My Bookshelf

this little book… it starts with a man lost on a drive and ending up in a café by the roadside where he’s being asked 3 simple questions.

The first one has the potential to stir up his life and everything in it: Why are you here?
The book is an invitation to ask this question to ourselves – why are we here? What are we meant to do or be in our lifetime?

I enjoyed reading it and discovering that I started my journey of discovery of my life’s purpose and that I walked a bit of the way already. Re-thinking my career from the inside out and turning it upside down makes an impact not only on my life but on many others. To my clients, my friends and my family, my clients’ friends and families, …

There are many more questions that come up while reading this book, like: what do we really need? What do we want? What do we want to spend our time with?

As for the last question: I found that spending time with this little book was a good use of my time. A refreshing break of a few hours in a busy week, a step into thinking more about the path I am on and a peak into the perspective of the amazing client who gave me this book at the end of a coaching program.

This post, like the last one, was inspired by the conversations I had last week with those awesome individuals I graduated with 25 years ago. Most of them, just like my husband and I are in this dynamic exploration of what share of family and income responsibility each one should take. In this, the classical gender roles seem to dissolve while external stereotypes seem to make it hard to find and stick to what works for each couple or family.

The first time I realized this is when my husband told me about the reactions of his professional environment when they heard that I went back to work a few weeks after giving birth to our children. It sounded like he was judged just as harshly as I was. And from what I heard form my school mates, it’s sometimes a tricky ride for most of them.

In this context, I thought back to Sheryl Sandberg’s (COO of Facebook) book “Lean in”. What struck me most about it is that it stereotypes are not just perpetuated by misogyn men, but equally or even more so by women. It’s really eye-opening how she describes how those stereotypes are getting perpetuated and how easily we can work against them.

I find this book to be an invitation to ask questions and to question what we do and how we think.  An invitation to make life’s choices in line with what we aspire to and not letting ourselves be held back by stereotypes.

Hats off to all of you following your unconventional path! And huge gratitude to my husband for his way of being unconventional.

 

PS: to those busy people challenged by finding time to read: the book is available as audio-book as well so you can read on the road and while gardening. Or so.

The story of the seagull Jonathan Livingston is one that has accompanied me throughout many stages of my life and as I start reading it now to my kids, I paused to feel what appeals to me in this tale as simple as it is.

What I love about this book is that it seems to be a parable for different stages of my life and maybe that’s why it always speaks to me. In part 1, Jonathan Livingston, the young seagull pushes the limits of flying fast and diving perilously so that he forgets about eating and behaving like a “normal seagull” who eats fallen fish and waste from the fishing boats. The day when he fully masters his flight, he is excluded from the flock for “abnormal behavior”. Alone, he lives a blissful life exploring new territory and finding new food sources thanks to his skills.

This deeply resonates with me. How many times did a move feel daring, outside of the rules – a step into the unknown? How many times did I feel that I don’t quite belong where I am? How much courage did it take to move away from the known, from a safe and comfortable place?

The story of Jonathan Livingston always reminds me that there’s no new finding without letting go of some of the old. It reminds me to take stock of all I have gained by leaving some beliefs or structures behind.

“Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with these gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.”

Jonathan reminds me to look at my life in gratitude, to question habits that don’t quite feel right and to leave or change the structures that seem to cripple my yearnings.

As a practice, spend some time with yourself (maybe 20 minutes) and walk backwards through your life up to now. What was a moment when you felt you had a breakthrough, an insight, an encounter that seemed shaping a period of your life? What was moment when you felt alone, isolated or in the wrong place? In what way did that impact the course you took?

Maybe you got curious? I’ll definitely be exploring Jonathan Livingston with my kids and see what it tells them. And I’ll be writing more about the rest of the tale (and maybe my kids’ philosophy here).

 

Is it hard to find time for reading? Here’s my hack to find some time for reading: http://miriamthecoach.com/2017/03/31/reading-books/

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Since I went to school, I always had a crush on books and from very early on, I also piled them up without necessarily reading them immediately.

In my busy corporate days and being a mother to little children, my reading was basically limited to e-mails and short articles, while the pile of books that I wanted to read because I had fallen in love with their cover and excerpt grew to gigantic size along with me feeling guilty about not reading.

As I had embarked on my journey of becoming a coach, reading books felt like a necessity and I started realizing that I had totally lost the habit of sitting still and immersing myself in written words. I also realized how not reading had dried up some aspects of my creative mind, of my imagination. And yet, there is always so much to do that putting down my book to get some work done doesn’t seem like a bad idea – at first.

My way back into reading was audio-books. Learning about brain science while doing the laundry was a bit of a challenge at first, while the “power of engagement” accompanied me well on my bike rides through the forest. By now, I do both, reading myself and listing to others reading to me. Listening while doing something else works fairly well for me, it’s a way to do a quick read. And then, I usually have the paper copy of the book to go deeper into what intrigued me.

As a practice to be reading for real again, I started planning 10 minutes reading as “my time for me”.  After those 10 minutes, I took a PostIt paper and before I closed the book made a note of what I got from my reading – insights or simply the feeling I had after this break.

In this section of my blog, you will find regularly recommendations for books. And in order to see if it’s worth a read for you, right now, I’ll share some of my insights and highlights. In a way each and every one of them triggered thoughts and ideas, found a way into my coaching work, my life and my very own development.