What Goes Around Comes Around

What goes around comes around. Sometimes even in a single day.

The day started with coach Theresa Callahan to share our coaching tools with each other. It was my turn to receive.

It was a tune-up of sorts, something we all need from time to time.

I walked away from the session with a name for my Pleaser saboteur, and box to leave her B.S. in when it's time to gather my superpowers and do what I am really here to do: Touch the souls of those with whom I cross paths so we can all vibrate at the highest level.

I knew I'd have an opportunity to pay that gift forward. But I didn't think it would be so soon.

When a young woman named Maïmouna Diop from Dakar, Senegal popped up on my schedule for that morning, I didn’t immediately recognize it as that opportunity.

There was some back and forth with scheduling. We tried for next week, but when I offered a slot later that day, she jumped on it. "I need help," she said. This is important, I knew then. There was more trouble downloading the Zoom app, then more trouble connecting. “Maybe it’s not supposed to happen today,” I said to myself.

“I guess I’ll have to reschedule,” she emailed. But something told me to keep my Zoom screen open.

Suddenly, there she was, 30 minutes after the scheduled time of our appointment. She burst onto my screen, a beautiful young woman in what looked like a bright mall. I heard voices in the background. She apologized that she was with her friends as this social time was already in the works when she rescheduled with me.

She turned the screen toward her friends, also gorgeous, impossibly young, as they raised their glasses to me. For a moment, I was thousands of miles away in a continent I have yet to visit, with people just beginning their lives.

Miamouna settled into our conversation as if she were alone, completely focused and vulnerable -- a testament to her ability to be authentic no matter who is nearby and the sign of real friendship.

There was something about my profile, she said -- I don't think it was my stated niche of coaching physicians, as she is not in the medical world -- something told her that I was to be her first coach.

I was the one.

She talked about the feeling the feeling that she is only worthy only because she is nice, not because she is talented – or simply worthy as she is amazing because she is. She felt like saying Yes was leading to burnout and depression.

I helped her name this feeling, the saboteur Pleaser, the one who makes her say Yes to her own detriment, deepening the feeling the hole of Not Enough.

By the end of our 45-minute conversation, her smile came easier.

Her clarity shined through the screen like a beam of sunshine through a hole in the clouds.

“I want to make people’s hope bigger, like you have already done for me," she said with grateful determination. "This is part of my purpose.” 

“You are here to do big things,” I said. I believe this.

I don’t say things to be nice. I put that in the Pleaser B.S. box already that morning.

Her smile filled the entire screen. It reached across the globe and grabbed me by the heart.

“Thank you for saying that,” she said. “I think so, too.”

“What are you walking away with today?”

“I am fearless,” she said.

This is how we raise the vibration. From Montana to Minneapolis to Dakar, Pleaser be gone. We have work to do. We have hope to grow. We have big things to do.

**Confidentiality is a cornerstone of coaching. This story was published only with enthusiastic permission from Maimouna.**