Must Reads

Were I to explain what I do as a life coach (a term I’ve never really loved), I’d say this:

If you want to get good at tennis, you hire a tennis coach. If you want to get good at life (or better at it anyway) you hire a life coach. A good coach can help you get from Point A to Point B in lots of different areas - relationships, finances, health, career, whatever you want.

In the past few years though, I’ve discovered many people have no idea what their Point B is or how to figure it out. They’re spending a ton of money and time on things that seem promising at first,...

Last night, when I was supposed to be doing my taxes, I found one of my favorite movies on Netflix - Something’s Gotta Give with Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson.

In it, Diane Keaton is a Broadway playwright with a fabulous house in the Hamptons. She’s successful, middle-aged, and divorced. Jack Nicholson is dating her 30-year old daughter.

A classic Nancy Meyers set up - very 2013.

You probably think you know why a midlife coach like me loves this film: The gender politics, the satisfying second-half career, the midlife malaise?

Nope. It’s none of those things.

...

I watched the Barbie movie (again) last night. Partly in solidarity with Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie who created this sneaky pink send-up of the patriarchy, AND created a cultural conversation, AND got snubbed by the Academy of Motion Pictures last week.

In a foreseeable but still ridiculous irony, Ken got nominated and Barbie didn’t, nor did the woman who put them both on screen. SMH.

America Ferrera got nominated - yay - and her character’s speech about the impossibility of womanhood has already gone down in history for it’s lucidity and precision, but...

Last week a team of us - four middle-aged, mid-western and Southern white women who talk way too much about menopause - gathered to serve in some dark corners of East LA.

We walked slowly, deliberately through trash and needle-strewn streets, delivered food in LA’s largest housing project, and talked to people living in the sidewalk complexes built from pallets, bike parts, cardboard and tents. With us were the blue shirts - the staff and volunteers of the Los Angeles Dream Center, which for the last 30 years has been feeding, clothing and helping into recovery the residents...

Eleven years ago today, I got baptized at the Angelus Temple, after spending a pretty intense week serving the urban poor at the Los Angeles Dream Center. 

Tomorrow morning, I’m headed back, and this time I’m taking a few clients with me.

The Backstory

This is Matthew Barnett in the picture baptizing me. He was 22 years old in 1996 when he purchased a decrepit 400,000 square-foot former hospital in the heart of Los Angeles intending to build a church without walls - one that would act like Jesus did.

I was so lost at that time, just desperate to...

I went to school in England for a year when I was in University.

In retrospect, I could have saved my parents a ton of money if I’d just drank beer for four years at one of the many fine Washington State schools.

Nonetheless, one silly night out in London, with people whose names I can’t recall, I met a fella sitting on the ground in a Tube station, busking badly on a guitar he clearly could not play and perhaps was not 100% his.

He seemed like he could use some money and I wanted to learn to play the guitar. So I asked him if he might sell it and what for.

£20.

I whipped...