Choices & Change

A propeller blade in my back was the only sign I needed.

When I was 18, I worked at a marina for one day – after slipping off the back of a boat and slamming into a propeller blade, I decided it wasn’t for me.

From the time I first started working as a babysitter at age 12 and throughout my 20s, I used to regularly quit jobs:

At a temp agency in England, after calmly listening to an irate client scream down the phone at me and demand to know my name, I lost patience and shouted, “It’s Andrea Coutts C-O-U-T-T-S and you can write it down, but I won’t be here tomorrow!”

A manager of a retail store in a mall told me I couldn’t take two weeks off for a once in a lifetime trip to Poland and Germany, and you guessed it, that was a big old QUIT for me.

I knew exactly what I wanted and exactly what mattered to me.

But somewhere along the way, my need for security outweighed my desire for freedom. And sometimes that meant tolerating things that I would have otherwise found intolerable.

Contact me to explore the changes you’re working through. 1-1 coaching or a group learning community are great options.

We all make choices; we all make compromises. We adapt, and learn, and grow. Quitting jobs every time I got annoyed was not exactly sustainable.

But neither is staying with the wrong thing – whether it’s the wrong relationship, wrong job, or just a book you just can’t get into.

These days, I prefer to help clients re-frame, and shift away from all the guilt and shame and self-criticism that comes with our negatives constructs of failure and quitting.

It’s choice. What can you choose now, that you couldn’t before? What options are you pursuing?

What are you choosing to release, so that you can move towards something better?

Where is your joy?

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