Let's Think About It Podcast

Feeling is Healing: The Transformative Journey to Emotional Well-Being

• Morice Mabry • Season 2 • Episode 36

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What happens when a seasoned attorney decides to hang up her legal robes and embark on a journey of transformation? Meet Arlene Cohen Miller, a remarkable work-life balance and harmony coach, who shares her personal story of leaving a demanding legal career behind to embrace a more fulfilling role in coaching and mentoring. Arlene's experience as a family and commercial law attorney, coupled with the challenges of being a working mother, propelled her to pursue a path of healing and communication. Through her compelling narrative, Arlene illustrates how she found her true calling in helping women achieve balance and harmony in their lives.

Uncover the profound impact of gratitude and self-awareness as we explore strategies to nurture these essential practices. Listen to the inspiring journey of a client who embarked on a year-long gratitude challenge, demonstrating how small, self-generated changes can lead to significant personal growth. We delve into the cycle of over-giving and the necessity of replenishing one's own resources to prevent burnout and foster resilience. By creating a judgment-free space, Arlene empowers her clients to develop their own gratitude practices and shift perspectives for a more fulfilling life.

The episode wraps up with a thoughtful exploration of self-care, transformation, and the differences between mentoring and coaching. Arlene emphasizes the healing power of acknowledging neglected parts of ourselves and the "feeling is healing" approach to emotional well-being. We also highlight the importance of kindness, patience, and tolerance as tools for personal growth, especially during the demanding holiday season. By offering a flexible practice tailored to individual needs, Arlene provides a safe space for clients to discover their inner strength and achieve transformative change.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the let's Think About it podcast, where we embark on a journey of thoughtfulness and personal growth. I'm your host, Coach Mo, and I'm here to guide you through thought-promoting discussions that will inspire you to unlock your full potential. In each episode, we'll explore a wide range of topics, from self-discovery and mindfulness to goal-setting and achieving success. Together, we'll challenge conventional thinking and dive deep into the realms of possibility. Whether you're looking to find clarity in your personal or professional life, or seeking strategies to overcome obstacles, this podcast is your go-to source for insightful conversations and practical advice. So find a comfortable spot, chill and let's embark on this journey of self-improvement together. Remember, the power of transformation lies within you, and together we'll uncover the tools and insights you need to make it happen. So let's dive in. Welcome to another episode of the let's Think About it podcast. I'm your host, Coach Mo, and I'm here with another amazing guest. This is Arlene Cohen Miller. Arlene, what's up? Hello?

Speaker 2:

I'm nothing, I'm just really glad to be here with you right now, mo.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely, absolutely. The first thing I ask my guests is where are you checking in from? What part of the country or the world are you calling in from?

Speaker 2:

I live in Colorado, in a little town called not that little, it's called Longmont, colorado. It's about I don't know 20 minutes down the road from Boulder and about 45 minutes northwest of downtown Denver. It's beautiful. We have the view of the mountains everywhere we go. I really like it here.

Speaker 1:

Born and raised.

Speaker 2:

No, I was born and raised in Louisville, kentucky, and I've lived in Atlanta, georgia and suburbs of Cleveland, ohio, so I've been around the map in the US.

Speaker 1:

Nice. So is it a lot of snow down there yet no in the mountains, there's skiing.

Speaker 2:

We've had like almost fall weather.

Speaker 2:

We have not had. We've had one little snow earlier in the year, but it's been really, really mild. We're just, we're just like when is it going to be winter? But it will come. It will come. It always comes to Colorado. Right now.

Speaker 2:

I am a work-life balance and harmony coach for women and a transformational mentor for men and women. I also do full readings for everybody to help facilitate your opportunities and challenges and move through them and experience growth. My foundation is as an attorney. When I was 15, I decided I wanted to be an attorney and I did. I practiced for many years in a suburb of Cleveland, ohio and also in Colorado. So I've been a family law attorney with divorces and disillusions and child custody and being appointed by the court to represent children when there's abuse. And I've also been a commercial law attorney. I've helped businesses to collect monies that are due and owing them for services and products that they've sold.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and when I moved, when I started my first business, I was 29 and I immediately found out I was pregnant and all of our family was in Kentucky. All of my tribe was in Kentucky. I didn't know that many people up here. So I didn't have a support system. I didn't have a tribe around me to help me raise my son or to be a working mother. So that's part of the reason I'm so passionate about helping women with work-life balance and harmony, because there were counselors and psychologists and stuff like that there. But what I really needed was some sort of coach. At the time I was pretty together but I just was like what do I do? Yeah, so that's a little bit about me and why I'm here.

