As a young married woman with a degree in English Literature, Kevyn Malloy first chose the obvious path. She became a teacher, one of the few careers considered acceptable for women at the time. She could have stayed on that path and taught for decades. She could have risked just a little more ambition, taken her studies to a higher level, and become a college professor.

But the obvious path just isn’t Kevyn’s way. She doesn’t like to let other people limit her choices. She looks at what life brings her way, listens to her heart, and then chooses a plan. With her heart engaged and her mind set, she makes things happen.

That is how, with absolutely no experience or even the first idea about what she was doing, Kevyn left teaching and opened a restaurant. That became the second of four successful careers she has had so far.

The Second Career

Kevyn didn’t start out knowing what she was doing in the restaurant business, but she knew that she wanted to do it. The adventure and the challenge were exciting and new, so she opened and managed a seafood restaurant on the Jersey shore.

Kevyn is a resourceful woman, so she hired some of the staff who had worked at a prior restaurant in that location. She encouraged them to let her know when her way of doing things was different from the “old way.” At first she would default to the old way. With her staff as unwitting consultants, she learned all about running a successful restaurant so she could do it her way.

This adventure lasted for nearly twelve years. The completely unknown and exciting became more comfortable and manageable as she mastered all the necessary skills. Then it became a little too known, and less exciting. The restaurant business is hard work and demands long hours. With the adventure fading, she decided to move on.

The Third Career

As a lifelong lover of learning, Kevyn decided to go back to college. The first semester she signed up, she was open to new opportunities so she chose classes based on what was available. By serendipity, one of the available classes was Research Methods in Psychology. Although this was not a class known for drawing large crowds, Kevyn decided to try it out.

She surprised herself and did very well in the class, understanding statistics well enough to tutor other students. She took more psychology courses and eventually earned her second bachelor’s degree in psychology. She entered graduate school, earned her master’s degree, and received her professional license.

Four years later she was asked to come speak to psychology graduates at the school about working in the field of psychology. The head of the school urged her to pursue her doctorate. She hadn’t planned to do that before, but she was persuaded.

The doctoral program was challenging in some ways for Kevyn. She fought herself to keep going, especially working on her dissertation. The work was isolated and lonely, which is contrary to her nature. During this time her first marriage was ending, which made it even more difficult.

She finished her dissertation and received her doctorate. After two years of agency work she entered private practice as a clinical psychologist. She worked out of her home and was able to set her schedule. In the beginning, it was a very good life.

Time for Respite

But in time Kevyn started disobeying the rules she intended to live by. She got very busy with work and wound up out of balance. She wasn’t giving enough time to other parts of her life and wasn’t spending enough time with her new husband. She decided to take a six-month sabbatical to rest, explore new ideas, and clarify her direction. She prepared for months so her therapy clients would be able to complete treatment or transition to another therapist.

The second week into her sabbatical, Kevyn’s life was intersected by serendipity again. She ran into a friend and colleague who told her about a book she had been reading that thoroughly reminded her of Kevyn. It was Co-Active Coaching, by Whitworth and Kimsey-House. This is the introductory text for professional coaching in most training programs. With her interest sparked and her heart being drawn, Kevyn started looking for information on training to be a coach.

Kevyn heard about a presentation for therapists interested in learning to be coaches, given by Ben Dean, Ph.D. Ben is the founder of MentorCoach, an International Coach Federation Accredited training organization. Ben was a clinical psychologist who transitioned to coaching so the training program he described was tailor made for Kevyn and others with her background. She decided to enroll in the training program.

The Fourth Career

When her sabbatical ended, Kevyn returned to her private practice. She limited it so she could have time to build a part-time coaching practice. But being a therapist had lost its luster for her. Coaching was energizing. In time she realized she wanted to coach full-time and let go of her therapy practice.

Two years after she began coaching, Kevyn closed her therapy practice, tiptoed up to the edge, held her breath, and jumped in to the “coaching pool” full-time. The next month she was teaching her first coaching class for MentorCoach. Today she teaches new coaching students on a regular basis while maintaining a full and varied coaching business. Since she works from home, she and her husband are able to live half of each year in Pennsylvania and half in Vermont.

