I felt a nudge when I was 17. I had been working at a camp all summer with kids of all ages, playing, swimming, cooking, and crafting outside all day in the sticky heat and humidity of a North Carolina summer. Of all the exciting things we did that summer, the times I remembered most were the long walks back to our campsite. Exhausted from the day’s activities, the campers and I would walk among the trees, and kids would come up beside me and start talking. They would talk about the day, a disagreement they were having with another camper, or a struggle they were having at home or school. In these moments, I felt like my words and my attention made a difference to them, and it felt good to be a listening space for these kids. So often in my own life, I didn’t feel like I had a safe, non-judgmental space to share my thoughts, work out my confusions, a space to simply be heard.
This was the beginning of my nudge.
Back at home, my proclamation of, “I think I want to be a child psychologist,” was met with, “Do you know how long that will take you and how much money that will cost?” I realized years later, this was spoken with concern for my naivete about things like money, but at the time, I became discouraged and filled with self-doubt about my future and whether or not this was really what I wanted. In the first few weeks of my senior year, school counselors were having “how to apply and pay for college” meetings, and during one of these, we were told about an opportunity for a full scholarship to an in-state university if we decided to pursue teaching as a career. After the meeting, I picked up the information packet, and as I walked down the crowded hallway towards my next class, lockers slamming, conversation buzzing, I had a distinct thought, “well, teaching is working with kids, and a full scholarship would take the financial pressure off of my family, so maybe this is the best option for me.”
Six months later, I found out that I had received the scholarship to attend my third-choice school. I decided to take it and was off to a university I never intended to attend, to study teaching, a career I never really wanted to pursue.
It took me 30 years to get back to my nudge.
In between, life was good. Teaching, first apartment, marriage, living abroad, kids, moving house, grad school. Good things. Life building things. But quite often, I felt like I was going through the motions of life. I was irritable and would get angry at random shit all the time. This sense of feeling lost would come up again and again, and I just couldn’t shake it.
So I started searching for what was going on behind all of the anger, discontent, and stuckness. This meant starting to pay more attention to myself and stop looking to other people to distract me from my life. As Nora Ephron said, I needed to become the heroine of my life, not the victim. I needed an internal journey. I needed to reconnect with my Soul.
This is a process that has unfolded over many years, and still unfolds every day. It has been a process of getting to know myself and integrating practices that support my well-being. It has been a process of developing a deep trust in who I am, what I want, and how I am meant to serve in the world. I have started to trust my nudges more and more and listen to where they want to lead me.
A few years ago, I decided to leave classroom teaching and pursue coaching, finally getting back to that nudge I felt so long ago out in the woods that day. My passion has become coaching Quarterlifers (roughly ages 16-36), supporting them in the process of uncovering their inner voice and trusting their nudges. I give them a safe space to work through challenges, teaching them strategies for how to uncover what might be standing in their way and how to overcome it. My passion is coaching and teaching about the things we should be taught about how to live as humans on this planet.
This isn’t a story about regrets. I was, and still am, a great teacher. The paths I chose to walk taught me many important lessons. The choices I made were not mistakes, but I believe they were misdirections, moments when I found myself off-trail.
This John O’Donohue quote I came across many years ago has become the guiding message for my journey and my mission in life has become sharing it with others,
“Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey.”
The gift I offer you is support and guidance in discovering YOUR map and a safe space to learn how to trust, and then follow, your nudges.
Soul Geography 