“I worked with Amber in weekly phone appointments for several months. I was looking for a life coach, because I wanted help transitioning out of a career that left me feeling chronically overwhelmed. In our appointments, Amber helped me to unravel that there was much more than just work contributing to my unsustainable lifestyle, including worries about family health issues, etc. She helped me to identify the issues I can control, the issues I can influence, and what is out of my hands. She also helped me to identify my core values. At first I was somewhat dismissive or reluctant to get into conversations about core values, because I was looking for specific strategies to get into a different line of work (eg. networking, etc.), and the core values conversation seemed too intangible to be helpful. However, Amber helped me to see that identifying core values is a necessary first step in order to ensure that any changes I make in my career, personal life, etc. will actually bring me satisfaction with my life.
Amber had some specific suggestions to help with my work-life balance and sanity in the immediate, and she had some general questions and guidelines for making decisions in any situation. Like many a wise guru, therapist, mentor, or coach, Amber helped me to discover that everything I needed was already inside of me. She gave very little direct instruction and instead did a lot of listening, echoing, and asking guiding questions. This sort of teach-a-man-to-fish coaching demonstrated Amber’s dedication to the principles of her practice, because it gave me a life-long internal coach and a guiding star of my core principles, but at the same time, she also worked herself out of a job.
Some people would be able to do this kind of work by themselves with a good self-help book. I am not one of those people. By working with Amber for several months, I made tremendous progress on issues that I had been struggling with on my own for several years. Sometimes Amber assigned me homework, but as I progressed, she coached me to assign my own homework by asking, “What’s the smallest possible step you can take to move yourself in that direction, and when is a reasonable deadline when you can have that done?” Just knowing that I would have that phone call with Amber at 4pm on Tuesday gave me the external accountability and the kick in the pants that I needed to follow through on tasks that I had wanted to do but found excuses to never get around to doing. When I tended to get overwhelmed with how much farther I had to go on major life projects, Amber genuinely celebrated my small steps in a positive direction. Her encouragement helped to keep me motivated, and her one-small-step-at-a-time approach was very effective with me, because one success gave me momentum to keep moving forward to the next success.
At first I thought that I would have preferred in-person meetings; however, I quickly appreciated the benefits of phone meetings. You can’t beat the convenience, and I believe that I made faster progress by working over the phone. On the phone, I felt safer to take risks, open up, and let myself be vulnerable. I am confident that Amber would be just as warm, empathetic, and encouraging in person as she was on the phone, but not having to face another person helped me to feel safe enough to get right to the heart of difficult topics.
In the two years since I stopped working with Amber, I have recommended her to a number of friends and colleagues. I have often used my core values and Amber’s guiding questions to coach myself through decisions. As a public school teacher living in San Francisco, cost was definitely an issue for me, but I was ready to make a big change, and I knew that I needed help, so I was ready to seek professional guidance and pay accordingly. What I have found in the subsequent two years is that working with a life coach is an investment that pays off in the long-term. I feel that I have received more than my money’s worth in terms of the self-empowerment, sanity, and improved life satisfaction I now experience. My life isn’t where I want it to be yet, but I have to tools to create the life I want, and I’m well on my way.
One last word- working with a life coach is like anything else. It’s not a magic pill. You get out of it what you put into it. You have to work the steps, etc. So when you’re motivated and ready to put in the effort, give Amber a call.”
Rebecca Rush, Public School Teacher, San Francisco, CA see less
