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Emotional Agility & Leadership Coaching with Leah Halvorsen

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To be, or not to be…

January 3, 2016 by Leah Halvorsen

Hello again. Sorry for being away so long. I have determined that I will blog when something scratches at the inside of my head, and demands to be let out. This is one of those times. Here is the “story” that is in my head today. I have seen this repeated again and again (in […]

Celebrate

December 3, 2014 by Leah Halvorsen

I just realized something…. I just (I mean JUST) completed my 2000th session as a Professional Life Coach. This means I have said 2000 “hellos”, 2000 “talk to you soons” and sat nestled in, for a mysterious adventure 2000 times. I am honored. Today I celebrate every one of those 2000 times. I celebrate each […]

Slip Sliding Away

September 18, 2014 by Leah Halvorsen

So, under the heading of “doing something new”, I went for a “float”. No, not the ice cream and soda variety, but rather the sensory deprivation kind, where you get to step away from your physical body and really let go. This involves being inside a pod with 11 inches of highly-salinated water (buoyancy guaranteed, […]

What do car washes and intimacy have in common…

July 28, 2014 by Leah Halvorsen

As I stand here washing bug guts off my van and reflecting on the fun road trip that put them there, I am struck by something. A few years ago, I would resist cleaning “fun” off my van for as long as possible. The dust and footprints reminded me of the fun I had, and […]

Resisting the Unresistable…

May 19, 2014 by Leah Halvorsen

Resistance. It is what happens that makes us try to stem the flow of things. It is what makes us try diligently to stop things that are unstoppable, or hold back experiences that must happen. We ALL do it. I was just doing it (where do you think the inspiration for this article came from?) […]

Hold On…

January 10, 2014 by Leah Halvorsen

Everyone who terrifies you is 65% water. Everyone you love is made of stardust. I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home, and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last 2%, but… Nothing is infinite, not even loss. You are […]

The Discomfort of the Christmas Bear…

December 12, 2013 by Leah Halvorsen

I was just struck by something. Do you remember what it was like to be waiting, and waiting for Christmas? The sweet agony (or just agony) of not knowing what Santa would bring, and if it would be the thing you REALLY wanted? Oh the days dragged, and the excitement and tension in your belly […]

BEcoming…

October 28, 2013 by Leah Halvorsen

Last night I watched the documentary “Becoming Chaz”, which is a documentary about Chastity Bono’s journey to becoming Chaz Bono. While we could discuss at length the issues facing the Transgender community (all worthy of deep discussion), today I am compelled by soemthing else–BEing and ONEness. The story that is echoing through my head is […]

Houston…can you hear me?

October 21, 2013 by Leah Halvorsen

I am back in the saddle again! After a Summer and Fall of ongoing technical issues and frustration, I FINALLY have full access to my website again, and am migrated to a new webhost who can meet my needs. What’s important about this?–I’ll tell you. I avoided these technical tasks for a long time. I […]

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The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

~ Mark Twain

Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.

~ Henry Ford

No punishment anyone might inflict on us could possibly be worse than the punishment we inflict on ourselves by conspiring in our own diminishment.

~ Parker Palmer

You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?

~ Rumi

You could say it is the feeling of healing, coming home to myself after a long seperation.

~ Tama J. Kieves

It seems that guidance is a lot like candlelight. It lights up a room or a moment at a time. I can see where I am right now. I can’t see where I am going. But I bring this flicker with me as I step forward.

~ Tama J. Kieves

Choosing our actions instead of reacting can change the course of history, or at least the course of our lives.

~ Melody Beattie

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

~ Winston Churchill

Doing work you love is the dizzying path of saying yes to yourself and yes to a brilliant, hidden self you do not yet know.

~ Tama J. Kieves

Well-meaning people will say well-meaning things that will make us feel foreign and tilted for wanting to walk this world another way.

~ Tama J. Kieves

Whatever you feed with attention will grow detailed, bold, and brilliant with life for you. Feed the wolves that howl on the outskirts of imagination or feed your dreams instead.

~ Tama J. Kieves

It all comes down to this: We can deny our hearts or we can deny our limits.

~ Tama J. Kieves

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Self care is never a selfish act – it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I was put on Earth to offer to others.

~ Parker Palmer

I wonder, he said, whether the stars are set a light in heaven so that one day each one of us may find his own again.

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Some things matter because we choose to make them matter.

~ James G. March

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

~ Henry J. Tillman

To make a friend of the part of us that wants nothing to do with the difficulties of work, of relationship, of doing what is necessary, is to learn humility; to cultivate self-compassion and to sharpen a necessary sense of humour and a merciful approach to both self and other.

~ David Whyte

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.

~ Mark Twain

The roar of your heart will quiet all terror. And, sometimes, it takes just a little terror to rouse your heart to roar.

~ Tama J. Kieves

It is life near the bone where it is sweetest.

~ Henry David Thoreau

To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

We make our lives bigger or smaller, more expansive or more limited, according to the interpretation of life that is our story.

~ Christina Baldwin

I saw a car with a bumper sticker that read “The one who dies with the most toys wins”. I think it should have said “joys”

~ Tama J. Kieves

You are succulent. Even if you don’t know it yet.

