You have an idea. A dream. A goal. And when you think about it, you feel a heady connection of excitement and nerves and "Oh! Wouldn't it be brilliant if!" and joy! All the joy! All the butterflies! All the woohoos! All the running around your house whooping like a deranged monkey in just your pants! All the waheys! All the glee! All the enthusiasm! All the exhilaration! And then you talk yourself out of it. Ugh. You pull the handbrake. You get scared. You start making excuses. You hesitate. You think you can't do it. You believe there's no way it's actually going to be possible..... Well. [...]

I was talking to one of my awesome clients the other day. He's unhappy in his marriage. He's considering leaving. He's in a lot of pain right now. He is suffering. He says things to me like, "If I do leave, I don't want to hurt her, Liz. I feel like the worst human being in the world." I tell him that I don't think he is the worse person in the world, far from it, but that I also understand why he feels that way. And I agree with him, that it's very possible that there will be hurt. A lot [...]

5 years ago, when I was training as a coach, part of the very drawn out accreditation process involved submitting taped recordings of 'practice' client sessions for assessment. I failed the assessment. I was nervous, bumbly and new to coaching and the recorded sessions highlighted that. I didn't think through the questions I asked and I raced through the session, desperate to get it over so I could stop the recording. I've never been one for performing under pressure, although, weirdly, I love public speaking. Also: during the recordings, one practice client—very sweetly but not all that helpfully—kept interrupting our session [...]

I spent last weekend training in existential coaching—learning more about how to help answer the profound and often confusing questions so many of us have about life: Why am I here? What does it all mean? Life is so short, what's the point in striving? How can I live a more fulfilling, purposeful life? What should I have for dinner? Big stuff, you know. The truth is, most people don't want to find or know the answers. Most people would rather drown it all out with TV and scrolling through shit on social media and conversations about the weather and what Kim Kardashian wore or didn't wear and [...]

If you're the kind of person who can eat just the one biscuit without automatically ramming the rest of the packet in your mouth straight after, or you wake up bright and early every single morning and skip to the gym because YOU LOVE WORKING OUT SO MUCH, or you go after every opportunity in life with gung-ho gusto, this email probably isn’t going to be of much interest to you. For the rest of us, I want to let you in on something: I didn’t feel like getting up at 6.30am this morning. But I did. I didn’t feel like exercising at 7am this morning. But I did. I didn’t feel like being thoughtful and understanding (yet [...]

A month or so ago, I met up with someone for a cup of coffee. Since moving to Germany last year, my all-encompassing loneliness has been much like a drunk, washed up glam metal rockstar from 1982: out of control, sporting an aggressive mullet, and begging for attention. As a result, I’ve been making waaaaaay more of an effort to meet new people. All in all, the person I hung out with was great. We swapped stories about life in Germany (she’s a transplant, too), belly laughed about bizarre German traditions, and talked about how hard it is living in [...]

I found a new trail this morning. I've never ever noticed it before, despite it branching off from a trail I run on at least 3 times a week. I don't know why today was the day that I noticed it. Maybe because Leonard Cohen died and I was thinking about him and light and dark and life and death and everything in between. The trail caught my eye as I shot past it and so I stopped, trotted back a fewmetres and stood at the foot of it, in awe of the autumnness that appeared to have exploded there. [...]

You are enough. I bet you’ve seen that somewhere before, haven’t you? Probably on Instagram. Or Facebook. A pretty picture emblazoned with the words, “You Are Enough”, in a really cool font with a blurred out background of a very attractive person gazing mindfully into the distance. There’s probably a mountain. Or an ocean. And that very attractive person in the pretty picture is definitely wearing white and is barefoot. That person feels all enough. You don’t need to gaze at a mountain or an ocean or do yoga or meditate or drink green smoothies to feel enough, you know. [...]

It's Sunday morning. Last Sunday morning, to be precise. I'm swimming in the local pool. I want to get a good hour of swimming in before the day ahead. The day ahead involves being naked. And sitting in a sauna with up to 20 other naked people. Naked German people. When my friends visit me here in Germany, I take them to the sauna. They think it is awesome and weird and the most relaxing experience. And it is. Truly. So. I'm swimming in the pool. I'm probably 30 lengths into the 100 I plan on completing. The lane I [...]

Feeling stuck, bored and “is this it?” is shit with a capital S, right? I know it well. It’s that dull feeling in your head. It’s the numbness, the frustration, the inertia, the overwhelming spiral of just not knowing what to do but knowing you need to do something. And it loops over and over. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. 7 years ago, I was in a corporate job I hated; the environment was bullshitty-sales, eye-rolling conference calls and pointless PowerPoint presentations and, well, all very depressingly un-me. I knew that there was something else out there I could be doing. Thing is, I didn’t have the first [...]