The Playbook
If you’re lucky, fate brought you one teacher or coach who changed your life. It’s the powerful stuff of the Netflix series I just inhaled, “The Playbook.”
In 27 years as a high school English teacher, here’s the ONLY thing I have learned for certain about the awesome profession that has been my life’s greatest joy:
See in another person what they don’t yet see in themselves.
Almost every day, someone asks me if I miss teaching.
Absolutely.
I will always miss laughing and learning alongside goofy, brave, brilliant teens. They have given me more than they will ever know.
But I love what I’m creating now for adults. And once a teacher,…
I help people change their lives the same way I did when I was covered in chalk dust (I’ve been around a while) or dry erase marker, or inking up stacks of essays while downing endless mugs of lukewarm faculty-room coffee.
For all you coaches out there, I know you know what I’m talking about:
See in another person what they don’t yet see in themselves.
I know, I repeated myself. I had to. t’s the only play you need in your coach’s playbook.
What I see in my clients is the “gems” of their experiences and emotions that they’re too close to see.
When you’re the jam inside the jar, you cannot read your own label.
What I see before they see it themselves is the shift I know is coming when they stop “curating” their self, like I did for decades, and instead live from their full self, putting their inner knowing in the driver’s seat.
How do you get there? By meeting yourself on the page–letting your full, full, messy, self pour on out. You have that right. Claim it.
Whether you’re seventeen or seventy, I bet you wonder whether you really need to pick up a fast-moving pen and grab a cheap notebook—the cheaper the better.
I bet you hope you can continue to intellectualize the experiences and emotions that have shaped your full self, like the sea shapes the shore.
I bet you wonder if you have anything inside you worth writing down.
For twenty-seven years, my students told me, “I don’t have anything to say.” “Nothing important has happened to me.” These are the same words I now hear from adults. Followed by:
I think I could benefit from automatic journaling, but I would have no idea where to begin.
My therapist keeps telling me to consider journaling, but I don’t know how to do it.
I’m afraid of what I might see on the page.
If these thoughts resonate with you, I hope you’ll sign up for the Authentic Voice community to immediately begin receiving prompts and tips from me.
My method is built around five steps that get you out of your thinking brain and into your subconscious so that your full self can emerge, in black on white, on the page.
I can’t wait for you to begin holding up your past to the light. Every transition gnawing at you from the inside will into open fields.
No more hiding.
Authentic Voice isn’t therapy. It’s better than any therapy I’ve ever experienced.
And while the work may not always feel comfortable, who said comfort is our highest goal?
Meeting your full self on the page is the process that will enable you to see in yourself what I already know is in there. And we haven’t even met yet.
Meet Jen
I find nothing more rewarding than inspiring people to value their stories and the fullness of their journey.
