Academic Coaching

We are all born students. You wouldn't be walking, talking, or correctly identifying your colors and shapes if you weren't a natural student in the first years of your life. But for some, life intervenes and distracts us from our natural capacity not just to learn, but to love learning. (And if you wonder what I mean about loving learning, watch the joy on a toddler's face when she learns a new skill.) I can help you recover and nurture your inborn love of learning and work with you to apply that innate capacity to the work you do for school.

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You need three things to recover the student within you. First, you need to discover your many strengths--that you are curious, or creative, or detail-oriented, or funny. You need to remember that you are resourceful, that you have the capacity to succeed as a student because of the many gifts with which you begin this enterprise.

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Then you need to let go of those strengths--or maybe more accurately, hold onto them loosely, so that you can recover the greatest gift with which you began life--your beginner's mind. A beginner's mind is a mind that is open and eager to learn. It doesn't expect itself to have mastered any subject, so it's not discouraged when it hasn't. But it does believe that there are many possible ways to look at a subject, and it's eager to explore them all. When you have a beginner's mind, your studies are an adventure, and struggle isn't a sign of weakness, but an invitation to engagement.

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Finally, you need a purpose--a clear sense of what is meaningful for you in life. This purpose can guide you through your studies, and it can also give you energy for them. Going to school simply because someone tells you that you should provides very little motivation. But if there's someplace you want to get to--some dream to achieve or desire to fulfill--a purpose--then that will provide you a surplus of motivation and it will help you focus in on exactly what you want to learn to help you move down the road which will lead you to your goal.

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I can help you discover your gifts, recover your beginner's mind, and discern your purpose in life. These will lay the foundation for your becoming a master student. I can then help you equip yourself with the skills a master student will need. In all of this, I can help you find the joy of learning that you possessed in your younger years. Contact me, and let's begin this journey together.

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"If you give a hungry man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime." -- from Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all that we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world and all there ever will be to know and understand."

                      -- Albert Einstein