Emergency Response Time: One Hour

15 Feb Emergency Response Time: One Hour

Emergency Response Time: One Hour! Help is on its way. Just ask us! Image: JP Valery on copyright-free Unsplash.

Emergency

The subject line of her email was “Money Emergency”

My client Sharon Marz* needed help. ASAP. She made clear it wasn’t “like, an ambulance emergency, but like, oh no this needs addressing asap.” And then she added:

Thank you!!! As soon as you have available, I would love to present you with my situation. It’s complex but I also think it can be knocked out. What does your schedule look like?

Emergency Response

I am very calm in emergencies. I slow down, in fact. Like when my building burned down. That helped me get out alive. Yet I’m not a bank, or even a financial advisor.

But Sharon knows me well. Notice the graciousness and self-awareness of her initial email. She knew what she was asking. She knew I could help her.

Emergency Response Time: One Hour

I’m honored to say that I helped Sharon handle her money emergency in one hour.  Here are the strategies we used to get the very most out of our hour together:

First Session

• • Sharon asked that we break up the hour, and we did. Half an hour is enough for a breakthrough, in many cases.
  • Sharon uses the Council of Selves practice I teach, so she used it before we met to help her figure out which voices inside her head were talking loudest about the emergency. And which were being drowned out!
  • She described her problem for me with clarity and self-honesty, thanks to having prepared so well.
  • We tapped her inner wisdom. She is well aware of it, and has worked with her wisest voices before, as part of the Council of Selves.

Making Good Use of A Break Between Our First and Second Sessions

• • We had recorded our first session so she could refer to it between meetings.
  • I gave her homework to nourish her self-awareness work. She journaled answers to questions her wisdom self asked her. No, I didn’t come up with the questions! She did. With my support and tools, yes. Which she now owns. (That’s my commitment to everyone I work with.)
  • She shared her journaling with me in advance of our next session. It showed all kinds of new awareness of what was at stake: the emergency was actually a trigger at a very deep level.
  • She did this deepening process once more, using journaling and her Council of Selves, and sharing it with me.

Second Session

• • Holding her with compassion and gratitude for her beautiful ability to become her own best healer, I asked her to come up with next steps. She came up with next steps she initially felt weren’t actionable. Part of our work in our last session was to show her just how actionable they were—scary! but real, good, true, and actionable.
  • And then we knew we were done. She had this. She didn’t need me anymore.

If you feel I may be able to help you with your crisis, please contact me: [email protected]

PS: And if you want to use the Council of Selves practice yourself, I can teach you, or you can click on that link and purchase my online course to learn it on your own.

*Not their real name, of course.