Speaker 1:

Take me through. Where did the pivot happen at? It's amazing that you as an attorney I can imagine a lot of the cases and the work that you was doing, the value that you was bringing to multiple communities but what was it that the light bulb just switched on for you to make you pivot towards being a life balance coach or transformational mentor?

Speaker 2:

It was like it was a process over many years when I got divorced when my son was almost three and he developed really pretty significant ADHD and I went on a healing journey to help him because I wasn't so thrilled about just sticking him on drugs and the story I just really feel in my heart of hearts is that as I was helping to heal him to the best of my ability, it was really starting to be a healing journey for myself. So I guess, as a young woman and a person who went into the law, I felt like I was very much a head case and through this process I started beginning to develop the other side of me, the more feminine, heart-based side, to be more of a balanced person and about I don't know, six or seven years before we sold the second law practice in Colorado, I got a diploma in coaching and mentoring and transformational holistic counseling and became a certified meditation facilitator.

Speaker 2:

At first I just wanted to practice law. I thought I needed better communication skills. I need a better listening skill. They didn't teach you that in law school. They taught you how to win stuff and I really need to be able to communicate better. And that was great. I loved it. I just got really. I just I got burnt out being an attorney because it's an amazing profession. You can help a lot of people, but there's no light switch to turn it off. Your cases are always there, people that need help are always there, especially if you're an entrepreneur and you have your own business. And I just I was just ready for a change and I really loved coaching, I really loved mentoring and I just decided that was what I needed to go into. So it wasn't like a big light bulb moment. It was more of a nice kind of progression over time that I went through.

Speaker 1:

When you work with clients right For your experience of being an attorney, like you just mentioned, the grind you just always want to go the chaos of the work that's consistently coming in, Don't have time for your family, extracurricular things because you're in the grind, whether you're an entrepreneur, attorney, like you said, whatever the CEO, whatever that profession is. But what are some things that you do to help clients begin to even think about the work-life balance? And what does that strategy look like?

Speaker 2:

First of all, I wasn't like one of those kind of people. I wasn't those kind of people that people judged, because I always took care of myself, even when my son was young. I was a runner when I was young and I would run with other women that were young parents, or I would work out in the gym or I would find I would swim. I would find ways to physically get that energy out. And I wasn't so good at eating healthy food when I was younger, but I'm much better now because I had some health issues and it's like you got to be better about this, arlene. You got to stay away from all that sugar which I was a little bit addicted to. So, yeah, I've lived it and I played with it and I've practiced it, and I guess what I do with my clients is I partner with them, because I don't think it's like a cookie cutter thing for all people. Some people have one area of their life better together than others. Other than others Maybe they are more get together with the work or with their, with how they intake food or how they take care of their bodies, but at home they really don't know how to balance things out. I really have to take people where they're at, really have conversations with them, allow them, as a coach, to lead the way. I believe they have the answers inside of them and from there we can pick up some things that they can do.

Speaker 2:

There's always some basic things that we can do to bring ourselves back down to earth Like. One thing that I facilitate, as especially the mentor, is like really being fully grounded and present in our body, because if we're all anxious, if we're all overwhelmed, we're all upset, we're going to be all over the place. It's going to be hard to do anything. So even a simple like visualization of feeling like you're a tree with like roots of light from your heart down your body, down your legs and anchoring to the heart of the planet, and really feeling connected in your, in our body and to the earth, can help people just go oh, I'm here, it's not so hard anymore.

