Mentoring Support
Mentor with Kallie
Welcome! Come on in and get comfortable. That's key, being comfortable enough to share what's on your heart and knowing it will be received, valued and honored. Comfortable enough to learn, grow and expand. Mentoring with me is a different experience than most people have encountered. My approach is one of partnership. I'm not here as an expert telling you what to do. I'm not an authority over you. I'm your partner. I have likely traveled a road similar to the one you are on, and will share with you tools and approaches that can help you navigate your road. I too am an active participant in life and am still forging my own roads. That’s good news, we’re in this together. I can often help where you feel wobbly. I walk beside you on your journey. I'm your partner.
This is an important distinction for me - partnership over authority figure. That’s because the aim of the Inner Academy, my practice, is to foster your access to your own inner resources. To show you - and more importantly have you experience - the solidity you have waiting inside you. You can do this life thing - you can gain mastery, have success - you just need to up your support! Paradoxically getting comfortable with where you are at today, this moment, allows us to look at areas where you might be feeling uncomfortable - your growth edge. That discomfort may also be the next desire calling you, asking you to give it some space and attention. We will work on that together as well. We live in the tension of what life asks of us and how we respond, to paraphrase Victor Frankl, the philosopher, psychiatrist, neurologist and Holocaust survivor. There’s the tension of your life that is drawing you, pulling you to find meaning, to live fully - and then there is the push we feel to belong, that stems from our innate need as human beings to be part of a community. A pull to be more, a push to belong and therefore stay the same, to fit in. It can feel like you are caught between the two, like you are thrown into a paradox. How can these coexist? I can help you unravel the paradoxes. What I've found is that where we experience paradox is often precisely where the Universe is asking us to jump up a level, to see things differently. There is a way through, I guarantee it. There is order in what may appear to be chaos. We just need to get a bigger context. Life is always asking us to expand beyond what we know. That’s growth, creativity, aliveness. We also need to feel our bare feet on the earth, to feel grounded, solid, to feel we belong on this planet. You can have both – that stable springboard over the pool that is also the foundation and support you need to feel secure enough to jump off of it and into the warm, expansive waters. We often need to get bigger in order to see our challenges in a different light. Or as Einstein has been often paraphrased as saying: you can’t solve a problem at the level that created it. To facilitate that expansion, know that the container for our mentoring together is vast. There are no topics off limits as long as they pertain to you and your growth. Where ever you feel stuck or held back or confused, or excited or overwhelmed (or any number of other emotions - as emotions are most welcome!), that's where we will gently, yet often directly work. This work will be practical, with tools and processes you can use now and going forward. It will always involve relationships - at minimum the relationship you have with yourself. But also likely your relationship with other people close to you, as well as animals, possessions, your habitat, your habits and so forth because we are each in relationship with all of life.
This approach isn't for everyone! I make a big ask when you join me on this path, and that is to show up fully as yourself. I make an equal promise to you as your partner to do the same. That commitment stretches things. That promise creates space. It can open you up and free you to discover parts of yourself that you'd long buried or ignored. What I have learned is that what I know and what you know about ourselves going into our partnership isn’t the whole story. We are always in process. That’s how life works.
Client-Partners completing their mentoring with me not only feel more inner resourced, but they also feel more whole, more integrated, more connected to who they are – and that who they are is what the world has been calling forth in them. Consequently that inner knowing allows them to function in the world to a much higher degree. Their sense of confidence has been reconnected with their felt sense. This confidence is no longer something they have to put on to keep up appearances, they just have a much clearer inner knowing of the truth that they are fundamentally okay. They've got this.
Intrigued? Want to know more? Reach out and ask for a 30 minute get-to-know-each-other Discovery session to decide for yourself if mentoring with me feels right to you. Not for you? I honor that too. We each have our own path. Thanks for walking yours.
This is an important distinction for me - partnership over authority figure. That’s because the aim of the Inner Academy, my practice, is to foster your access to your own inner resources. To show you - and more importantly have you experience - the solidity you have waiting inside you. You can do this life thing - you can gain mastery, have success - you just need to up your support! Paradoxically getting comfortable with where you are at today, this moment, allows us to look at areas where you might be feeling uncomfortable - your growth edge. That discomfort may also be the next desire calling you, asking you to give it some space and attention. We will work on that together as well. We live in the tension of what life asks of us and how we respond, to paraphrase Victor Frankl, the philosopher, psychiatrist, neurologist and Holocaust survivor. There’s the tension of your life that is drawing you, pulling you to find meaning, to live fully - and then there is the push we feel to belong, that stems from our innate need as human beings to be part of a community. A pull to be more, a push to belong and therefore stay the same, to fit in. It can feel like you are caught between the two, like you are thrown into a paradox. How can these coexist? I can help you unravel the paradoxes. What I've found is that where we experience paradox is often precisely where the Universe is asking us to jump up a level, to see things differently. There is a way through, I guarantee it. There is order in what may appear to be chaos. We just need to get a bigger context. Life is always asking us to expand beyond what we know. That’s growth, creativity, aliveness. We also need to feel our bare feet on the earth, to feel grounded, solid, to feel we belong on this planet. You can have both – that stable springboard over the pool that is also the foundation and support you need to feel secure enough to jump off of it and into the warm, expansive waters. We often need to get bigger in order to see our challenges in a different light. Or as Einstein has been often paraphrased as saying: you can’t solve a problem at the level that created it. To facilitate that expansion, know that the container for our mentoring together is vast. There are no topics off limits as long as they pertain to you and your growth. Where ever you feel stuck or held back or confused, or excited or overwhelmed (or any number of other emotions - as emotions are most welcome!), that's where we will gently, yet often directly work. This work will be practical, with tools and processes you can use now and going forward. It will always involve relationships - at minimum the relationship you have with yourself. But also likely your relationship with other people close to you, as well as animals, possessions, your habitat, your habits and so forth because we are each in relationship with all of life.
