My friend Julia was visiting this past weekend and we decided to expand our annual year-end review to a decade review instead. We covered all the big events that transpired in both our lives and challenged each other to give it a name. I called mine ‘growing up.’

I was truly blessed—although it often didn’t feel that way—by my decision to pursue coaching training with Integral Coaching Canada (ICC) starting in January 2010. I had no way to predict how stressful the coaching work was going to be. ICC’s methodology employs a blend of rigour and intuition. Rigour I could handle as I have a strong will, but calling upon my intuitive self while in a perpetual state of heightened anxiety was much harder. Nevertheless, I persevered. 

The experience of going ‘back to school’ challenged me in ways I couldn’t have imagined, but it also formed the bedrock for everything that transpired over the coming decade. One memorable moment occurred in the second module of the training. We were assigned partners and they filmed us coaching each other. This was my first-ever experience of seeing myself objectively and I remember being surprised and thinking ‘she looks like a nice person’—not the misfit I felt myself to be from the inside.

After successfully completing the program I returned to Ottawa for one of ICC’s Mastery Workshops. During our time together we were encouraged to form small interest groups, to explore how we might be of greater service in the world. Ten of us formed the Coaching and Healing group, including my housemate John. Out of that collaboration came a book we co-authored called Coaching and Healing: Transcending The Illness Narrative and we continue to meet to this day. One of the threads that runs throughout the book is the idea of a healing narrative.

As I reflect on this past decade—where it opened and where it closed—I see that this year of blogging has in fact been my own deep dive into writing a healing narrative. It has allowed me to integrate, not only the developmental pursuits I engaged in this last decade, but events that transpired throughout my whole life.

At one point during my ICC training my teacher, Laura, suggested I practice ‘getting comfortable with surprise.’ Imagine my surprise when I realized that my year of blogging has also been helping with exactly that. Each week, when I sit down to write a post, I’m never sure where it’s going. At times I’ve experienced abject terror. What on earth am I trying to say?!! But over time I’ve come to trust the process. Each post reveals itself eventually and the process of digging around for the nuggets is just as important as the finished piece. The vlogs are also an echo from the past when I first saw myself on camera. Perhaps the biggest surprise there is that I undertook them in the first place!

Philosopher and poet John O’Donohue wrote these beautiful words: I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding. That’s my intention for the coming years. To keep growing up and waking up and being surprised by my own unfolding.

What is your intention for 2020? Let me know, I’d love to hear!