After my mom passed away I began to contemplate my life in a whole new way. I started to take inventory of my existence and began to uncover things about myself that I never saw before. As I became more honest with myself about who I am and what my faults are, it quickly became evident to me that if I was truly going to progress in my life that I was going to need some help.
I had heard about how Oprah works with an online life coach so I started to research it to see if it might be something worth trying out. However I must confess that I felt a bit odd about the idea of speaking with someone who I didn’t even know about the most intimate details of my life. Things like my weight, health, relationships, finances, and all of my bad habits that I had tucked away under the rug so no one could see just felt a bit strange to me.
After speaking with a few friends who had worked with a coach said that they had a great experience started to make me feel a bit more at ease. So I decided to rustle up the courage to interview some potential coaches and after doing some more research online, I found a great person who helps women just like me.
One of the first things we did in our sessions was what she called an “inventory assessment” where she asked me a lot of probing and tough questions about how I think, feel, and behave in certain areas of my life such as relationships, career, food, and so on. During this process, she suggested that I keep a daily journal of my thoughts, feelings, and how I spent my days.
At first I thought this was a bit over excessive. Why do I need to write down every little thing I think, feel, or do? But as I began to go through this exercise, I quickly saw how necessary it actually was because what I had not realized until I did start doing this was that I was making a lot of bad choices unconsciously.
All of a sudden I became conscious of all the things I was unconscious of and it came crashing down on me like a ton of bricks. It was like getting slapped in the face about how poor my choices and habits actually were. Up until then I never thought there “that bad.” But after being forced to have to write down everything and then look at it, I had only one of two choices:
Mature, be accountable, and change my ways. Or, continue the way I was living and accept who I was and know that my life would not improve until I did something about it. This was a very difficult moment in my life where I had to step up and become a better version of myself. While it was not easy and took me many months of self reflection and building more discipline, I am so glad that I started keeping that journal because for the first time in my life I saw who I really was up until that moment.
Now I have chosen to be someone else.