Okay, I am rethinking my entire website and blog again. So the next time you visit, it could all change. Not that I’m one of those indecisive creatures who go into great dramatics over which flavor of ice cream they want on their cone. Well, maybe sometimes. No, don’t let me digress. Instead I am just going to open my heart to you and tell you a bit of my story, and where my heart is.  It is a longish read – you’ve been warned!

I have had the fortune of two different career fields in my life. When I lived in California, which I still consider my “home,” I worked in the field of interior design. Yes it was glam, exciting, and also stressful and frustrating as any job can be. But I did love it. This encompassed my life from my 20s to nearly 40. During that time, I also read and studied with many life masters. The paranormal was a strong focus for me, having had psychic experiences of my own. That led me to learning more about the nature of reality, energy work, and even studying psychology – all the while ordering sofa fabrics and pouring over the tacky wallpaper choices of the 1980s.

Jump ahead (and snip all the circumstances and life in between) to my 40^th birthday when I found myself just uprooted from the San Francisco bay area to The Bronx – New York City. It’s all a story of love, of course. Be careful out there, love can turn your life on a dime. I remarried to a man who would take me on a journey of life education beyond anything I could have anticipated.   He put in my hands ancient philosophers, modern philosophers, art, culture, and the challenge to stay present in reality. All that is another story I will share later.

A designer is only as good as her sources, and all mine were in California. So I left the design life behind. Eventually I picked up medical transcription, and like all jobs I ever worked, I grew with this until I was running a transcription company as the director of operations. The one thing I loved most during my years in management was coaching and mentoring the transcriptionists who comprised my team. Often it was a matter of inspiring them and showing them how to set personal goals, but it was occasionally a bit of coaching on life as well. I showered them with positivity and inspiration. To telescope the story down in a hurry, a big fish corporation came along and gobbled our medium fish company.  As corporate America often goes, a year later they filed bankruptcy and reorganization, which meant work force reduction. There was wave after wave of cuts.  By August that year, they finally got around to me after I transitioned my last large client onto their software platform. This was a gift, though I did not immediately realize it at the time. What I could not foresee then was at the very end of the year my husband, Jim, would die at my feet here at home within minutes from a sudden and massive coronary event. The last 5 months with the man we all fondly referred to as “The Master” were spent together, without the time crunch and stress of work.  We had a wonderful 5 months together, free as children, before he made his exit in the manner that Dr. Christiane Northrup likes to refer to as “Happy, Healthy, Dead.” Perfect. He was indeed The Master. We had been together a little over 21 years, married 20 years.

Notice my entire life seems to cycle in 20-year increments and turns on a dime every 20 years. A few days after Jim passed, I got the offer letter in my email that I had been anticipating from a CEO who had reached out to me a month earlier to come on board and help “fix” the company. Having absolutely no source of income after Jim passed, I accepted the offer letter immediately with great relief. The new job started out fantastic. I would continue to be able to work from my home office, remotely connected to their server.  I stepped into their quality department and after more than a year of constant backlog in that department, I had it turned around in a matter of days. It felt great to have that “win.” Unfortunately, it went downhill from there. When the CEO switched me over from quality to production, and instead of empowering me as he had done when bringing me in as quality manger, he took all my power away.  I was put into a position to handle production the same way it had always been handled (or mishandled) and given no power to control it at all.  It quickly escalated to my working from the time my feet hit the deck in the morning for a solid 10 hours or more, still checking back on the production servers in the evening. Then it became clear that I was expected to constantly monitor production and employees over the weekend.

Because they did not want to pay for an overnight help desk any longer, it was decided that managers could rotate through each week to be on call from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m. for help desk calls.  Soooo, it came down to the fact that I was now expected to constantly monitoring the work 7 days a week.  During “help desk week,” I could not leave the house at all.  Bloody hell, it was like being in the “Shu” on Orange is the New Black!  In addition, they were holding my feet to the fire over production when I had no real control over it. It was absolutely beginning to destroy my health.  My blood pressure was rising, and I experienced a couple of episodes of ventricular tachycardia. I was on heart medication for the first time in my life.  All that and it was only the tip of the iceberg of negativity going on in this company.

Then came the epiphany.  I had “a peak moment” that I cannot quite put into words. I was at my desk when I suddenly looked up from what I was doing and knew my life would could not continue in that direction.  I knew what I missing most was the opportunity to actually coach and mentor the people I was working with.  The expectation was more about beating people up over their lack and/or short comings instead of inspiring team cooperation. Like curtains being raised up off my eyes, I saw what I had been doing all along as a manager and actually “studying for” my entire life was coaching and mentoring others into their best life. Showing others how to reshape their reality into the life they want, and inspiring them to go for it. Yes – it was another 20-year turn for me.

In that flash of inspiration, I knew that this is what the rest of my life on this planet will look like. I will coach others how to choose happiness, to love themselves and others, to live their lives “Happy, Healthy, Dead.” Just like that – Joann The Life Coach came as a moment of divine inspiration. I left my job shortly thereafter. I did not give notice, but I bowed out with grace and shared with them where they needed to look to move their company forward and continue to fix what is broken. I pray that they can learn the difference in taking a sour view constantly and instead manage from a place of excitement and inspiration to run their company.

This was a total leap of faith to move forward on my savings to gain certification as a Life and Wellness Coach. Right now, I am perfecting the tools I have learned over my lifetime and using them to coach myself. I need to know these work from the inside out and then I can start placing those tools into the hands of others. I feel I am looking at two paths and still do not want to completely close the gate on one. In my heart, I want to reach out to women who have struggled with weight, body image, and maybe even overall health for all their life. I want to help others understand the power of their thoughts and how to unbury those thoughts in a gentle and supportive space.

But I cannot turn a blind eye to the last gift I was given in corporate America and the reality that there are companies who are still managing staff and resources in the old paradigm. Even worse is the advent of a paradigm where performance is considered measurable, creating an environment that undermines team effort. CEOs have completely forgotten that 2 + 2 does not always equal 4.  Artistotle knew this 2,400 years ago, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”  How can such a universal truth gotten swept under the rug of “analytics?”

So two roads open before me for the next 20 years. I am hoping I can eventually encompass both. But for now, I have to go with what is foremost in my heart: One-on-one coaching and mentoring to help and support other women to reach their personal potential. Talking to women, the number one concern is almost always weight issues, eating issues, body issues. So there is the starting point, and the story of the peak moment that changed everything. Welcome to my next 20 years. I hope you will come along for the ride!