles, I know where I want to land and the muscle strain is worth it.  When I know what the next highest level looks like, sometimes I hesitate, then say to myself, “well, Victoria what do you want, the same old thing? Naah. Or to grow up?  Yes.”

I am learning to uncover interpretations about life that I had over time unknowingly come to accept, but once uncovered, am totally disgusted by and realized that these beliefs I adopted were the very same ones I said I would never do.  And what’s great is that by observing them as one interpretation about life out of a countless number, I renew my convictions in what I really want rather than give in to “That’s just the way it is,  that’s just the way I am.”

More than anything though, I see that this work is a process and that each choice I make creates more confidence in my abilities to make a better life for myself.  Like Megan, I have also shared what I’ve been learning with friends and one in particular was very inspired and she shared it with her friends who in turn want to learn more.

If you are interested in learning more about life coaching or speaking with Maia, email us and we’ll get you in touch with her.