Get a Life...Coach

My wife, Terri, is somewhat well known for her inspiring "fully-alive" teaching. So now she's taken a leap to "follow her heart" and become a life coach. I think she's going to call her effort "Fully-Alive Life Coaching" or something like that...which will also include a catchy tag line of some kind. (It will function as a sub-department of our little non-profit ministry called Radius.) We probably could have all guessed on that name for her practice anyway. She's has certainly been providing life coaching for me now for 32 years and look what I've become! Well...maybe you actually shouldn't look too closely...it might hurt her new, more deliberate, service to humanity. I don't know that I am yet "fully-alive", but I don't seem as "half-dead" as I used to be...maybe I'm up to 3/4 alive now...at least on most days. And I owe it all to her!!

What the heck is life coaching anyway? For some reason I tend to think of it as having regular time with Bobby Knight and him going berserk and yelling at me about not performing too well on the basketball court of life. Now Terri has a lot of passion, but she certainly is no irate mentor who cusses and spits out orders to people. (Actually, I have seen her spit strategically on very rare occasions..but that's the private stuff of married life!) But it is true that she has often lit a fire under my seat to get me moving forward. She thinks that people tend to get stuck living lives below their potential and that she can help them get unstuck by helping them discover how God has designed them and then help them map out a specific plan to move ahead in their life's work toward being more and more their "authentic self" under God. (But beware...rumor has it that God does sometimes whisper random insights to her about people's lives.) It all sounds good, but will it help pay the bills?!

As she has been dreaming about all of this, I have been present to point out all the times that I've seen people's plans for their life takes twists and turns that they could never have imagined. Take our lives for example! It seems to me that God doesn't often cooperate with this kind of planning. But she says her approach is different than the traditional approach somehow and she has some mysterious way of incorporating all of these surprising dynamics into her big picture of the art and craft of setting life goals. I guess we'll see about that. She certainly has been good at "mystery" through the years. I am regularly "mystified" by her to this day!

So now you know what Terri Sullivant is most recently up to. Yes...I live with a bonafide life coach. (Do you think this really is a good thing? I'm hoping and praying so.) She has a certificate and everything. She even received some personal training from the "Dave Ramsey" of life coaching on the national front. His name is Dan Miller. He and Dave live in the same city, go to church together, are actually buddies and regularly refer their followers to the other guy in his arena of expertise. Dave is around to "free" us up financially (ouch!) and, I assume, Dan is around to "free" us up in all the other stuff of life (more ouches?). Seems like a whole lot of stuff falls in Dan's bailiwick to me. (What is a bailiwick? Does anyone really know? But...my spellchecker didn't underline it, so there you go.)

I guess we all have a "life" to live and we all need some "coaching" along the way...so maybe this will be a good thing to add to the Sullivant repertoire of services to the people God sends our way. If you decide to hire her to do some life coaching for you...whether by phone, personal appointment or in one of her classes she's conspiring to host here at home (where am I going to live while all these people are meeting at my house to make plans to live?)...please let me know how it goes...I may decide to hire her myself. I may need to just to get some time with her!

So now I will really let the cat out of the bag and give you her email address just in case you might dare to give her a shot at helping you plan out...your entire future!
terrisully@gmail.com. God bless and...good luck.

Your friend,
Michael

P.S. "BAILIWICK - In general use, 'bailiwick' has come to mean your own province, particularly one in which experience or knowledge gives you special authority or freedom to act. However, it has had a very definite legal sense for centuries: the area of jurisdiction of a bailiff (sheriff's assistant). It goes back to Middle English 'bailie,' meaning 'bailiff,' and 'wick,' meaning 'village.' If you trace the origin of bailiff back to Latin, the poor chap suffers a loss in dignity since 'bailiff' is derived from 'bajalus,' the Latin word for 'porter.'" From the "Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins" by William and Mary Morris (HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, 1977).