Speaker 2:

And even some simple breathing techniques like breathing in through the nose and out through the nose, with the out breath being longer than the inner breath, physiologically tells us, hey, we can calm down. And so there's very simple techniques that we can engage in to work from the inside out. But how I approach everybody's on an individual, unique basis, because everyone's different. Some people have more together at work and less together at home, and vice versa, or maybe they're just a little bit scattered everywhere and I want them to come to me and say and I'm work with me and like together with those powerful questions and using my intuition to share with them where to from here.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we have so much in alignment of what you were saying. But I was working with a client and I want to run this by you and just get your thoughts on this. I was working with this client, right, and he said I got chaos around me. It's just everywhere I look. It's chaos. It's coming from the top, from my peers, from the employees. Tasks aren't being done well, I'm feeling stressed, my hair is falling out. I got to go to the doctor All of this stuff, right and I asked him this question.

Speaker 1:

I said how much positivity do you have coming in to balance or compensate all of the chaos that's coming in? He said go for a walk. I said OK, stop there, tell me about when you go for a walk. What are you thinking about? And he paused and he said I'm thinking about work. And I said exercise is great, but what are you doing to offset the chaos with the positivity mentally? And then he said huh, that's a good point, I don't think I'm really doing much. And so then he said huh, that's a good point, I don't think I'm really doing much. And so then I said there's something that you can do. That's very easy to do, but even easier not to do. And he was like well, what's that? I said, have gratitude thoughts and be intentional about your gratitude thoughts to incorporate the positivity, to help offset all of the chaos, because it starts from within you first. And so my question to you how do you approach the whole theory around gratitude and the work and coaching?

Speaker 2:

Well, we'll probably be on the same page here too, because I think gratitude is like the key for manifestation, the key for success on all levels, and I think the mistake that people make with gratitude is they make it a listening or a thinking thing.

Speaker 2:

And unless we truly feel grateful for even a few things in our life and it just really sinks in to our heart of hearts and we breathe it in and it's a part of who we are, then we're going to experience positive change.

Speaker 2:

It could be as simple as you walk out and you're really stressed from work and we're just going to have a slow walk, looking around and appreciating nature, and we're going to breathe deeply and we're going to just let things go and we're just going to be really grateful for that moment.

Speaker 2:

Or we're going to wake up and we're going to go wow, this is a really comfortable bed, and now I get to have my cup of coffee and I get to take a hot shower and is, wow, that's really cool, I'm really grateful for that and this, whatever it was I had for breakfast, and when we really have that foundational gratitude and we're not just making lists but we're really aware of what we can be grateful for in the moment. It is really transformational. It is like a foundational stone in our lives and I just I guess what I do is my focus is to help people to feel more grateful, but let's just really feel it. Don't tell me about the list that you made and how long it is, but what you actually feel and what can we do to help you feel that more.

Speaker 1:

And I think in the society that we live in, it becomes very easy to be distracted away from how we feel and the gratitude. We're in this reactive mode consistently and we can't get out of it because the mind frame is I got to put out the fire, I got to do this, I got to do this, I got to do that and, like you alluded to, even when you was an attorney, the self-care, self-care, self-care is what helps generate the gratitude and it makes total sense. So how do you help a person really start to gain that awareness around the concept of gratitude and creating this transformation for themselves?

Speaker 2:

I think we really need to have them maybe have a brainstorming session or whatever how they could maybe have more gratitude in their life. I had a really cool client. She was also an attorney and a coach, like me, and after a bunch of sessions like our, time was up and she decided that she didn't have enough gratitude for a whole year. What she did was and this was all her idea, and I think it's important to hold space like a huge, judgment-free, unconditionally loving space for our clients so that they can come up with ideas within themselves that will help them to experience more gratitude. And what she did was that every day for a year on a social media site, she posted either a picture or a photo of something that epitomized what she was grateful for and she wrote like a little sentence underneath it. And I had the privilege of following her and it was so inspiring and so heart opening. And she just kept on saying Arlene, I'm changing, I'm feeling so very different, and this was something that she came up with herself.

Speaker 2:

And so what I like to do with my clients and, of course, I can make recommendations but I really feel if they come up with a way that they can practice gratitude, because practice makes permanent.

Speaker 2:

We have to practice something in order for it to be a part of our lives. So if they find a way to practice that gratitude every way, in a way that they can be consistent with it's going to, it's going to effectuate some sort of positive change. It will be incremental over time or maybe there'll be some big moments where there's like some aha realizations and they can ground it more. But we can hold it like a really positive, judgment-free, not loving space for them so that they can come up with their own ideas. And this which she came up with and the only reason I'm sharing it with her, it was so transformational for me as a coach to follow along with her I'd never experienced a client that every day was so committed that they did something like that and just to experience the transformation with them. And yeah, I like to do that to help clients whatever works for them with them. And yeah, I like to do that to help clients whatever works for them.