This approach isn't for everyone! I make a big ask when you join me on this path, and that is to show up fully as yourself. I make an equal promise to you as your partner to do the same. That commitment stretches things. That promise creates space. It can open you up and free you to discover parts of yourself that you'd long buried or ignored. What I have learned is that what I know and what you know about ourselves going into our partnership isn’t the whole story. We are always in process. That’s how life works.
Client-Partners completing their mentoring with me not only feel more inner resourced, but they also feel more whole, more integrated, more connected to who they are – and that who they are is what the world has been calling forth in them. Consequently that inner knowing allows them to function in the world to a much higher degree. Their sense of confidence has been reconnected with their felt sense. This confidence is no longer something they have to put on to keep up appearances, they just have a much clearer inner knowing of the truth that they are fundamentally okay. They've got this.
Intrigued? Want to know more? Reach out and ask for a 30 minute get-to-know-each-other Discovery session to decide for yourself if mentoring with me feels right to you. Not for you? I honor that too. We each have our own path. Thanks for walking yours.
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The Big Ask
As I mention in the "Mentor with Kallie" introduction, I make a big ask at the beginning of our journey together. That is to decide if you are willing to show up fully as yourself in our interactions. Know that you are not alone in sharing this vulnerability, I make the same agreement to show up fully as myself. Now, let me clarify that this is not a "let it all hang out" kind of request. What I'm after is for neither one of us to hold back in our conversations for fear of being seen as "too" anything (too needy, too "out-there", too messed up, even too good. Any of it). I also ask that we be respectful of our own and each other's boundaries, so this request is definitely an invitation to a dance.
This commitment to showing up fully as ourselves is a big pivot from what we usually experience in life. Part of the impetus for this request - and for my desire to hold space for such explorations - is my 20+ years of working in corporations. What came to be the norm in working in these environments - often even if on the surface they seemed to operate out of goodwill - was that as a member of the organization you had to check your soul at the door. You were there to perform a task, and the less of "you" that was involved in the execution of that task, the better. So many of us experiencing this soul-deadening environment took it to be the norm, that this was all there was, this was the only way to be if you wanted to work with other people. Some people held on to the unwritten (and usually unfulfilled) promise that as you rose up the ladder that you could exhibit a little more of yourself on the job. And while much of my experience has involved working in corporate America, I've also endured 19 years of formal education which required the same approach. And this was before teachers had to teach to the test. I can only imagine the forces now in place for people to conform to some external norm and measurement and not stand out as unique, to not be true to themselves.
We are humans, we have a shared humanity, and we are each created to be purposefully unique. It's our individual, unique perspective on the Whole that is my working definition of why we are here - so that the Whole can know itself. As a client-partner, you start with the expectation that I can hold space for the all of you that shows up. This is a first and ongoing step in finding your own voice, your own wisdom and your own inner resources.
This commitment to showing up fully as ourselves is a big pivot from what we usually experience in life. Part of the impetus for this request - and for my desire to hold space for such explorations - is my 20+ years of working in corporations. What came to be the norm in working in these environments - often even if on the surface they seemed to operate out of goodwill - was that as a member of the organization you had to check your soul at the door. You were there to perform a task, and the less of "you" that was involved in the execution of that task, the better. So many of us experiencing this soul-deadening environment took it to be the norm, that this was all there was, this was the only way to be if you wanted to work with other people. Some people held on to the unwritten (and usually unfulfilled) promise that as you rose up the ladder that you could exhibit a little more of yourself on the job. And while much of my experience has involved working in corporate America, I've also endured 19 years of formal education which required the same approach. And this was before teachers had to teach to the test. I can only imagine the forces now in place for people to conform to some external norm and measurement and not stand out as unique, to not be true to themselves.
We are humans, we have a shared humanity, and we are each created to be purposefully unique. It's our individual, unique perspective on the Whole that is my working definition of why we are here - so that the Whole can know itself. As a client-partner, you start with the expectation that I can hold space for the all of you that shows up. This is a first and ongoing step in finding your own voice, your own wisdom and your own inner resources.
Photo by Jeff Stasney jeffstasneyphotography.com via www.oelmag.com/lake-of-the-clouds
Why I Love Mentoring
What does Inner Academy mentoring look like?
- So what might mentoring look like? Great question. Because we are each unique the outline of what I'll share here can and does vary as needed for each client-partner. At the same time I have found this format to work for many people, especially in the beginning:
- We'll meet, on the phone or on a zoom call, on a weekly basis for about 90 minutes.
- Why 90 minutes and not an hour? The world out there is already rushed. Even now, during the times we are living in you likely feel crunched for time, especially for yourself. I want you to feel a spaciousness about our conversations. To allow enough time to do some significant work, to dig in and feel connected, reinforced, more whole. 90 minutes feels like a sweet spot for most people. I'm flexible if it's not right for you.
- Why weekly to start? Because I've found that it helps create a rhythm, a cadence for our meetings where we can learn about each other, try things out and get relatively quick feedback or new directions. You don't feel stuck. After some time it's natural that the interval of our meetings starts to lengthen to every-other week or so. Is weekly too much? Too little? We're partners, we'll figure out what works together.
