I’ve been a coach for five years. I partner with a top rated credentialing authority to recruit, train, and mentor other coaches. With a degree in social work, I started as a skeptic when it came to the world of coaching. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t think I needed a measly coaching certificate when I already had a four year degree in helping people. 

I started with a Udemy certificate in Law of Attraction Coaching. This is regularly criticized for not being ‘real training,” but it’s how I got my start. It was a ten-ish hour online training. At the time, I understood the coaching industry was unregulated, and yet, I wanted some certifying agency to give me a quick stamp of approval to call myself a coach. I wasn’t ready to invest more, and I didn’t know where to start. I think it cost me $30. It did not teach me the necessary protocols and high standards of coaching, but it did get me started in learning about...

I am sharing a few examples of how to honor Black History Month.

I try to do many of these things year-round. Black History Month serves as a nice reminder to evaluate my efforts and add to them as well. I hope you can implement and add to these ideas. 

Consider the source here. I am a white woman who grew up in a small white town in Wisconsin. I went to a mostly white college in Wisconsin, too. Growing up, I could count the number of black friends I had on three fingers. My black friends were all adopted by white families. I can't change this fact, and I am not an expert on this matter. I do care to broaden my world, so I try to mostly listen when it comes to this topic.

After college, I moved to Chicago. I currently live on a street that you could compare to Sesame Street. No family is the same when it comes to race, religion, ethnicity, abilities, sexual orientation, age, and more. My children are growing up with much more diversity, and we are all benefiting from it. As a...

For a long while, I've struggled with drinking to have fun and drinking to relieve and escape some of the monotony and fatigue of the day-in, day-out routine of working full time as a database developer while also trying to be "everything" for my three young children.

Sometimes a glass of wine seems like the only way to get through a dinner with a screaming toddler who doesn't want to eat, homework with older kids, dinner, bathtime, storytime, etc. It exhausts me even thinking about it, but I knew the wine was also increasing my exhaustion, my anxiety, my daily internal struggle that I wasn't doing my best either at work or at home because of what I was holding onto: wine.

With my older kids now 9 and 7, they were beginning to see things in me that they hated when I was drinking, and my entire goal of being an amazing mother was falling away from me. I was putting so much pressure on myself to be perfect, using wine as an escape from that pressure, and then failing at the very...