Speaker 1:

That's powerful because I remember, even for myself, starting with the gratitude thought early on, going through some hiccups and being introduced to coaching.

Speaker 1:

People have heard the story before, but being introduced to coaching, one of the things that it taught me was about gratitude and the moment that I put all of my energy into cultivating gratitude thoughts and journaling affirmations, I think that was very powerful too, because as you write down affirmations, the consciousness takes that in and particularly when you sleep on it, the consciousness is just constantly materializing those affirmations and I was just like diligent about it and it really shifted my being to where I don't stay in that rut as long as I used to because of the presence of gratitude within me and my being.

Speaker 1:

And I think for what your client did is extremely powerful. And with clients I introduced to them, with my clients just start small Gratitude thoughts, little activities, because, like you said, it's a habit. Get them in the habit and part of the habit is self-awareness so that even I tell them when you forget to have a gratitude thought, you go to the kitchen and you forget and you remember that you forgot Guess what you typically do. You try to replace it and have a gratitude thought in that moment, and that's the start, and you're creating more resilience of building that for yourself and shifting that habit. My next thought that I wanted to ask you is how do you help a client with burnout? What's that look like?

Speaker 2:

Gosh, I think burnout is what a lot of people do, because they give and they give and they give, but they're not filling up their cup with love. And so it's this cycle they go into where they're giving and they're giving and they're giving and they're giving. Then they get frustrated and angry and upset about giving and not getting anything back that they should be giving, getting back from other people should a judgment, and then they beat themselves up for having those thoughts and being that way. And then they go into this people pleasing over giving pattern again. And so the first thing that we can really do is to bring awareness to the pattern and program that whatever they have in place is causing them to give everything away instead of replenishing their own cup up with love. And so we really it comes back to that self-care and that self-love and so really learning how to fill ourselves up with love. And I mean, I guess one way that we can do that, one way that I learned to do that seems really helpful, is that if I'm upset or I'm angry or I'm having a reaction, one of the things I always do is go OK, how old is this Arlene inside of me? Is she four? Is she two, is she eight, is she 16?, is she 25? And really feel into it, because there's a part of me that got stuck somewhere.

Speaker 2:

Something happened. I didn't have the ability to handle the situation or I judged on what I did in those moments, maybe as a teenager or young adult, and that bit of me got stuck and I've been ignoring this part. I haven't been loving this part. I've been letting it languish. They feel like rejected, abandoned, betrayed, and all I really need to do to begin with is to turn around and begin to love these bits of myself and to fill myself up with love. Of course, there's other ways too. As women, maybe, we like to go get a massage or get a mani-pedi or whatever, but I think when we don't give ourselves credit enough that the love that we have inside of ourselves is the perfect love for those bits of ourselves that are languishing, and then, when we start to love those bits and fill ourselves up with love, we're going to be more of a whole person, so that we're not going to be giving ourselves away in a way that's not appropriate.

Speaker 1:

When a person who's came up through the ranks in an environment that's not about self-care and it's about putting you down and you're carrying a lot of this shame, doubt, that type of energy with you, how do you really work with them to shift that? Because it can just be hard and you can feel trapped and what does that look like and what's that process like?

Speaker 2:

So this sounds. This is a little bit more. If someone is that stuck and they've really been in that kind of traumatic abusive cycle, probably mentoring is going to be better for them and they might even need to go to someone else for counseling. But one thing that I love to work with as a mentor is a process called feeling is healing, Because lots of times if our feelings don't feel good, we want to push them away.

Speaker 2:

But if we actually feel our feelings and just allow them to move through us, but we're at the same time we're really aligned to what we're moving towards, whatever positivity, whatever goals we're moving towards, but we're not judging our feelings, they're simply feelings, they're not. It's a process of acknowledging I have feelings, but I'm not my feelings. I have emotions, but I'm not my emotions. I have thoughts, I'm not my thoughts. I'm a soul having this experience on this planet. I can feel this. I can allow them to move through me with gratitude and then I can replace them with more positivity of what I'm actually moving towards. But that's more of a mentoring process than a coaching process what's the difference between a mentoring process versus a coaching process?

