You know, when life hands you rotten potatoes, well, make what you can from them!! 

Just before the discovery of the potatoes, I had re-visited what appears to be one of my big life lessons which is that accept who I am and what I have to offer as a person and a Coach.  I’m one of these maverick kind of people who doesn’t like to be pigeon-holed in this wonderful age of branding.  My work experience includes 13 years running an IT Consulting Company as well as stints in the publishing, academia and pathology worlds. My Coaching credentialing includes both CoachU and SUN ™ Coaching schools.  I say all this because in addition to having all this great experience and schooling, and loving to work with people in various stages of career transition, I still sometimes get pigeon-holed as being a “Holistic Life Coach” (as if that is a bad thing!) and not always recognized as also being a terrific Career Coach with a wide breadth of experience and schooling to pull from.  It especially irks me when people that I thought knew who I was and what I was about, so obviously don’t.  Is this a branding issue? Perhaps. Or is this an opportunity for me to accept all of who I am and what I want at a deeper level.  In other words, perhaps I’m a “Holistic Career and Life Coach”? 

My fervent desire for people is that they figure out what to do in life that “lights them up” and then go do that thing, whatever it is. And not to let perceptions hold you back. Well, maybe this occurrence (again) today is a life “test question”. How much do I really believe what I say?    If I am willing to access my entire bag of tricks, well, who will be the people that will most benefit from them? These are the people that I need to put my attentions towards, not the ones who don’t grok me. 

What about you? What is your unique specialness? How do you perceive yourself and how do others perceive you? And who do you really-really care about understanding who you are and what you are about? 

How does this all tie in with “rotten potatoes”?  Because I was starting to grow a nice little resentment towards these people that had dared to refer to me as a “Holistic Life Coach” and I somehow believe that the Good Orderly Direction of life was giving me a hint through the use of rotten potatoes. I have much to be grateful for and many wonderful clients who find my style of Coaching very helpful for them because I can go down all kinds of roads that they may need to explore, depending on what they need. 

I’ll grab the miracles from the lessons where I can! How about you?  

This is the ultimate gift for anyone who loves to make people laugh, this kind of hearty response.

And yet, there are the times when I swear to you I must be the most serious person that ever came out of someone’s womb. When I get into these absolutely BLEAK, BLEAK places, I feel like there is not one drop of humor living inside me that I could possibly wrangle together to evoke a smile, much less a gufaw.

However, there is hope. I think I may have stumbled on to a cure for me that may be helpful for you when/if you get into these places.

If I accept the black, dank humor of my heart in these times, I can find “hit your funny bone” type connecting-humor by looking at some obvious point of life that I completely missed or a mishap or oh-so-human behavior that I’ve found myself mesmerized by

For instance. as a Coach, I have sometimes this absolutely unrealistic expectation of myself that everything has to be PERFECT. Even being imperfect has to be perfect. Anyway, the “grandfather” of Coaching, the late Thomas Leonard used to have all kinds of ideas of how your physical space should be kept and decorated where you live, work and play. For instance, there is a list of questions about the condition of your car, if it is maintained properly, washed (even the underside) etc.

Herein is where Thomas’ expectations and my reality diverge greatly. My car is well maintained, thanks in large part to my husband and it does remain fairly clean, however I have a nasty habit of chewing gum and putting the abc (already been chewed) gum into a wrapper and tossing it into the console box. Mix in a couple of those abc wrapper’s not wrapped all the way and the good ole Texas heat, and well you can imagine.

First time I realized how I was setting myself up for failure with the gum was on the way to meet an important VP of Corporate Training for a big company. Had my nice outfit on, had my clean car, had my fancy sunglasses….. When I went to retrieve my sunglasses out of the console, there was melted gum all over one of the lenses and some of the frame. I spent a good 10-15 minutes trying to figure out how to remove melted gum off of the sunglasses, with this gum continuing to melt and gooily attaching itself to all my fingers and both sides of my hands. I said a brief prayer of thanks to God that I was in my own driveway. At least there would be no witnesses.

Finally I got most of the gum off and drove to my appointment. Thank God I had the sense to take my glasses off and put them in my purse before I met with my client because a small round circle of gum was still located somewhere upon the glasses and had managed to suck every bit of hair (dog, cat, human) along with little itty bitty pieces of paper that I had in my purse, onto the gum. I had art instead of glasses at this point.

After the meeting, when I had discovered this lastest transformation of my glasses, I was in my car, parked out front of the client’s office which had large glass windows tinted on one side so you couldn’t see if anyone could see you, or were bothering to look, but you couldn’t tell for sure if they were or weren’t watching you.

Oh and my car is a convertible too, did I tell you that? So you guessed it, I got into my car and held the glasses with their appendage of gradoo below my knee under the steering wheel while I frantically scraped off the hair and paper and all manner of things attached to the gum onto my glasses WITHOUT drawing attention to myself.

At this point I figured the sane thing to do was to cop an attitude and act as if I indeed had intended to wear glasses with accutrements all along and so I flipped my pony tail over my shoulder, put the glasses on and drove away. Luckily, I’d managed to scrape enough of the junk off of my glasses that I could see out of the lense!

So, if you are ever feeling especially BLACK about the world or yourself and you want to laugh again, look to your own human-ness and help people to laugh along with you!