How often does someone’s life end up the way that they had planned? I know mine didn’t. I had been practicing law for years and expected to spend the rest of my life practicing law. Additionally, I was married, and we were planning our lives together. However, after 10 years of practicing law, I no longer wanted to continue my practice as it was draining me, leaving me stressed and exhausted. Further, my wife no longer wanted to continue our lives together. So, the life I thought I was going to have was not to be and I found myself uncertain about where I was headed and what I wanted.

 

To figure out what I wanted for the next chapter of my life, I took a job outside my previous profession and worked to get myself on an even footing. Just as I was feeling like I was accomplishing that even footing, my mother was diagnosed with incurable cancer, and we went into quarantine not long thereafter. I spent the quarantine staying with my parents to help with her care as she went through cancer treatments until her death a little over 7 months after her diagnosis. Afterwards, I stayed with my dad for a while so that we would not be alone in our grief.

 

During this time, I grieved all the loss in my life: my mom, my marriage, and my profession. I moved through my grief by working on my own personal issues through therapy, spiritual growth, and other various ways. During this period of personal growth, I realized that what I enjoyed about practicing law was helping people accomplish their goals. I just did not enjoy enough of the other aspects of it to want to continue practicing.

 

Life coaching, I realized, is an excellent way for me to help people accomplish goals but also learn something more about themselves. Therefore, I set about achieving my certificate in beginner to advanced life coaching from The Academy of Modern Applied Psychology and started Becoming You LLC to give myself the appropriate tools and knowledge to do just that.