Stephanie Leigh Coaching

What “life lesson” are you learning
on repeat?

Finding yourself a little hot-under-the-collar lately?

I can help.

Great news, I offer a free session to anyone who is interested in learning more.

DM me to schedule.

Do you ever listen to a podcast and think that the podcaster was speaking right to you?

That's how I felt when I listened to a recent episode of Making Midlife Magic with Rachel Baum.

Her episode, titled "A love note to the exhausted," spoke right to me and I asked her if I could share it with you on this week's episode of Not Your Mama's Midlife Podcast.

It’s finally summer.

As a career academic, summer is always a special time (even though I never managed to have one of those jobs where you get summer off ;) ).

Even if you don’t have summer “off,” for many of us it’s a time when the schedule feels a bit looser. Maybe it is just that the days are longer and it feels like there is more time for personal things in the morning and evening hours.

Summer is a time for reflection, for thinking about what went well and how to make that happen again. What didn’t go as planned and how do I want to think about that.

Summer can also be a time for new beginnings.

What's the new beginning that you desire?

I can help you create it.

I have one-on-one private coaching sessions available. DM me for more information.

Want to bring a little levity to your life and work? Come join us in August to read “Humor, Seriously.” Link in the comments!

Not Your Mama's Midlife Podcast is one year old!

On this episode, I take you back from clips of each of our previous 51 episodes. Putting this together was so much fun!

If you haven't checked out Not Your Mama's Midlife Podcast yet, this is a great way to get your toes wet.

Check it out on Apple Podcasts or YouTube!

Your life isn’t one-size-fits-all.

Your coaching shouldn’t be either.

Most of my clients purchase a 12-session coaching package, but I offer 3,6, and even 1-session packages to meet your needs.

Wonder if this is a good fit for you? DM me.

We've been having a blast in my no-stress bookclub.

Here's the deal:
We'll be reading "Humor, Seriously" by Aaker & Bagdonas.
We read-a-long together over the course of a month and are in a Facebook group where we chat about the book. I post prompts, questions, items for consideration. You participate as much or as little as you like.
The last week of the month those of us that want to and are available hop on Zoom for a coffee/beverage of your choice chat to discuss the book.

Who could use a bit more humor in their life and work? This girl!

You too? Who's in? DM me for an invite.

Something that gets in the way of us making the changes that we want in our lives - even small ones - is the idea that something has to be “wrong” or “bad” for us to want to change it.

I never liked that job. I always hated that town. It was an unhealthy relationship. I had a dysfunctional relationship with food. I never wanted to be a ___________________.

Actually, wanting your life to be in some way different than it is right now doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with your life. Or with that thing. Or with you, for that matter.

Nothing has to be wrong for you to want something to be different.

We have this idea that in order for us to make a change - to where we live, to the way that we balance our career and home life, to our bodies, to our marriages - something needs to be wrong to justify the change.

This can get in the way of change because we actually don’t want to label a part of ourselves or our choices as bad.

You don’t need something to be wrong to justify your desire to change.

I’ll share with you an example from my own life:

I became a vegetarian when I was probably in 5th or 6th grade. I had several “bad experiences” involving cafeteria food and a trip to a pier (that I can still smell in my mind) that turned my stomach as a young girl and I was simply done eating meat.

For over 25 years, I was a vegetarian and a persnickety one at that. I didn’t eat soup with chicken broth and avoided eating anything that had even touched meat.

But then I began training for a half marathon and I just simply could not eat enough beans and rice to satisfy my hunger. I was training for a long-distance race and gaining weight - which is apparently not all that uncommon - but I found it pretty frustrating. Even more frustrating, though, was that I was simply hungry all of the time. And so my husband and I went on vacation and I started sampling chicken salad and steak off of his plate and then stopped being vegetarian quickly thereafter.

Nothing was wrong with me being a vegetarian. I wasn’t malnourished. I hadn’t been “sold a bill of goods” or felt like I was misinformed. I was just simply no longer served by not eating meat. And that was because I had changed. I had quite unexpectedly become a runner in my late 30s and my nutritional needs changed.

This probably seems like a very minor example to you but it was actually pretty significant for me. Being vegetarian had become a part of my identity and felt very much like a part of who I was. It was hard to let it go.

Being a vegetarian simply no longer served me where I was in my life and it was time to let it go and change my mind about eating meat. We’re often very uncomfortable with the idea that we can simply change our mind. It feels like we are admitting that we were wrong and most of us don’t like that very much.

Often when I am working with clients and they are talking about something that they want to change, they speak pretty adamantly about what they did in the past and how they don’t want to do that anymore. And if that works for you as a foundation to make change, go for it. But it can also pose a mental block to change when we feel like we need to demonize something we once espoused or enjoyed.

So let that go - it’s unnecessary.

Instead, recognize that who you were in the past, what you did in the past, was very likely the best that you could do at the time with the information that you had. It was probably appropriate for where you were. It may have been the best thing at the time, and still not be what you want going forward.

You'd never buy a car without first test-driving it.

Why would you do that with coaching?

A lot of people wonder whether they'd be comfortable getting coached.

Great news, I offer a free session to anyone who is interested in learning more.

DM me to schedule.

That very first sentence sums it up. Wow, I feel compelled to get more movement into my life. How about you?

#261 ‒ Training for The Centenarian Decathlon: zone 2, VO2 max, stability, and strength | Peter Attia, M.D. - Peter Attia “I would never want anybody to come away from this thinking, ‘I'm too old to do anything about it.’ I think as long as you're breathing, you have a chance to do something about it.” —Peter Attia