When Life Gets In The Way….
New Year – New Life?
It must be the New Year! Suddenly, stories are everywhere of women making big transitions in their lives. I open Good Housekeeping, and there’s a piece on four women who successfully made it through their own personal transitions. One of them won a national triathlon just after she turned 50.
Another walked away from a six-figure salary in banking in order to teach prisoners to bake bread. A third became a guitarist in a rock band, and a woman who’d been made redundant set up her own business developing children’s products. In the Sunday Times Style magazine, there’s a piece about Martine Wright, who lost both her legs in the London tube bombings. Before the bombings, Martine was a marketing manager. Afterwards, she vowed to grab every opportunity that came her way, and now she’s part of the national women’s sitting volleyball team and hopes to be chosen to take part in this year’s Paralympics. Another article in Good Housekeeping features Natalie Ellis, who recovered from a mini-stroke to set up an international business designing and selling canine products. A measure of her success is that her non-spill dog bowl is used by the Obamas’ dog, Bo.
Of these six women, three chose to go through a transition – from being unfit to being a triathlon winner, from banking to bread-making and from yummy-mummy to rock guitarist – and three had a transition forced upon them. All six left their previous way of life behind and created a new one. Each of their transitions began with an ending, continued with a period of reflection when they weighed up possibilities and options for the future, and ended with a new beginning. That’s typical of transitions, and typical, too, is that sometimes they’re easy, and sometimes they’re difficult. It’s when you get stuck in the middle that a Transitions Coach can be really helpful!
Jan King is a qualified Life Transitions Coach with extensive experience of working with individuals, couples and groups. If you’d like to contact her, you can email her at jan@janking.co.uk or call her on 01787 222540 or on 07949 821 670. And you can visit her website at www.janking.co.uk