~ Sark

May you parent your passion exquisitely.

~ Dawna Markova

Purpose is the place where your deep gladness meets the worlds needs.

~ Frederick Buechner

I found more strength swinging from vine-to-vine than I ever would have huddled away in a life-proof life.

~ Tama J. Kieves

Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.

~ Rumi

We are all meant to shine, as children do. As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated by our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

~ Marianne Williamson

Stop ignoring that temptation that makes you giggle and flush in hopes that you can find a smugly sensible resolution instead.

~ Tama J. Kieves

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

You must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I am coming to see that time free is not an indulgence, but a kind of vigilance. Knowing myself and knowing my dreams comes from having time. Without self-connection, I won’t have true direction.

~ Tama J. Kieves

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; But often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.

~ Helen Keller

Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.

~ Hans Christian Andersen

Let life get wind of you.

~ Tama J. Kieves

Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world.

~ Rumi

Life is just a mirror, and what you see out there, you must first see inside of you.

~ Wally Amos

Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.

~ Samuel Butler

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

~ Rumi

Know yourself

~ Ancient Wisdom

The purpose of life is a life of purpose.

~ Robert Byrne

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

~ Gandhi

I find it fascinating that most people plan their vacations with better care than they do their lives.

~ Jim Rohn

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Listen to your life. All moments are key moments.

~ Frederick Buechner

A task without a vision is just a job. A vision without a task is just a dream. A vision with a task can change the world.

~ Unknown

Deep experience is never peaceful.

~ Henry James

My path has not been determined. I shall have more experiences and pass many more milestones.

~ Agnetha Faltskog

Belief creates the actual fact.

~ William James

Change your thoughts and you change your world.

~ Norman Vincent Peale

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

Nothing is impossible, the word itself says “I’m possible!”

~ Audrey Hepburn

To cultivate joy, pay attention to what you like

~ Billy Fingers

Life unfolds naturally and organically, presenting us with situations which allow us to learn.

~ Melody Beattie

We grow by thrusting our roots into the darkness as well as our branches into the light.

~ Dawna Markova

When we learn how to be truly present with our joy and our sorrow, with our longing and our desires, layer upon layer of ourselves and the world are revealed.

~ Oriah Mountain Dreamer

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

~ Oscar Wilde

The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. He frees himself and shows the way to others. Freedom and slavery are mental states.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower, share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another\’s, smile at someone and receive a smile in return, are to me continual spiritual exercises.

~ Leo Buscaglia

For every species alive on the planet today, there are many more that didn’t adapt quickly enough to the challenges they faced… The only way to survive is to change.

~ Oprah Winfrey

Candour is a compliment; it implies equality. It’s how true friends talk.

~ Peggy Noonan

The consequences of deep intimacy with yourself, another or the world are completely unpredictable.

~ Oriah Mountain Dreamer

No-one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Turn to nature to pardon some of the difficulty you have to bear.

~ Billy Fingers

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

~ Winston Churchill

It’s not what we don’t know that hurts us, it’s what we believe is true that isn’t, that does the damage.

~ Melody Beattie

What is needed, rather than running away, controlling, suppressing or any other resistance, is UNDERSTANDING fear. Than means watch it, learn about it, come in contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape it.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Once you recognize within yourself a hunger for something beyond just continuing, once you taste even the possibility of touching the meaning enfolded in your life, you can never be completely content with just going through the motions.

~ Oriah Mountain Dreamer

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

~ M. Scott

There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. If you cannot hear it, you will spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.

~ Howard Thurman

When you are happy, you don’t have a heartbeat. You have a hum in your chest that makes you want to laugh all the time.

~ Jann Arden

Through fear of knowing who we really are, we sidestep our own destiny, which leaves us hungry in a famine of our own making.

~ Dawna Markova

You don’t have to hold your head, higher than your heart.

~ Jack Johnson

The healthiest response to life is joy.

~ Deepak Chopra

You see things; and you say, “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say, “Why not?”

~ George Bernard Shaw

You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.

~ Christopher Columbus

An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

~ Oscar Wilde

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

~ Mark Twain

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the dessert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

~ Mary Oliver

Tell me something you have not told yourself for a very long time. Let it come up from your belly, so we can be surprised together.

~ Oriah Mountain Dreamer

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

~ Winston Churchill

We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvellously who we were born to be.

~ Anne Lamott

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

~ Charles Darwin

Until you are fully using what/who you are currently, the universe will not give you access to more of you.

~ Jody Larkin

We all have islands of fear inside us, but we also have continents of wisdom and truth.

~ Dawna Markova

The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could have materialized – never knowing.

~ Jim Rohn

I think the key to a life well lived, is to be gentle on your soul.

~ Jann Arden

“Everything will be alright” is not the same as “everything will stay the same”

~ Seth Godin

Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both.

~ Brene Brown

Life unfolds naturally and organically, presenting us with situations which allow us to learn.

~ Melody Beattie

Humans make stuff up, then they believe it.

~ Billy Fingers

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