Why Trust Pat?

Choosing a life coach is very personal. For our relationship to succeed, you need to be comfortable with me and believe I offer what you need.

So, here’s a little of my story. I look forward to hearing yours!

• What are Pat’s qualifications?

• What’s Pat’s approach?

• Is Pat the best coach for me?

What are Pat’s qualifications?

As a professional life coach, I am a board certified coach (BCC) by the Center for Credentialing and Education (CCE) and comply with the Code of Ethics of the CCE and the International Coaching Federation. I am also trained in several special topic programs. I have professional liability insurance endorsed by the ACHP. 

My life coaching is enriched by my expertise with learning and development, personal transitions, design thinking, evidence-based practices for sustainable behavior change, and ways for aligning daily life with what matters most to you. This enables me to adapt to your needs and preferences, evolving with you as you wend your way through a challenging time. I can bring possibilities to life — prompt fresh clarity, choices, and ways of claiming a better day toward better tomorrows.

Most importantly, I have the personal and professional integrity and proficiency that comes from aligning my coaching approach with my core values — values that support the dignity, equity, creativity, individuality, and caring in my service on your behalf. By honoring you and adapting my approach, I intentionally embrace the richness of your possibilities, complexity of choices, and convergence of challenges at this particular time and place in your life.

What’s Pat’s approach?

At C3 Life Coach, it’s all about you! Together, we create an approach that starts wherever you’re at and evolves with you as you navigate your situation. Such flexibility is possible because my approach embodies the natural processes of how we adapt, how we learn, and how we create something desirable amidst uncertainty.

However, effective learning does not happen automatically. When our habits and beliefs engage automatically, our experiencing turns into an old pattern of reacting. Ironically, what we think we know can be the greatest barrier to our learning — to our ability to adapt. Ideally we would live present and aware, taking it all in freshly and fully. Yet, many of us make little conscious effort to learn from our days experiencing.

The life coaching process opens you to the moment and living it fully with awareness for learning, renewal, and growth. By attending consciously, you can selectively influence what is happening, redefining it and carrying it forward, shaping its flow by giving direction and structure, introducing purpose and focus, deliberately choosing how it shapes you and the world.

I encourage a focus on personal values, a curious mindset, an optimistic attitude, flexibility in habits and patterns, nurturing of skills and capabilities, and cultivation of purposeful energy. I emphasize “wholeness” of mind, body, and spirit in life and with community. It is all connected, dynamic, and uncertain.

The natural cycle of adaption provides a template of the more specific processes underlying most types of changes and related transitions. The cycle begins with a disturbance followed by phases of confusion, search, innovation, and a new ‘normal.’ Each phase has its function, tasks, and potential pitfalls. Once learned, it’s useful every time life shifts uncomfortably.

The cycle offers a map, but we each make our own path. We move through our next chosen step, which is an action, but not in response to a pre-set plan, rather to navigating the situation — dynamic and co-emergent.

It’s balancing what to plan and what not to plan. Plans work well if you know exactly what you need, how to get it, and can control results. Life is dynamic and unpredictable — with no clear solutions, no guarantees, no stopping, and no going back. The situation can unfold in infinite ways. For this reason, when desired, my clients practice strategies for navigating uncertainty, experiencing how to live with grace while growing naturally into a life they can’t yet imagine.

How can that be?
Because we can — we just need to open ourselves to our possibilities, choose, and follow through.

How do you do this?

Start with three important shifts.

• Open up! See your situation in a more complete light — not as a problem, but as a cloud of possibilities. This is a significant shift. Problems are limited to solutions based on what we know. Possibilities open us to what we don’t know, what doesn’t yet exist, if we dare to believe.

• Get grounded! Use the overarching lens of adaption — shift your focus from the outcome (what you want, your goal) to the process. Life is about wholeness, with a natural cycle and a personal rhythm carrying us forward. Understanding where we are in the cycle enables us to direct our efforts effectively.

