Your calling is calling! Will you answer?
It's late September 2025, I am sitting across Tina Wrede, an accomplished woman in her seventies reminding us all of the importance of being connected to ourselves and leading from a place of authentic meaning and passion. As I am sipping on my tea at her colorful and cozy coaching and counselling practice in Leiderdoorp (ADHD Praktijk Leiden) where she so generously invited me, it doesn't take me long to understand that the colors of her practice resemble the playful, energetic, and vibrant interior of her inner world. Tina’s journey to becoming a coach and counsellor is a story of transformation through accepting and honing her own personal history and reconnecting with herself. Born in post-war Germany into a family marked by loss, trauma, and resilience, she learned early to sense and feel deeply, even when there was little space for it. Her path wound through years of caregiving, migration, motherhood, divorce, and reinvention – from nursing to IT and from there to coaching and counselling. In embracing her past rather than running from it, Tina found her calling: learning about and connecting to people all with the aim to help them get in touch with themselves with the same compassion and courage she learned to extend to her own story. Today, she draws on her life’s mosaic to inspire and encourage others toward awareness and meaningful change by reminding us of the important inner resources that we all carry and that can be helpful for informing meaningful career paths. Her ingredients for a fulfilling career are the following:
Gathering the Gifts Within
Even when life is not marked by changes, turning inwards and building awareness about our qualities and strengths can help us make those inner resources more accessible. If we know what we have and what we can offer, we can make more mindful use of it. We can assess for ourselves - in which are of life would we want to see more of something. As such, harvesting our inner strengths can support us in actualizing our purpose and potential and living the life we truly want.
In this season of Harvest, turn inwards and Gather the gifts within, I know I will!
The responsibility track
During one of the last class days within my coaching education, I was asked how would I describe the notion of responsibility and the importance of remaining within its appropriate scope in a simple yet compelling manner.
What usually helps me is to break down such complex notions into graphic representations and metaphors - with a little bit of playfulness and imagination my mind tends to be sufficiently entertained to actually retain some of what otherwise feels as rather abstract content.
The imagery that I came up with on the spot assumes that every one of us as an individual has their own unique path - we can think of such paths in terms of train tracks. On that track, commutes our own very unique train of which we are the driver. Just like we are the drivers of our own train on our own train track, others around us are in charge of the train and accompanying track they are in possession of.
What’s awareness got to do with it?!
Clients often doubt the importance of building awareness about our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in the coaching & counselling process. I get it - it calls for a lot of effort, time, and energy, yet it too often feels like there is no immediately traceable effect to it. Our behaviors do not change over night after all.
It is not seldom that after some repeated efforts to build such awareness in our sessions, clients reflect back and almost in a surprise realize that they actually made use of that awareness. They managed to catch themselves in a moment when they were about to step into an old behavior that was recognized as unhelpful. In other words, only when they were able to see the hole and consciously choose another street, they realized the effect of what initially seemed to be close to wasted effort.
Entrepreneuring: The noble walk of truth
Fellow starting entrepreneurs, I just received some of the printed marketing materials – I have flyers and business cards! And the coolest part – bookmarks with the logo and branding of my practice. Yeah, I also have a practice, a coaching and counselling practice.
If you are starting to feel like I am just mumbling while factually listing what is going on in my life, you are getting it right. I have been catching myself in this specific fact listing act quite regularly these days. Listing facts somehow became my mantra – I walk around the park and admire the awakening of nature in the midst of our exceptionally beautiful spring here in the Netherlands and my inner voice keeps rehashing: “I am an entrepreneur”, “I have started my own practice”, “I am building a life that I want to live”. It’s quite meditative. In fact, my partner who has recently become amused by studiously reading Buddhist teachings gave it a just and proportionately grand label: The noble walk of truth.
Resources for academic staff
While Sunflowerful’s blog posts are in development, feel free to check out the blog posts I’ve written while I was working in academia - they allowed me to process some of my most difficult experiences and find meaning in them. Pouring my struggles on paper and translating them into key takeaways and supportive and validating words that are widely available to my peers across the world was my way of digging gold.
The themes center around well-being in academia through the eyes of a struggling PhD, but the challenges and coping mechanisms described can apply to any knowledge-based high-achievement and high-pressure environments beyond the academic community.