Coach as Instrument: Being a Wounded Healer, Making Peace With Who We Are and Food For the Heart

This Week's Attunement 

Here's what I'm learning, pondering and what's inspiring me this week! 

What I'm Learning
So I can improve myself as a coach, as a human 

“Each person carries her own healer inside her. We work best as coaches when we give the healer who resides within each person the chance to work and can meet them there as a wounded healer.”
— Albert Schweitzer MD (paraphrased)

This quote from Albert Schweitzer provides me a positive framework to view all of the things I struggle within my life. I can see how my own struggles can benefit my clients. If I can feel my pain and struggle, I can be with them in theirs. I can be a wounded healer.

What I'm Pondering
So I can stay curious

"Until you make peace with who you are, you’ll never be content with what you have."
— Doris Mortman

What's Inspiring Me
So I can continue to do what I do and inspire my clients as well
Sociologist, historian, and activist W. E. B. Du Bois with some life advice in a letter to his daughter:

"The main thing is the YOU beneath the clothes and skin—the ability to do, the will to conquer, the determination to understand and know this great, wonderful, curious world. Don’t shrink from new experiences and customs. Take the cold bath bravely. Enter into the spirit of your big bedroom. Enjoy what is and not pine for what is not. Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline. Take yourself in hand and master yourself. Make yourself do unpleasant things, so as to gain the upper hand of your soul."
— Source: The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois

During the pandemic, I started sending my clients poems as a form of encouragement and inspiration. Poetry touches something in us that figuring and analyzing can't. Perhaps now more than ever most of us need food for the heart. Though not a poem, this piece from WEB Du Bois contains sustenance.