Kevyn says that she would never have guessed she would enjoy the areas of specialty she now works in. But she found them by being willing to try new things. She works with restaurant owners, a link to her distant past that brings her more energy and enthusiasm than running a restaurant ever did. She works with medical executives occasionally. She is one of a hand-chosen group of coaches working with MBA students at Smeal College of Business at Penn State.

Kevyn recently became the Director of Learning at MentorCoach. She helps mentor and lead the other trainers, and she helps revise and improve the curriculum for new coaching students. She is admired, respected, and loved in the MentorCoach community.

Dancing in the Moment

In the field of coaching, “dancing in the moment” refers to the coach follow the client wherever he or she decides to go at any given moment in a session. If the client has an ongoing goal of getting a project completed, but in the session she starts talking about spending more time with her daughter, the coach goes where she leads.

Coaches listen on many levels and must be flexible to respond to what is most important to the client. They must listen with knowledge, but they must especially listen with wisdom and intuition. They must hear the language of the heart, and they must see serendipity.

Kevyn has chosen to listen to her heart at key turning points in her life. She has been willing to follow the lead of serendipity, even when she was not sure where it would take her. By being open and willing to risk, Kevyn continues to have a life of adventure, happiness, and freedom.

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For More Information About Coaching

Kevyn Malloy, Ph.D., is a Certified Mentor Coach (CMC) and a Professional Certified Coach (PCC). More information on coaching and on her coaching business can be found at her website. Kevyn maintains a full practice but can occasionally accept new clients. She has a vast network of experienced coaching colleagues to recommend when she is not able to start working with a client right away.

Information about coach training is available throughMentorCoach.
MentorCoach specializes in “Training Accomplished Helping Professionals to Become Extraordinary Coaches.” MentorCoach was started specifically to help therapists and other mental health workers build on their significant strengths and skills while learning important distinctions between therapy and coaching. The organization’s reach has grown to include students from a wide variety of backgrounds.

All the skills, techniques, and perspectives provided by Faber and Mazlish give parents better relationships with their children. Many provide short-term results, and all of them are designed for long-term improvements in cooperation and communication. But one set of skills is specifically aimed at helping parents accomplish one of our most important jobs over the long run.

Chapter 4 of How To Talk So Kids Will Listen And Listen So Kids Will Talk is “Encouraging Autonomy.” Being independent and able to manage one’s own life is a hallmark of adulthood. From infancy, we mentor our children towards adulthood so they can take charge of their own lives, explore their gifts and talents, and realize their potential.

Faber and Mazlish offer many suggestions for moving children towards autonomy, and three flow nicely to exemplify their approach. First they suggest letting children choose. As much as possible, as often as possible, they should have choices. Since the purpose of having choices is to get used to making decisions and learning that decisions have consequences, this is not a wide-open freedom to do whatever they feel like doing. Instead, it is handing them choices within the protection of safety. It can be choosing whether to have broccoli or green beans, but not choosing to avoid vegetables. It can be choosing which order to do chores, but not refusing chores. It can be choosing whether to have a part-time job, part-time volunteer position, or summer classes, but not the freedom to choose lots of idle free time.

A second idea that comes from letting children choose is letting them struggle. Struggling is the recurrent effort needed to learn new things, or to improve to new levels of ability. Struggling is part of the natural progression from being introduced to a skill or task to mastering it. If we step in and do something for them when they’re struggling because it’s a little difficult, we take away their opportunity to improve and to experience true self-esteem, which comes from mastering new skills. When we allow our children to struggle, they learn “struggle hardiness.” They learn to see that persistence in the face of frustration pays off over time. Striving leads to thriving.

A third idea follows closely. They urge parents to avoid rescuing their children when the children don’t need it. When they’re over their heads or facing things beyond their experience or ability, they need us to step in and give guidance, help, or protection. But when they make a choice and are upset with the outcome, unless it threatens their health, we need to let them experience the consequences of their choices. This is the only way they learn with certainty that choices matter.

