Ta-dah!

Yep, goal number one met. I am officially a certified life coach.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. It feels fake, in a way, because I haven’t worked with any real clients, i.e. people who pay me money to help them with their life. On the other hand, those years of counseling school, and the binges of self-help reading, do mean I’m pretty far ahead of the game in terms of knowing everything the class covered. Plus, I breezed through many of the exercises because they were things I’d already done. I was super amused by one exercise that had me thinking about passion and purpose in life, because I spent the last two months thinking about just those things. If I hadn’t already done that work, I wouldn’t have been taking the class!

Overall, there were not a lot of surprises for me. The biggest area that I didn’t know much about was neurolinguistic programming, aka NLP. Me being me, I immediately started doing more research, and while NLP is a hot topic, there’s not a lot of science to back it up. There’s nothing in it that’s dangerously far out there, IMO — I’d put it in Law of Attraction territory for being maybe helpful, maybe just wishful thinking — but there’s nothing that says I have to use it with my future clients. I’d really rather spend more time talking about how we can improve their sleep than working on hypnosis-type strategies for changing their thinking, although I guess those two areas could easily intersect. But it definitely won’t be my focus.

There was one cool exercise, though, where you visualize as emotion as a physical object — with a color, a texture, a location in your body — and then you start to spin it, and transform it. At the end, the emotion doesn’t feel the same. You’ve changed it. I found it surprisingly effective in the moment, and would definitely try it again or recommend it to someone who had some unpleasant emotions to work through. Again, though, not really going to be the focus of my future “signature program.” (Instagram has just been flooding me with ads and sponsored posts about coaching, so I am quickly getting up there with the jargon.) 

Apart from the life coach certification class, which was fairly intense because I was doing it quite quickly, I’ve been looking at branding and marketing and video creation. I spent hours yesterday working on logo design, because before I can really start creating content, I need to figure out what it looks like. <– And the moment I wrote that, I realized that’s a stupid idea. I don’t have to know what the cover looks like before I write the book. And I don’t have to create my website before I start putting my ideas together! Well, that’s… a thing to think about, I suppose. I do still feel like it’s an obvious first step, but maybe I’m rushing my fences. It’s enjoyable, but I definitely reached a point yesterday where I felt stressed out, and anxious, and like I was spinning my wheels, going nowhere. Fortunately, Miss Sophie Sunshine suggested that it was time to play, so I walked away from my computer and by the time I came back, I felt better. 

Last night was the first class for her therapy dog training. She didn’t get to come to that one: it was the introductory class to meet the instructors and talk about how the whole thing works, ie the goals, the process, the requirements. I am… reserving judgement, I guess. I spent $90 today on the required stuff — a harness, Therapy dog badges, paw treatment lotion, a first aid kit, wet wipes, nail clippers (she has to have her nails trimmed, which she is just going to love <–not) — so I’m committed enough to be investing.

But they allow prong collars up until the first AKC certification test (although not after) and they don’t use treats, so I am going to see how the training actually goes. I think Sophie will like it — it involves a ton of outings to a lot of different places, and a lot of learning, which ought to please her. She is a girl who likes to be busy. But if anything about the training makes her unhappy, I’ll quit. The whole point is for her to be having fun, so if it’s not fun for her, she will not become a therapy dog.

But I do think she’ll like it. It’s a lot of work, though! I knew it was 90 hours of training, plus a bunch of testing, but I didn’t really factor in driving time in my mental  estimation of what it would require. Last night’s class was an hour away, started late and ran long, so it was four hours, not the one hour I expected. I don’t expect every one of those 90 hours to require another 2 hours on either side — the training takes place in many different locations — but it’s definitely going to be keeping me busy. Also getting me out and meeting people and doing things, all of which is good. We’ll see how it goes. Along the way she’ll have to pass 3 AKC certification tests, too, including some things that I am not at all sure about, ie calmly stay with a stranger for three minutes while I leave. So maybe she’ll fail! I guess that would be we’ll fail, since I’m the one responsible for teaching her. But I have no idea how one teaches a thoroughly attached dog how to be okay with being left with a stranger, so… yeah. I repeat, we’ll see how it goes. 

Plans for the rest of today: a trip to the grocery store, some work in my Happiness Coach Certification class, a little more time watching my video class, and tonight, writing with my friend, J. I’m looking forward to the last the most, obviously! I’ve been quite happily doing all my stuff, but there’s a dragon in the back of my head, tapping her foot impatiently, and I don’t want to leave her alone for too much longer. Who knows what kind of trouble she would get into?