Speaker 2:

As a mentor, what I'm doing is I'm allowing people to stand on my shoulders for all the wisdom that I've accumulated through all the experiences I've had and all my study and everything like that, and sharing it with them and letting them practice it and see how it goes for them. As a coach, I know that they have all the answers within them, so I'm not telling them what to do. I'm allowing them to find the answers within. I might reflect back what I'm seeing within them as far as their body language, I might share an intuition, but I'm always handing it back to them to be the decision maker. So my business is dual consultancy. For me, the visual is just different sides of the diamond.

Speaker 1:

It's different ways of approaching the same thing, of whatever is going to work for that person. So when I hear in your practice you're wearing, you can wear a couple of different hats. You can come from the mentoring perspective and you can come from the coaching perspective, and the mentoring perspective is more so sharing more of your experience, providing you're helping to provide a path for them to take. That can be easier, giving a little bit of advice. On the other side of coaching is more of self-discovery and the person already has the answers for and it's up to you to help them self-discover what those answers are.

Speaker 2:

So when a client comes to you, do you dictate which side of the no, because if they want to buy a package, a coaching package, it can always be a coaching and mentoring package. They can always go back and forth. As far as I'm concerned, whatever works for them and lots of times people don't know, they just have to try different things I can give. If they talk to me and I have a discovery interview and they're sharing, I might make a recommendation, but I always feel like the final decision has to be up to them and then I can. We can work with either way, because there's no right or wrong way and I always believe in people coming. If they come from their hearts of what they want to try, then that's, let's go with that. How can I possibly know what's in their heart, of hearts? I can always give a recommendation, but I'm never going to tell anybody what they have to do.

Speaker 2:

Who is your client, tim? Who do you work best for? I work with a lot of women. I work with a lot of professional women. I'm a member of the Colorado Women's Bar Association and so I work with a lot of professional women that are mothers or just have a lot on their plate, but as far as a coach. But the mentoring is both men and women, and I don't know if there's any particular type. It just I always feel like if you put out the energy that for the right and perfect clients, that you're going to get people coming to you, they have an affinity with you and you have an affinity with them to work with and there's going to be that, it's just going going to click and most of the time it works. Sometimes it doesn't. You have to say this just isn't. I don't think it's right for either one of us. I can make a recommendation for somebody else and that's the most loving and kind thing to do for somebody okay, so I'd imagine that you work with a lot of clients, um, through work-life balance.

Speaker 1:

What have you found to be the common theme of challenges that people have when it comes to work-life balance?

Speaker 2:

it's just feeling a lot of stress. They're just feeling a lot of stress because a lot of them come to me and they want to be everything to everybody. They want to be the best mother they can be. They really want to do a great job at work. They want to be. If they have a partner. They want to be the best partner they can be. They really want to do a great job at work. They want to be. If they have a partner, they want to be the best partner they can be.

Speaker 2:

And you can't be everything to everybody and it just in the world that it is today, there's so much.

Speaker 2:

It feels like so much divisiveness. It really doesn't support people and it just feels like a different world than when my mother raised me, that her parents were really very poor and she felt like she had made it and she wanted to stay home and raise us. She did a lot of volunteer work, she handled a lot of finances of the family, but she wasn't trying to do too much at once and it just feels like in order for families to make it now, lots of times there has to be two breadwinners and I don't have an easy, quick answer for that, but I can help people to not put so many unrealistic expectations on themselves. Where they're judging themselves so harshly that instead of having that gratitude that you're talking about, that it brings them down and they don't really acknowledge all that they do bring to the table. So I guess that's a common thing that I see in a lot of people and I hope things can change in the world that there's not so much pressure on everybody.

Speaker 1:

Thinking back to your story of coming from being an attorney to a coach now and a mentor, what's the biggest fulfillment that you've received or that you get from making that transition to being a coach and a mentor now? What would you say that is for yourself?

