Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life!

When your birth includes a near-death experience, you know you are in for a wild ride. A fifty-five-year roller coaster of triumph and burnout led to finding my life purpose more than five decades later. Mine is a story of hope. Yours can be too.
As a life coach, organization transformation consultant, Reiki master, artist, author, and broadcast personality, I have pursued a lifelong passion for the transformative power of love. I help individuals and organizations learn to harness that power to step into their greatness.
When we choose fear as our fuel, any of us—individuals and organizations alike—can become stuck in the “hamster wheel” approach to life. Trapped by the mistaken belief that busyness is the same as purpose, we can’t stand the way we’re living but feel powerless to change.
As we work together, my clients discover what I discovered: when you fall in love with yourself, everything else falls into place, personally and professionally. Choosing love as your core energy automatically enhances every aspect of your life: your perceptions, opportunities, relationships, and priorities. You get unstuck, reclaim your personal power, and recapture your zest for living, moving yourself forward into a life you love.
Instead of choosing to live as a victim of circumstance, consider embracing the power of loving yourself unconditionally through insights, encouragement, clear strategies, and practical tools built on

• my personal journey, including a sustained eighty-pound weight loss, freedom from a ten-year bout of debilitating depression, and finding my purpose guiding others on their journeys;
• living in flow, a fluid Journey to Wholeness grounded in who you are being not what you are doing;
• the Discovery Framework that grew out of my experience, including core energy, sensory balance, and your personal board of directors; and
• Lessons in Living inspired by the journeys of my clients.

What’s love got to do with it? Everything!

If despite a lifetime of diligence and hard work, you feel you are still searching for something that remains just beyond your grasp, then you, my friend, may be stuck in the hamster wheel approach to life. Hamster wheel people don’t give up; they will die trying to deliver the goods.
You may think you want a better job, more satisfying relationship, or healthier body. In reality, your restlessness isn’t about your income, your relationships, or your looks. It’s about feeling incomplete.
As a life coach and Reiki master, I am in the business of liberation. I help people escape the self-imposed prison of the hamster wheel. For many years, their stories were my story, and they may be your story as well, but they don’t have to be. There is hope for getting off the wheel and living a life you love. It all starts with embracing the amazing and liberating possibility that the love of your life just might be you.
If you are like many others, you may doubt that falling in love with yourself is even possible let alone powerful. I assure you, it is. To help you begin to accept that you too have the power to embrace this reality, I will share with you the short version of my own personal story of transformation. The story of what happened in my own life when I finally fell in love with myself.
Mine is an all too common tale. Too many years on the wheel resulted in utter exhaustion and despair. I was the classic successful Type A overachiever. Sensible, driven, hardworking, and financially secure. Someone you could always count on to get the job done.
I began life in 1954 with a question mark over my head. Back then, medicine could not assure the survival of an “Rh factor” baby. Some required many blood transfusions. I was one of the fortunate few who needed just one.
Instead of perceiving my survival as a blessing and a gift, early on I concluded that I had to pack each day with output because I was, after all, operating on borrowed time and someone else’s blood. My response to a gift of grace was a lifelong marathon of trying to prove myself worthy through productivity.
Prove myself I did! Along the way, I earned a full scholarship to college and graduated summa cum laude in three years. Sounds great but at what price? Anorexic, ulcer ridden, and clinically depressed by age nineteen, I thought I had to re-earn my right to be here every day. To be worthy and safe, I had to control every aspect of my life, always pushing, always moving, always working, always doing. Looking back, I now realize that when I chose the following couplet from Sara Teasdale’s poem “Dust” (1966) as the caption for my college yearbook picture, even at age twenty-one I already knew somewhere deep in my soul that this way of living was a very slippery slope. Sara writes,

I almost gave my life long ago for a thing
That has gone to dust now, stinging my eyes—
It is strange how often a heart must be broken
Before the years can make it wise.

Although I was usually a quick learner, it would require three more decades of experience before I was finally compelled to act on that inner wisdom. Meanwhile, the world kept right on rewarding my perfectionism and incessant productivity. Fresh out of college, I got a job in management consulting, making partner in my first firm at age thirty. Over the next thirty years, I served as a senior partner in four of the world’s largest and most prestigious global professional services firms.
I had some wonderful times in that career. I traveled all over the world, mentored young people, and knew the satisfaction of doing good work. But even the most committed and productive individuals can shift from frustration to a sense of futility when their values, passion, work, and lives become disconnected. After decades of working nonstop with little attention to my personal health and welfare, my soul and my role had become increasingly separated, leaving me feeling disillusioned and betrayed by the very life I’d created.