Categories: accountability, awareness, forgiveness

Since I’ve begun coaching, I’ve been listening to recordings I make of myself during my coaching sessions. This is to increase my awareness, knowledge, skill, and hopefully my effectiveness with my clients.

I’ve also asked my boyfriend to create a webpage for me - the one you’re looking at now. This was a culmination of work that he and I did together to display my services in an online brochure.

I am floored to look back on a few months of work and look at what I’ve created. My skills as a coach continue to grow. The integration of my childhood and my adulthood appears much more complete, mainly because of my very simple manifesto page. As my sister said, that picture of me as a little boy in the desert is famous - to my family at least. The photo was taken by my mom on a camping trip and has forever been the essence of me.

It is with a lot of patience that I look at photos of myself today. I don’t always embody that free spirited, energetic child. Forgiveness is racing through my body as I observe the emergence of wrinkles around my eyes, the few extra pounds that I haven’t let go of yet, my diminished hair. I must say that I also have a great love for my legs, my chest, my whole body really (another blog or ten will tell more about that…)

As my awareness increases of who I am, so does my ability to use forgiveness. Forgiveness is a skill that I learned as a client of working with a coach. By forgiving myself, I don’t let myself off the hook - I get to take responsbility for my actions and be accountable for them, not blame anyone - including me - for the truth of reality.

Rather than hide who I am, I am risking showing you my true self with my website and my blog. Afterall, as Helen Keller says, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” I guess that means my life is something.

Homework:

Who haven’t you forgiven? Yes, your answer to that question may be yourself.

Have you not forgiven that person because:

• You haven’t learned the skill of forgiveness. It’s not just a simple, one-shot, drink a miracle potion solution.
• You have chosen not to forgive the person.
• You don’t know.

Start there with your awareness of the situation. In any problem, the place to begin is the truth of what is - that’s awareness.

Truly Yours,

Joseph Lyons

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