If they forget their lunch on the kitchen table, don’t make an extra trip to school to deliver it. If they tell you the night before that a project is due the next day and they need supplies at the store, don’t rush off to get them unless your child “pays” you with chores for your time and effort. And whatever you do, don’t stay up late helping your child do the last-minute project! All he or she will learn is that putting things off works out well because mom or dad will take care of it.

The hovering “helicopter parent” replaces the child’s judgment and choices with the parent’s. This is only a good long-term plan if the parent will be hovering for the rest of the child’s life! Since the child’s natural developmental drive is towards autonomy, that really won’t work anyway.

If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.

© Copyright Kent M. Keith 1968, renewed 2001

I didn’t see this extreme response to success while I was a business co-owner. That might be because our level of financial success was a steady, comfortable income, but it didn’t bump us up a few tax brackets.

But the response came when, quite by accident, we looked like we were being elitist with our new address!

My wife and I lived in a starter home with less than 1,200 square feet for 13 years. Yes, we understand the idea of a starter home. But we had a longer-term vision than just buying a larger home every few years.

We wanted to live in a rural setting with some open land. Instead of moving into larger and more expensive homes, we found a plot of land with an old farmhouse and bought it. There were renters in the house, until it was too dilapidated to be livable, and their rent helped us make payments on the property. When we bought the property, the town was an old farming community with a few neighborhoods but mostly open land.

While we waited, and waited, and waited, we paid off our little house and started paying more on the property. After twelve years, we were finally at a point where we were ready to build our house. The renters had left a couple of years before and we had demolished the little house. We designed our home and had it built. By then, the little farm town had turned into an “exclusive, upscale” suburb. More and more open land was being bought up and turned into tract mansions. It was odd. People would say they loved the area because of the open land, but every addition seemed to have a large rock wall around it.

Our home, beautiful to us but modest and plain compared to the new homes being built, is still in a mostly rural part of town. But we are minutes away from elite shopping areas. This is how the Third Commandment reared its ugly head.

Before we moved, a woman we knew through soccer treated us warmly. She lived in another upscale suburb that also used to be farmland. But it was not as new and trendy as the neighborhoods being built in our suburb. When she found out where our new house was being built, she got very distant.

It got worse. When I told people where I lived it made an immediate impact. Some got a little sarcastic and expected I thought I was better than they were. Some acted like I had won a competition that I didn’t even know was going on. They were mostly people who lived in nice, but not as trendy, suburbs. Some lit up and said that we must be rich, that we must live in a huge house, and showed a lot of interest in where all the money came from. It was ridiculous!

I got to a point of not telling people the name of our town. I would say we lived near Grapevine, which is a very old city by Texas standards and has a mixture of communities and income levels. When I told them that, people treated me like just another person.

I think this comes from a strange tendency in the human race. In general, we want to be like other people, to fit in. More specifically, we usually want to be like and fit in with people in our own class. We want to be “just like everyone else” – only a little better. So there’s constant comparison.

Are you in my status level? Are you even with me? Boring!
Are you a little beneath me? Wonderful. I get to feel just a teeny bit superior!
Are you a little above me? Yuck! You arrogant pig!

We planned for a long time and paid down the loan on our land while we lived in a modest house. When we sold our little house we paid off the land and only owed the cost of building our new house. Over thirteen years we spent about half of what a lot of people are paying for homes around here by being patient. To me that’s success.

But to many people the fact that we live on the rural edge of an upscale neighborhood suggests huge financial success and a desire to flaunt our money. We don’t have expensive new cars and we don’t have an ornate home, but people assume we’re rolling in cash. And the way they treat us is based on their assumptions, good or bad, that we are financially successful in a huge way.

Some are friendly because we’re “good enough” or because they think we can add to their status. Others truly resent us. And their view of us is based on wrong assumptions about our success.

Succeed anyway. And do it on your own terms.

