Celebration, learning and your future: Questions to help you reflect on your year & envision your year ahead

Another year has gone by. As we say goodbye to 2018, I would invite you to reflect on your year. Here are some questions to guide your thinking.

Celebration

• What are you celebrating?
• What territory have you taken?

For me, I am celebrating that I have pursued my health coaching and leadership training and certification! Becoming a health coach has been a dream I have held for the last number of years. I started my training 13 years ago while pregnant with my first child. After his birth, I put that dream aside as I adjusted to the overwhelm of parenthood.

My dream, while put on hold, never died. I could feel it bubbling up inside my soul over the last few years. This past year and a half, I resumed my training. In September, I completed my Wellcoaches Health Coaching Certification.

This health coaching certification involved:

• Passing a written exam on coaching psychology
• Submitting my personal 3 month wellness vision
• Submitting 12 week goals and weekly goals and objectives from a practice client
• Completing a behavioural neuroscience course called “Organize your Mind” looking at the neuroscience of change
• Passing an oral coaching exam, which involved being able to demonstrate coaching competencies such as asking open-ended, powerful questions, offering reflections and mindfulness with a client within a 30-minute exam.

In addition to my health coaching certification, I also deepened my learning with personal leadership coaching with the Coaches Training Institute’s Co-Active Coaching Program. This program is world-renowned. It has enhanced my nutrition and dietetic practice, and has changed my life!  That story will have to be another blog post.

Learning:

• What specifically have you learned about yourself over this last year?
• What do you wish you had done more of? Done less of?
• Where are you too hard on yourself?
• What limiting beliefs have you let go of?

I have had much personal growth during my coaching programs. I have worked with several world-class coaches, including my personal coach, Leona deVinne. These coaches have asked me powerful questions and have helped me identify my inner leader, my life purpose, my personal values, as well as my ugly inner critic.

I have learned that when I live my life in alignment with my values, my life feels fuller. I feel alive. I have learned to evaluate decisions against my values and against my life purpose. Sometimes the hard choice is also the right choice.

I have learned that, when I have the courage to sit within the black hole of uncomfortable emotions, there is brightness on the other side.

I have recognized some of my limiting beliefs – and while I may not have totally let them go, I can now recognize them for what they are, when they are activated, and I can see how they interfere in my life.

Gratitude:

• For what are you grateful?

This year, I completed a Happiness Basics Course through the Foothills Primary Care Clinic, learning about practices I can do to create more happiness in my life. Of the many practices I can do to create more happiness in my life, gratitude was one of them.

When you specifically look for things in your life for which you are grateful, your perspective shifts. You start looking for all that you already have. What we focus on tends to grow. It is a powerful shift in perspective and absolutely contributes to happiness.

Your Future:

• What do you need to let go of to start fresh going forward?
• What are you unwilling to change?
• In what ways will you take care of your wellbeing to boost or maintain your life balance?
• What are you becoming?

As I think about my next year, I am especially provoked by the question about taking care of my well-being. While I usually think about my professional and well-being goals, and I design my life to achieve my professional goals, I am often not successful with maintaining my behaviours that support my overall well-being. While work contributes to my happiness and fulfillment, so too do other activities in my life like spending time outside in nature, spending time with friends, being creative and music. For me, it will take discipline and purposeful design in my life (and calendar) to not fill every spare moment of my free time in work-related pursuits.

I am unwilling to change my passion for my work. I am unwilling to stop learning about food, nutrition and coaching. But I am unwilling to let that be the only way I spend my time. In this way, I see my life in 2019 becoming bigger and more whole-hearted. I see me starting to truly live.