Speaker 2:

Coaching and mentoring feels more personal. I really, as an attorney, I always I gave my best shot to just really be kind and patient with the people that I was working with, because a lot of people in divorce situations or business people that were coming to us we helped businesses collect their debts. They were in dire situation. A lot of people treat people that don't have a lot of money their finances are going down the tubes really poorly. So I felt like my job to make a difference in the world as an attorney was to treat people everyone with dignity and respect. Unless they disrespected me, then I would draw a boundary and I'd do something legal that I needed to do as a coach and a mentor.

Speaker 2:

It feels much more personal where I can really personally step in and make a difference in people's lives, either individually or in groups, and I find that really rewarding. They're both rewarding in different ways. I do love the freedom that comes with coaching and mentoring. You can do that anywhere, which is really lovely, and it's probably something that you experience as well as a coach. It's really. It's a heartfelt thing to be able to hold space for someone, to share some things with someone and to really see the light bulb go off in them to be able to ground and actualize new things in their life that really make a difference. You know.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'm just listening to you and I think about just the countless times of working with clients and they just feel, seen through our conversations. People carry so much baggage, they're burned out, they're stressed and they feel like they have to carry all of these different roles and have to be so many different roles. The coaching experience, letting them just offload it, just being seen in the present moment to be their authentic selves I think it lights my fire. It's such an amazing feeling to watch people grow from that space and then they learn how to be present for themselves. When they're out there in the chaos, they have techniques to be present and reground themselves, and that comes from us providing insights and helping them self-discover that for themselves. So I love it. We're just in a powerful position to help people get out of their own way, and that's how I like to describe it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's really something so powerful because most of the time when you just have a conversation with somebody else, they're thinking about what they're going to say as you're talking and as we hold this big loving judgment, free space where we're not doing that, and that in itself is hugely transformational for people, because they don't necessarily get it anywhere else and that gives them that that space to really breathe, have a different experience. We're modeling a new way of behavior for them and in that space they can come to and be a new kind of person, like you're saying, be more grounded, fully present and more able to handle what life presents and let go of some of the stuff that just is not working.

Speaker 1:

Exactly. I thank you for coming on today and sharing how you help clients in your way and your approach. How can people find you?

Speaker 2:

Thank you for asking. My website is Jewel Consultancy, j-e-w-e-l, like the diamond consultancycom, and my full name is Arlene A-R-L-E-N-E Cohen, c-o-h-e-n Miller. You Google that. You will find me everywhere in all the different places that are on the web, and if you are in the United States or Canada, you can always text me at 720-936-2634,. Mention Mo and I will gift you with a free mini soul reading. There's a little 10 minute thing, but happy to do that for anyone who's interested.

Speaker 1:

Thank you. Thank you for sharing that as we close out. What's some lasting thoughts, nugget, that you can leave the audience.

Speaker 2:

There's something I love to share. I know I share it a lot, but I don't think I can share it enough. It's like a trinity, like a triangle kindness, patience and tolerance. So maybe just give that to you in the holiday season and in the coming new year to be kind, to be patient and tolerant with yourself. First and foremost. Kindness is going to lead you to more gratitude. Patience is about love, of course. Impatience is about urgency and pushes things away. So let's choose to practice that patience and just to be tolerant with ourselves and other people. We're not perfect. We're all works in progress. We're going to make mistakes that can be viewed as opportunities to learn and grow and that's going to help you to feel different about yourself and different about the people that you interact with.

Speaker 1:

There it is, arlene, you are powerful, thank you. Thank you so much for the wisdom and the insights today.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for having me here. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1:

Have a good day. Thank you for having me here. I really appreciate it. Have a good day. Thank you for joining me in this episode of let's think about it. Your time and attention are greatly appreciated. If you found value in today's discussion, I encourage you to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. Remember, the journey of self-improvement is ongoing and I'm here to support you every step of the way. Connect with me on social media for updates and insights. You can find me on Instagram and Facebook at Coach, mo Coaching, or LinkedIn at Maurice Mabry, or visit my website at mauricemabrycom for exclusive content. Mauricemabrycom for exclusive content. Until next time, keep reflecting, keep growing and, most importantly, keep believing in yourself. Remember the most effective way to do it is to do it Together. We're making incredible strides toward a better and more empowered you. So thank you and I'll see you in our next episode.