TARA OCON | CREATIVE COACHING

View Original

MY PERSONAL JOURNEY



“You don’t need words, you are powerful without them”.

Until one of my mentors said this to me during a coaching session, I used to think I was inarticulate and often misunderstood. That who I am at my core, and what my life experience has taught me held little value to the people I most want to serve. I was struggling with internalized beliefs of what’s possible for me as a movement-based performing artist in a society that values conformity, cognition, quick fixes, linearity,and production. It was hard for me to trust that helping people connect to their authenticity, purpose, and intuition are among the greatest gifts I have to offer. Because it has nothing to do with having the immediate answers or the quick fix, and everything to do with slowing people down long enough to listen to what they already know to be their truth.

But who was I to hold such courageous space for people’s lives in this way?

It was like he reached into my soul and plopped my heart right into my hands with such compassionate force that I could no longer hide from myself. I had a good messy cry after that and it was like the fog and confusion had been lifted. I could see clearly that my decades of experience working as a performer and collaborator in intimate interactive settings that are designed to meet people where they are and hold space for them to have engaging transformational personal experiences, translates to a deeply healing way of holding space for people to access their most powerful and deepest desires and make real change in their lives.
I was reminded that my search for a pathway that could both support my life as a performing artist, and be a bridge to how I am meant to serve in society at large, is what brought me to coaching in the first place and that it is my deepest joy to be able to fully embrace how interconnected my passions are and how they feed each other.

And since then, I’ve made a commitment to dedicate my coaching practice to helping others trust, with deep conviction, that all the many facets of who they are and the wisdom of their lived experience can be integrated into a vision that brings them meaning, fulfillment, abundance, and possibility in doing what they are called to do. I believe that when people have the courage to break the mold and design a life filled with purpose, it has ripple effects that can change the world for the better.

Speaking of intuition, a huge defining moment in my personal life came when I cancelled a wedding and ended an engagement to someone who, among other things that served as red flags, resented the fact that I was going after my goals and having success as an artist. It kept me feeling like I had to choose between our relationship and shaping my career. And that I was a failure of a person who didn’t love him enough because I loved performing more than him. I realized that in marrying him, I would be ignoring all of the signals in my body, that were saying this is not the partner for me, and that this way of “loving” was not the kind of love that I wanted or believed in, and that standing up in front of our community to say “I do” would be a lie, and that we would both end up miserable.  Fast forward, I am in a supportive and expansive relationship that has inspired my personal growth in ways I never could have imagined had I stayed the course and married someone who was not right for me.

That experience has even further solidified how important it is to me to empower people to listen to their intuition when their circumstances are not serving them, and stand with them as they access their inner resources, resilience, and courage to make a change. Especially when making that change or going after that dream feels super vulnerable. The kind of vulnerability that emerges when outcomes are unknown or require choices that have a lot of push-back due to societal conditioning and expectations, or when it’s just plain sad and heartbreaking even though it’s for the best.

So that’s what’s in my heart. What’s in yours right now?