PART 1: Transitioning into the world of coaching from a day job she’d held for nearly three decades.
Life can be like a river, moving slow and deep. We dive in and, even if the current isn’t strong, over time it carries us far from where we originally intended to go. It’s easy to become trapped by salary, status and the lifestyles we build around them. So easy, in fact, we’re often willing to overlook things like passion and personal fulfillment for months, years or even decades.
This was where Tina Woosley found herself – quite literally – one morning when she discovered she was physically unable to go to the job she’d dedicated the last 28 years of her life to.
Her story begins 13 months before. January 11, 2016 started like any other day. Deeply spiritual, Tina goes through her morning routine of prayer, meditation and journaling, asking the universe and the god of her understanding for the same thing she’s been requesting for a long time:
“Please show me something that makes me have a passion, that gives me an awareness about myself.
Help me find something in the world that I can fit into,” Tina prays.
Even though this day began like countless others she’d experienced before, Tina would be completely changed before she went to sleep that night. Today, the universe would answer. The openness and commitment to these daily rituals provides Tina with what she terms a “spiritual epiphany.”
As you may have discovered in your own life, change isn’t the only thing that sneaks up on us. Answers often use the back door too.
Driving to work before dawn, Tina begins to ramp up for her day. Up to this point, she has spent most of her working life advancing within the grocery business. So she knows her inbox is going to be filled with new items, not to mention a number pending from days prior. As the store’s bookkeeper, the stack of paperwork requiring her approval will be just as daunting as ever (despite the cute orange-haired troll she uses as a paperweight). She also knows that, in an 8-hour day (which often ends up closer to 10 hours), she’ll be lucky to focus on the never-ending deluge of timecards, deposits, balance sheets and cash reports for even half her shift. The balance of her day will be spent on meetings and the daily fires thrust upon her by corporate and store management. She’s tired already. And she is still a 20-minute commute from starting her day.
A large corporate grocery store never truly closes, given the presence of an overnight stock crew and janitorial staff. Yet Tina is typically one of the first employees in the upper office, starting her morning around 5:00 AM. On this particular morning, she hits the light switch in her office and the lifeless fluorescents buzz and flicker as they flood the tiny space (barely bigger than a closet) with a flat, shadowless light. Tossing coat and bag onto her desk, Tina makes her way to the breakroom next door and puts on the day’s first pot of coffee.
She stands alone in the empty space, the chairs pushed neatly up to the breakroom table and the scent of sanitizer lingering in the air from the custodial staff. The building’s HVAC system hums quietly, cycling temperate air through the vents. As the coffee works its way through the filter and into the pot with a promising trickle, the store’s music service pipes Eternal Flame, the old Bangles tune, into the room through a recessed speaker overhead. It’s a routine morning experience that can be had at any office in the world. Yet for some reason, Tina is suddenly aware of the emptiness of her surroundings.
That’s when she hears a voice distinctly say: “You want to be a life coach.”
The voice is so real, so present, so close, it startles her initially. It feels as though someone is standing right beside her. The remnants of her morning devotions still lingering, Tina has slipped back into a meditative state. And the universe is there waiting. It has finally opened for her. That night, she goes home and shares the experience with her husband. He encourages her and says he’ll support her in whatever decision she makes.
Energized by the clarity and direction she’s received, Tina can’t go to sleep. Instead, she begins her search, Googling the term “life coach.” As the next few days pass, she hones her understanding of the coaching profession and starts to investigate schools. Initially interviewing a school in San Diego, she continues her search hoping for a better fit.
That’s when she discovers me and the supportive community at Coach Training World.
Less than three weeks later, in February of 2016, Tina takes money from her savings account and invests it into herself. By that May, she is a certified life coach and building a small clientele.
But fear isn’t going to let her go quite that easily. Her story continues in Part 2.