The categories are a little jumbled this month to reflect how a lot of us have gotten our thoughts jumbled. We think we need money in order to play, and to have money we need to “work” – implying a certain level of drudgery and sacrifice. We formulate it like this:

I need a j-o-b that pays more than my bills. Whatever I make above that I can use to play. The more I make the more I can play.

What happens when we take charge of the relationships between work, money, and play?

Take away money as a precursor to play and you’re left looking for ways to play that cost little or nothing. It brings to mind a frequent complaint from older parents and grandparents who say children today don’t know how to entertain themselves. They don’t have to use their imaginations because they have electronic toys, video games, and movies they can play in their homes. How can your imagination help you play without spending a lot of money?

Barbara Winter tells a great story about a friend who called her and, though a little hesitant to ask, invited her to come over to paint with water colors. It wasn’t two trained artists working on pieces to sell. It was two women who enjoyed something as girls who finally decided to give it another go. As a fun evening, it was a spectacular success.

Think about the standard entertainment script: dinner and a movie. Is it enjoyable time with your friends and family, and is it worth the money? Often it’s not. What about movies on DVD at the library? It’s doubtful anyone has seen every movie available, even if you limit the list to all the movies considered classics. A Bette Davis or Clark Gable marathon with a “floor picnic” (around here that’s fast food eaten with a beach towel as the blanket on the living room floor) might be a lot of fun and give you many more opportunities to talk to each other.

Museums often have a day of the week or month that you get in for free or nearly free. Community theater companies put on enjoyable presentations for a low ticket price, and if you volunteer you might get in free. Unlike golf, tennis can be played at many public locations for free. You need a companion, a racket, and some tennis balls. Find the right person and he or she will provide all of them! Someone who wants to try out sailing can start meeting people at the marina and offer to learn by helping crew on some outings. You’ll probably sail a lot more than the people who spend a bunch of money to buy a boat, rent a slip, and keep up with maintenance!

Can you work without making money? Trust me! You can, especially when you’re starting a new business. But there are other ways to work without pursuing money. You can volunteer part of your time. You can do extra things at a j-o-b to learn more and get more experience. You can write without publishing, or without seeing a short-term possibility to publish. You might eventually get paid, but it’s not the main motivation. The work itself is.

Many people who write, or paint, or create things they might eventually sell do it for the enjoyment. They have already blurred the line between work and play. They have discovered work, a productive activity with a goal in mind, can be as enjoyable as play. Stories abound about people taking college classes for the joy of learning, then winding up with enough credits to get a second degree. The degree may lead to a new career or open additional doors. The experience of being involved in learning something for fun may lead to offers to work in the field.

The big question, it seems, is How can I play and make money? The ideal answer is to find a way to do work that crosses into play. It will be productive, like work, but involve the imagination and a sense of wonder and a lot of enjoyment.

A friend wrote an update to our creative career forum that in her new job she is able to organize the office, their paperwork, and some of their daily operations. She loves it! This is something she has looked forward to doing for years, and she sees it as something she “gets” to do, not something she “has” to do. That may not be play for most of us, but it sure is to her.

In the trailblazer’s life, the lines between work, money, and play will get blurry. Sometimes they might even disappear. Trailblazers find a way to do what they were born to do, so it flows from their gifts and passions and ignites their souls. They find people who will benefit from what they do, the ones who need what they have to offer. Those people are happy to pay for it.

May it be so for all of us.

Back in February I posted an Elephant Burgers article titled This Sounds Nuts! But I Think You’ll Like It. I gave a brief overview of a system for defining a long-term vision, setting annual goals, then breaking them into monthly pieces and eventually into daily steps. Boy, was I hot stuff!

Then a couple of coaching colleagues started asking questions about ways to organize their days to stay on task. I shared my system. They told me why it won’t work for them. There was a huge hole in my sytem!

What was missing? The part where you’re willing to do what you schedule.

