Try-Day Friday: I Saw a Life Coach

— -- “Just because you think it, doesn’t mean it’s true.”

This, more than anything else my life coach Melanie Rudnick told me, is what I took away from my experiencing trying out a life coach.

If you asked me just a few weeks ago what I thought of life coaches, the first thing would be “self-indulgent.” The second would be, "who has time for these things?"

Turns out the people who think they have no time for “these things” (me) are very likely the same people who should make the time.

I knew Melanie from a previous article I wrote on her conscious parenting coaching. So when the opportunity came up to talk to a life coach and write an article about the experience, I naturally thought of her.

We dove right in our first session. The very first question she asked me was “so what’s been going on?” I launched into a minutes-long tangent about how I was simultaneously overwhelmed by doing too much and crippled with anxiety at the thought of not doing enough.

Talking to Melanie -- four times in total for the purposes of this article -- was very much like speaking to a friend who had very thought-provoking nuggets of feedback and exercises to work on between sessions.

Anxiety became a central theme of our conversations. Not the panic-attack inducing kind, but rather the kind of anxiety when your thoughts start spiraling and that feeling in your gut gets worse and worse and then all of a sudden you realize you’ve wasted an hour thinking about something that may or may not even happen.

I told Melanie that with a family, career, two children -- one with special needs -- training for a marathon, fundraising for causes I’m passionate about, writing a book and all the while trying to be an attentive wife/daughter/sister/friend, it often felt like things were just too much.