Tag: #CoachingWithSydney
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From The Outside-In
What almost getting hacked taught me about AI, human experience, and what it means to understand I am fairly new to Substack and love it! I have naively scrolled and typed and restacked and made notes. I’ve been happy. Then one day I came across someone, Derek Hughes, an expert who helps with writing. And,…
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So I Changed the Situation. Why Is the Pattern Still Here?
Why awareness alone isn’t enough. So I Changed the Situation. Why Is the Pattern Still Here? People often contact me with issues around their relationship with money. Maybe they were raised in an environment of scarcity and don’t quite know how to develop a different relationship to earning, spending, saving, or simply having enough. They’ve…
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When the Truth Becomes Too Expensive
The hidden cost of maintaining a reality that is no longer true What happens to us when the truth, the unvarnished truth, becomes socially, professionally, relationally, or psychologically too expensive to tell? Justin was out on the golf course with some friends as one of his buddies shared the latest and greatest achievement his wife…
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The Return
And why getting back to normal may be the wrong goal I took some time away this week to honor an important anniversary. And this morning, I found myself thinking about how we return to “normal.” To our sense of self and the rhythm of those around us. To our routines. After grief, illness, disappointment,…
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Nobody’s Marriage Begins With Divorce
Every Life Cycle Has a Beginning Leah contacted me because she was concerned about her marriage. She couldn’t easily pinpoint what had happened, but she was filled with resentment, and she didn’t like the feeling. There was no explosive argument, no affair, no single moment she could point to and say, “This is where it went…
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The Hidden Grief Of Becoming Someone Else
A few months ago, I wrote about the thousand tiny goodbyes we never acknowledge: the client who leaves, the business that changes, the future that quietly disappears. I wrote about how important it is to pause long enough to acknowledge those losses before rushing into the next pivot. More recently, I’ve been writing about the…
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The Life That Survival Built
I was raised to be an overfunctioner. Rural settings, constant moves, and instability created a parentified child who grew into a hyper-empathetic, overfunctioning adult. In every relationship and every career setting, I showed up as the door prize…the unexpected dynamo who quietly won everyone over. “I just want to be a receptionist,” a partner teased me…
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When The Costume Changes, But The Operating System Doesn’t
Congruent Reinvention The personal development world has turned reinvention into another performance. Become your highest self, your future self, your 2.0 self, your most successful self. We are obsessed with optimizing, scaling, upgrading, reinventing. But most people reinvent from the very survival patterns they are unhappy with and trying to escape. They simply reinvent their…
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The Doctor Who Disappeared
He’d been working for hours and it was only 6 a.m. Reviewing messages, going to do rounds, checking the schedule, returning a couple of calls. He felt the exhaustion creeping in already and there were hours to go…There is a version of tired, all too familiar, that has nothing to do with hours worked. It’s…
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The Meaning Famine in Modern Medicine
A physician told me this week: “I have never had more data and felt less valued than I do right now. I mean, I don’t know if I can keep doing this.” That last line was spoken from such a deeply exhausted place that I felt myself leaning forward, my usual list of potential pivots…
