When I was in fourth grade, my parents took me to a high school production of Bye Bye Birdie. I fell in love with musical theater, especially the song Telephone Hour, where all the teenagers are popping out of nowhere with landline telephones singing, “Hi Nancy, Hi Helen, What’s the story, Morning Glory, What’s the Tale Nightingale, Tell me quick about Hugo and Kim!”

I have another memory. This one begins even earlier. My grandfather used to love to sing to us, in his not perfect voice, the theme song from the movie Casablanca, “It’s still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die.” 

We tell our children bedtime stories before they go to sleep. They can be made up or from a book, rhyming and rhythmic or tall tales and fantasy. Stories can be the pieces of life that give us comfort and joy or scary and disturbing. Stories can keep us up at night. When I was eight years old, I sat with my father on a Sunday afternoon watching a documentary about the Holocaust. I can picture little me, with my thumb in my mouth, tucked into the crook under my dad’s arm and against his belly, watching the photographic story. This was a real story that happened to people just like me. I started not being able to sleep at night. I needed different stories.

We go through life constructing our stories based on the family we come from, the things that happen to us, the things we yearn for, the people we meet, the people we fall in love with, the people who disappoint us, and the messages that society places before us. Our stories have many layers and many facets. In the film Shrek, the title character insists that ogres are like onions, they have layers (they smell too!). That’s pretty wise. Take away some of the smell, and we all are multilayered. And we have stories at every one of those layers.

So what does that mean for us when we are going through a dark transitional, transformational time like divorce? How do we take our divorce story and shift it, peel it, uncover it so that we can reveal a lighter, more appealing story that inspires us, that makes us dream and want to build our future instead of wasting time living in our past? What does it mean to peel back the layers and uncover the hidden soul of our story?

It means we have a choice. It means we can be the authors of our story. It means that the labels that weigh us down can be thrown off and we can put on new identities that align with our values. That is where the magic of coaching comes in. Working with a coach helps you find multiple paths toward forward motion. There are more than two choices for every problem. There is more than the obvious and the known. 

A coach helps you get curious and creative. 

A coach helps you get in touch with the wisdom that is located within your soul that you have locked away under years of stories and labels that may have silenced the person you once were.  

Who you are now may be a powerful person overloaded with stories that may be limiting you and your options. We take your current story and what you know, and shake it up, so you can “shake off” what doesn’t serve you. 

Because ultimately, we are all constantly becoming. We are becoming more of who we are and who we are meant to be. We are humans who are not designed to stop creating ourselves, we are designed to continue creating and becoming and changing and shifting until the last breath. For those who say, people don’t or can’t change, I disagree. It’s all about the story you choose to write for yourself. In a poignant number from the musical Baby, a character sings,”The Story Goes On”, when she becomes pregnant. She acknowledges that life is about living and becoming and she is part of the story whether she wants to be or not. It is about hope and joy. We write our stories. We can unwind and peel the layers. We can uncover, and reveal what we’ve hidden. And that self-reclamation becomes the central identity upon which we begin to write our next chapter with clarity, confidence and courage and in strength, power and joy.