Saw a good one tonight through the Sedona Film Festival. “Cyrus” is a wonderfully-written psychological comedy about a woman caught between her over-possessive son and her new boyfriend. It should open nation-wide in about a week.

Make sure you catch it!

I am pleased to say that I have been invited to join the iPinion.me Syndicate as a contributing writer. “The
iPinion Syndicate is a collective of accomplished and award-winning writers who have come together to share their disparate thoughts, beliefs, humor, world-views, rants, diatribes, useless banter, substanitive insights, ideological b.s., and perhaps sometimes odd outlooks on life…”

Please check out the website and join the Facebook iPinion page whenyou have the chance!

See www.ipinion.me

In honor of my late mother-in-law’s birthday today, and the 7th anniversary of my dad’s passing, I’d like to share this short final chapter from Organizing for The Spirit:

A man of ritual, routine, and regularity, my father opened my biweekly email newsletters at precisely 11:00 on Saturday mornings. It didn’t matter that he had been up since 5:00 or that I usually sent them before 10:00; his time to check his mail was 11:00. Period.

My dad passed away suddenly on May 7, 2003. Fortunately, I was with him, in town to help my folks out after my mother’s mild stroke three weeks previous. Even though he had survived a massive heart attack twenty-two years before and four subsequent cardiac arrests, it came as a shock that it was finally his time to go.

As I contemplated writing my next newsletter, I didn’t know how to deal with the fact that my father wouldn’t be sitting at his computer, ready to read it, ever again. But a wise friend told me to write it anyway,  because my dad would still receive it – he would simply be at another address.

My dad was a complex and stubborn man, and that’s probably what kept him alive for so many extra years. He insisted on things being done his way, and only his way, but after his attack he left an impressive legacy of public service through his twenty-two years of volunteer work for many organizations.

The night before the funeral, I lay awake, wondering what exactly I could contribute for my part of the eulogy. My husband told me not to worry, that somehow my dad would “tell” me what to say. The next morning, my mother came to me with an envelope that she had taken from the back of her desk drawer. It read, “To Be Opened Upon My Demise” and was signed by my father. “I knew this was there,” she told me, “but I have no idea when he wrote it.” We opened the envelope, which contained one sheet of paper, with but a single sentence written on it, summing up what he believed to be the purpose of his life.

As my father demonstrated to me, “Organizing for the Spirit” means to become who you really are – to discover what makes you unique and personally powerful so that you can experience the joy of living and sharing your gifts with others. Organizing for the Spirit is a lifelong process of discovery and self-development, and the ultimate personal adventure. As my dad wrote in his final message: “To leave the world a bit better – to know that a life has been changed because you were there – this is to have succeeded.”

It is never too late to become who you are meant to be.

Interested in memoir and story-telling?

I’ve been enjoying Writing About Your Life: A Journey Into The Past, written by one of the masters, William Zinsser (On Writing Well). He weaves his own life stories into advice on how to write clearly and effectively and the transitions are seamless. Thanks, Colleen, for the recommendation!

My friend Nancy Whitney-Reiter has written another information-packed book (Do What You Love) on the art and science of achieving success — the kind of success that’s “not of a summit you reach after a lifetime of climbing, but a feeling you experience daily when you’re doing what you love.” Utilizing interviews compiled during a seven-year study on successful career change, along with her own experiences, Nancy has demonstrated that change is something to be embraced, not feared, and that the journey toward your dream job is the road you’re truly supposed to be traveling.

This is an excellent book on the subject, and one that I was pleased to have been asked to contribute to.

photo credit Thai Jasmine

What inspires you? How do you inspire others?

photo credit nouQraz

I bet you think that what you’re arguing about is what you’re arguing about. Check out my latest article to see if you’re right.

photo credit eklektick

“If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”     ~Toni Morrison

photo credit mckirsch

The new and improved website for SunCoach Inc. is just about ready to launch! The project had to be backburnered for a few months but now I’ve returned to editing copy and making formatting decisions. I’m going with a relatively new WordPress theme that I’ll (hopefully) be able to manage myself once it’s set up.

My first home page was designed 11 years ago and it’s hard to believe how fast and far the computer industry has grown. Back then the concept of coaching was very new and hard to put into words. Now of course, it’s well-understood and accepted. And as I transition from a coaching role into more of a mentoring one I’m learning to craft the descriptions that most completely explain what I do today.

I’m planning to offer a free-of-charge full mentoring session celebrating the activation of my new site so stay tuned for details.

photo credit Cindy Andrie

Most people, if and when they think about leaving a legacy, think in terms of bequeathing money or valuables. But there’s something else you can leave behind that will benefit your children and their children and the generations to come.

And that’s your Story. Oh, how I wish I knew the stories behind the faces that stare up at me from the old photos I’ve inherited. I wish I knew what their childhoods were like, what they valued and who they looked up to. I know the few tales that were passed along by my parents but those are mostly facts about what happened to whom and when. I want to know how those people felt.

I’m reading a wonderful book that I hope will help me give my own future family something more to go on. It’s called The Legacy Guide: Capturing the Facts, Memories and Meaning of Your Life. The authors say, “It’s your experience, the details of your journey, that’s your real legacy…Let the children of your children know you as a person, so they can know themselves. Let them learn from your experience. Let them benefit from what you’ve worked so hard to understand. And, not least, give yourself the satisfaction of seeing your life whole.”

What I like best about the book is that it divides one’s life into stages, so no matter where you are in the process, you can distill the facts and memories that will allow you to derive meaning. The authors ask the questions and you can answer those that seem pertinent. Put together, you eventually have a notebook or a scrapbook or a memoir to hand down. 

This seems to be an original and innovative approach and I’d be interested in hearing from anyone else who is working their way through The Legacy Guide.