One colleague explained that it doesn’t matter that the person actually assigning her tasks is herself. Anyone in the CEO role triggers her rebellious streak. It seemed like that would be a rare sort of problem, one solved either through some self-discovery and personal growth, counseling, or personal coaching. Yes, my pride was spiking, and we know what comes next.

Right now it’s the third day this week that I have scheduled my day with tasks that need to be accomplished, spaced them out and allotted enough time, and failed to do most of them. One day the only things I actually accomplished from my list were “Daily planning meeting” and “Daily review.”

I was still doing things, and they were important, but I completely blew off the list. I was annoyed with the list the first two days. Kind of like my colleague who said any CEO will trigger her rebellious streak, even if it’s herself. But by today I started catching on.

Flexibility With Priorities

Some of the things I felt I needed to do instead of the list really were more important once things started developing. I had to be flexible to allow myself to focus my time on the things that turned out to have a higher priority than when the day started. In part, my priorities shifted as I realized I need to change a couple of things to make planning and outlining an idea go smoothly. That’s where I realized I couldn’t do C because I’d been thinking about changing the way I did A. Until I decided A, I couldn’t figure how that would affect B, and of course C depended on B.

But at the end of the day as I looked back, I realized that A was my priority all along. Once again, I had a “plan” to be getting to C and dismissed the importance of the changes I was thinking about for A. If I had paid more attention to priorities A would have been at the top of the list from the beginning.

Listen To Your Calling

Prioritize the things you are drawn to do, that bring you alive, and less to the things you think you “should” do. I keep re-learning this lesson so often I expect I’ll know it pretty soon. My long-term plans for my business include things that logically are connected to coaching, personal growth, and creative career choice. But they’re not things I’m drawn to do right now. So some of the things on my list for this week were steps towards less inspiring goals. Instead of me seeing how the actions would bring me closer to my desired future, they stirred up questions about whether I will actually include those components in my business. Guess what? I didn’t do those steps!

Go In Order, Or “First Things First”

This is another one I keep trying to learn. For example, I can’t design and write a report or an e-book or a script for a recorded training to offer as a gift for signing up for my newsletter until I get clear about the focus of my newsletter. I’ve had steps about building my list on my schedule for three weeks. It was easy to do the ones about brainstorming and coming up with possible ideas.

But when it was time to start implementing a step I had planned I realized I’m still clarifying the focus of the newsletter. Since the offer (the report, book, or recording) I create needs to be connected to the purpose of the newsletter, I couldn’t really start creating it until I decided. All the time I had scheduled to start creating a product for my offer got redirected to considering ideas about the focus of the newsletter.

Some Tasks Are Rotten

Now we’re talking! This is in line with what my colleague said about rebelling against directions. When I schedule tasks that relate to the fun part of my work, I usually wind up doing them early and get through them more easily. When the task is more mundane, I dread it, avoid it, get started late, or justify putting it off a day or two.

It seems to me the trick here is knowing the “rotten” factor of certain tasks and not planning too much “rottenness” into any given day. It’s also reasonable to see how many of the “rotten” tasks you can hand off to someone else or ask someone to help you do.

Accountability

But if the rotten tasks are yours, and no one else can or will do them for you, and you schedule them sparingly so you won’t get bogged down but you still won’t do them, you’re stuck. That’s when an accountability buddy or group is a great idea. Pick your odious task each week and commit to getting it done. If you still avoid it, be open to ideas from the accountability partners to give you new approaches to get it done.

Consider individual or group coaching if you’re staying stuck and not getting important things accomplished. This will give you the opportunity to look at your own resistance and decide if it’s fear, uncertainty, a wise inner voice keeping you from doing something you’re not ready to do, or just your spoiled inner child. Once you are clear on the reasons for your goals and how they will improve your life, you will find motivation to overcome hesitancy, fear, boredom, and uncertainty with the help of accountability.

Unless you don’t. If you try creative planning, accountability buddies, and coaching, but you still can’t get yourself to do much, there might be a different problem. It might be time to consider counseling to understand the part of you that keeps you stuck when you’re longing to change.