Liz, Author at Liz Esquirol

Coach or Cheerleader?

Life Coach. What is that exactly?

No disrespect AT ALL to Life Coaches (as Buddha Balboa too is of the same ilk) but I’ve always found the phrase a little odd. Coaches of life. One designated to coach one through one’s life.

Aren’t we all our OWN life coaches? Or better yet, shouldn’t we be?

Yes, having a mentor, a guide, a friend, a confidante, is essential in our personal journey. We need each other – to help us through the tough times, the moments of instability and fear, the persistent path of procrastination. We need someone to hold our hand, rub our back, give us advice and just plain old love us through the ups and downs. We need help.

I guess I see the whole Life Coach umbrella as a little bit of a crutch (again, no disrespect, just honest chatter.) A crutch that we lean on even though we can indeed walk on our own. Something to reach for when we are feeling unsteady…instead of just handling the wobble and knowing that we already have what it takes inside us to take that step forward.

Maybe what we need is more of a Life Cheerleader – someone who yells our praises through a megaphone, someone who jumps high in the air and claps when we are heading for the goal. We want and need someone to cheer us through – to remind us to keep going, to never give up, to have faith when we are 4th and inches.

Maybe what we really just need is someone who will shake their positive pom-pom’s at us and remind us that our true life coach is called our heart.

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Put Down Your Gavel

Judgment.

It’s a hefty word, right? I hear it and I just bristle. Because we bat it around as if it were our rightful Wiffle ball to hit any which way we choose.

But really, we don’t. Mostly because our judgment is based on personal prejudice and experience. We formulate judgment with faulty facts and internal bias. It’s hard for us to assess properly from an unfiltered place.

Amanda Gore, an energetic and delightful speaker, says, “Use judgment. Don’t make judgment.” Love it. Hits the nail on the head for Buddha Balboa.

Perhaps if we spent a little less time judging, and more time trying to understand and empathize, we may be able to see people and situations as they truly are – broken, fragile, searching, yearning.

We all do it. I do it. I make private unspoken judgments in my mind all day long. But I catch this behavior and remind myself that I am not the judge. I am not the jury. We are all fellow passengers.

Put down your gavel. It’s noisy.

TBIF (Thank Buddha It's Friday)

TBIF (Thank Buddha It’s Friday)

Ahhhh yes…it’s that glorious day of the week for the traditional worker….Friday!

And why do we look at Friday differently? Because as a culture we have come to view it as the marker of freedom – from our jobs, our daily grind, our weeklong drudgery. Yuck. Why have we done this to ourselves?

Yes – is it nice knowing that now we have some “free” time to enjoy our other pursuits – that of relaxation, dinner with family, hobbies and sports? Yes, it is. Have we come to believe that the weekend, days off, are our time to be who we really are, without the confines of cubicle culture? Yes, we have.

Although that’s lovely and all – I don’t think I want to hear “Happy Friday” from anyone anymore. I want to hear, “Happy that we are alive and have jobs and have our health and have love and look how fortunate we really are Day” from my office mates and fellow street passengers. Wouldn’t that be refreshing?!

The truth is – Buddha Balboa get’s it. There are 2 sides to just about everything. BUT – if we flip the perspective coin and let every day land heads up, then every day can be our personal Friday. Every day can be a chance to be who we really are…to be thankful for what we have…and to look forward to work as well as play. It’s all part of the same circle.

So, with that in mind, Thank Buddha It’s Today. – BB

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Mark it with a T

“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”

That was the open to the soap opera classic Day of our Lives. The image of an hourglass, with sand slipping through the narrow tube, is impactful. It is the constant reminder that time is elusive…always moving, impossible to hold, slipping through our fingers.

As a hungover friend once said, “You can always make more money, but you can’t make more time.” A sobering thought indeed.

You can’t make more time. True. We can’t manufacture more time – we can’t go into the lab and put some chemicals together and produce new and improved time (some would argue time travel possibilities here, but we don’t have TIME for that.) We can extend time – as the medical field does in the case of the very sick – in prolonging someone’s life, thereby creating more time than what was expected in one souls life span.

But time at its very core – is always present and never here. It passes without thought or work. Much as our breath goes in and out of our lungs…on automatic pilot. We don’t “think” time into existence….it just is. We can’t hold it, smell it or taste it. We can only see it through the invention of clocks, calendars and various measuring devices. Much like the ancients had the sundial to view the passing of time, we have our digital armband displays or our towering Big Ben monoliths.

Sometimes, we want time to pass quickly, and other times we want to freeze it – holding a precious moment tightly so it doesn’t escape us. But time is ultimately a measure of the past and future. The present comes and goes in the blink of an eye – and then we are left with the memory of what is gone and the thought of what is yet to be.

I recently heard a man on the bus say something like you don’t want to do something because otherwise you were going to “spend your whole life…..” doing this or that (it was a morning commute, I wasn’t running on all cylinders yet.) But my point is this – time is a commodity. That bus-man said it – we can “spend our lives” doing something…hopefully putting it to good use, but that we can spend away our time, our one and only truly important resource. “Time well spent” as the expression goes is what I think hungover friend was referring to….wanting to keep it, use it, enjoy it – because we can’t get more at Home Depot. There is no aisle for Time.

It’s four simple letters…time…but it’s huge in how we measure our history, our lives and ultimately, ourselves.