My Obstacle Course: Engage, Encourage and Empower

A fun, structured, systematic way to work on your child's strengths and weaknesses at home!

Archives for November 2011

Exciting News!

I am excited to share with you something I have been working on for the past 8 months…

Margaret Webb Life Coaching – Find Peace in the Chaos of Life

Me and my teacher – Martha Beck!

A life coach could help you if…

  • Life feels chaotic and you want more peace and joy in your relationships and home environment.
  • You have lost their identity and cannot remember what brings you joy.
  • Struggling with finding peace and joy in parenting a child who is on his/her own developmental timeline (autism, apraxia of speech, developmental delays, ADHD, etc.)
  • Creating or cultivating a connection with nature.
*Those are some of the things that I have worked through and have focused on in life coaching others.

As a life coach…

  • I can help people who want more out of their life and are willing to look at the thoughts, beliefs and stories that are holding them back from living a life that is filled with more joy, peace and love than they could ever imagine.
  • I work 1:1 with clients via phone or in person if you are in the area
  • I will be teaching tele-classes based on common issues that come up, such as “peaceful parenting,” “finding out who you really are and what brings you joy,” “setting healthy boundaries” and “surviving the holidays.”
  • I will be leading a tele-book group for Martha Beck’s new book “Finding Your Way in a Wild New World.”
  • I will also have “fee-free” call hour once a month to do one on one coaching on a first come, first serve basis. Depending on the demand, I may open this up to a group call, something I have personally found to be beneficial to be part of!
  • If you are part of a group (school, neighborhood, etc.) and would like me to cover a specific topic, I can set that up as a tele-class.

Coaching Services

I have done lots of free practice coaching and now need 25 paid hours to qualify for certification. If you are or know someone who is interested in improving themselves and their lives, I would be honored if you passed my website to them –www.margaretwebblifecoach.com.

I am offering 1:1 coaching for $25 per 50 minute session but in February my rates will increase to $50 for 50 minute sessions. Appointments can be scheduled by clicking here and can be done over the phone.

My heart’s desire has always been to help people and right now I am feeling pulled to help people who want more peace and joy in their lives. One of the many things that having Andrew has taught me is that I cannot live vicariously through him and need to have things that I am passionate about and bring me joy. I now know that in order to be the best mother/wife/friend/person for anyone, I have to be the best me.

My Training:

Martha Beck Life Coaching

I learned life coaching from Dr. Martha Beck (www.marthabeck.com), a monthly columnist for Oprah’s O Magazine (check her out here on Oprah’s Lifeclass Webinar – even Oprah was amazed!) and some amazing Martha Beck Master Life Coaches*.

Martha Beck is the author of several books, “The Joy Diet,” “Finding Your Own North Star,” “Steering By Starlight” a new one that is being released December 27th – “Finding Your Way in a Wild New World.”

She also happens to be the mother of a son with Down Syndrome (her memoir of this experience “Expecting Adam” is Target’s Book Club book!) and when I was really struggling with accepting Andrew’s autism and apraxia it helped to hear her perspective of the path she went through to come to terms with what this meant as well as experiencing all of the gifts that having a child who doesn’t fit what you “thought” it was going to be like.

*Master Life Coach Instructors: Jackie Gartman, Terry DeMeo, Susan Hyatt, Pamela Slim, Christina Brandt, Jennifer Moman Voss and Abigail Steidley.

Nature Based Coach Training

In addition to the Martha Beck Life Coach training, I am also part of Sagefire Institute’s Nature Based Coach Training program working with Master Life Coach Michael Trotta who is a master teacher and naturalist. Spending more time in nature has improved my self-awareness and I will be leading nature based coaching retreats for self discovery, peaceful parenting and team building.

Pure joy!!

Here is a link to my Facebook page for Margaret Webb Life Coaching. I’d LOVE for you to “like” it!

Consultation Services

I have also been consulting with people who have relatives or friends with children on the autism spectrum because they want to understand or they have questions that they do not feel comfortable asking parents of these children. These people want to connect with the child. They want to help the parents. They just don’t know how to do so and don’t want to come across as being intrusive or insensitive. This is where I step in. I shed light on the daily struggles of parenting a child with autism as well as help to explain things from a different perspective because as I have learned, things aren’t always as they seem. No doom and gloom or pity seeking here, just helping to explain a different kind of normal!

If you can relate to this and have questions, want to get my perspective OR are a parent who would like some suggestions for how to explain things/behaviors/frustrations/etc. to family members, you can sign up here for a consultation session. Please know that I do not pass judgement on anyone and everything remains confidential. I really have heard it all, ranging from things said to me about Andrew (“I would have never known! He looks like he’s normal.”) to people inquiring about a child’s behaviors they call “odd” only to have a greater sense of compassion and understanding of those behaviors after talking with me.

My rates for consultation services will be the same as my life coaching rates, $25/5o minutes until February when they will raise to $50/50 minutes. You can sign up here for an appointment and will take place over the phone.

My Obstacle Course 2.0

Don’t worry, I will still be on the lookout for ways to share how to “engage, encourage and empower” you and your children at home and will post when I find things or think of ideas, but my year of frequent posts has come to an end. Writing these almost daily posts was a great joy and also more time intensive than I imagined. I have lots of ideas percolating in my brain that I think will help people like you even more but haven’t been able to put them together in a useful format, yet, so stay tuned!

Thank You!

Thank you so much for all of the support you have given me during this year and I look forward to working with those who are ready to find their peace (and joy) in the chaos of life!

Love and gratitude,

Margaret

Halloween

I hope you all had a wonderful day yesterday. Halloween holds a special place in my heart, not because I love it or love to dress up or scare people (I actually don’t), but because it is the holiday that woke me up a bit to something I had been overlooking with Andrew.

We were in the grocery store a few years back, when he was 4 and was not speaking any consonants. There were decorations up all over the store and he pointed up at a witch and asked in his own way, what it was. It hit me like a ton of bricks that I had been so focused on trying to get him to talk that I hadn’t really placed any focus on things that most typical children generally pick up on at an early age. It was not that I was dying to teach him about witches, ghosts and goblins but was more about how he was noticing all sorts of things going on around him that I didn’t even realize.

I wanted to be more mindful of exposing him to vocabulary and concepts of each holiday, month and season so that he would form connections between symbols and these times of the year. This is essentially how I was motivated to incorporate themes into My Obstacle Courses, which then reminded me of how I did it so naturally as a teacher. I could incorporate fun, thematic things and concepts while building things like literacy, math, fine motor, gross motor, oral motor, sensory processing and pretend play. He loved it and still gets excited as the themes change.

A huge bonus for me came a year after this first happened and we walked into a store in September with all of the Halloween decorations up and he looked up and said, “Haween.” I said, “Yes! It’s almost Halloween.” 🙂

Andrew's first Halloween in New Zealand - 4 months old.
This year as Spiderman!

Engage, Encourage and Empower!