• Stay centered! Develop new skills and strategies — shift from following a plan to navigating the uncertainty. Embracing the unknowable and uncontrollable doesn’t alter the facts, but it retools our thoughts which fuel our actions — how we live life. Navigating frees us to move toward what’s desirable, ready to re-aim our efforts as the situation emerges. It’s empowering.

Together, these three shifts result in not only more desirable outcomes, but the needed skills, self-confidence, and power to create results that can be produced in no other way. Each day you move toward what you desire through your thoughts and actions — to shape its emergence through intention, imagination, and innovation. With practice, this conscious approach creates a lifetime of self-discovery.

Is Pat the best coach for me?

Everyone has their story, and I’m interested in serving you. No, I haven’t walked in your shoes, and you haven’t walked in mine. I trust that my honest intent, professional ethics, and broad expertise are a solid foundation for a professional relationship that could serve you well. As your coach, I believe in you, listen deeply without judgment, ask thought-provoking questions, and support you unconditionally. Yet, for our relationship to succeed, you need to be comfortable not just with my coaching approach, but with me as a person — someone you can trust. So, here’s a little of my story.

The Short Story

Becoming a life coach was my next step in a career of developing systems, information, and tools to help people survive and thrive. Yet, what happens if we don’t know what’s best or we can’t make it happen? How do we do this even as life keeps going? Plans work well if you know exactly what you need, how to get it, and can control results. Life works differently, something we all face at some point in our life. I was my first client.

Becoming a life coach wasn’t easy for me. As a lifelong learner with many years of formal education across multiple disciplines, this was both humbling and frustrating. No one coaching approach or niche seemed enough — my own life was the first test! And I needed them all — wouldn’t others? This was important. I felt called to connect and contribute more directly to others. I persevered. I felt compelled to do so.

I believed. I opened myself. I aligned the cross-disciplinary concepts. I validated the evidence. I explored the balance of planning and not planning. I compiled coherent flexible options for clients with diverse needs and evolving circumstances. I practiced designing life. As a life coach, I needed to trust my capacity to help others discover the ways best for them. There had to be an overarching flexible framework for what may work best when for whom. And there is!

But the best surprise?
All that time I had unwittingly been practicing and living into the life I had believed in.

The Outward Story

In 2001, we moved to South Hadley in search of a cleaner, simpler life. Working from home, I applied my talents to writing and editing — helping people do what they needed to do. Our family celebrated weddings, dealt with chronic illnesses, and mourned at funerals. In 2009–2011 while recovering from a car accident, I attained a masters of education focusing on health literacy. Upon graduation, I worked in education and support at a local community health center. After leaving suddenly in 2012, my focus turned from helping those with illness to helping to prevent illness. I became a certified wellness specialist and trained as a wellness coach, learning wellness practices for lasting behavior change. Yet I couldn’t find local employment in corporate wellness — local was important.

In 2015, I shifted to life coaching, seeking ways for aligning daily life with what matters most — starting with myself. I learned how to apply the rational goal-oriented action planning I had excelled in from earlier careers. I learned about the underlying transition process, the personal inner side of change. And I kept learning … discovering the overarching lenses of adaption, a new philosophy toward life, and the heart of C3 Life Coach — my life’s work.

These lessons have been invaluable for us as my husband and I seek more joy in our life amidst the complex aging of our parents (in their 90s!). Every day, I remind myself that the possibilities are mine, if I choose and follow through.

The Inner Story

Throughout my life, I have been adept at seeing the big picture, relationships, and possibilities. 

• As a child, I watched in silent awe as snowflakes puddled in the sun and then sublimed, only to form a mist casting a rainbow.

• As a student and working adult, I met society’s norms, institutions, and rational rules. I learned the math of rainbows. I planned, living from my head. Thriving for a while — I’ve the awards to prove it! — until illness said otherwise. Continuing to strive — my life WILL BE what I make it! — until lack of desired opportunity said otherwise. Becoming a life coach, I lived my way into a new life by facing the challenges presented, both the unresolved past and the uncertain future. It’s been quite a journey.

• As C3 Life Coach, I’m finally blooming. I use my head but live from my heart. 

This IS my life’s work.

What now?