Minding the Gaps
Minding the Gaps
But I digress...
In Episode One we meet and learn a bit more about our host Heather Liv Melver. Who is she? Why a Podcast? Why coaching?
After a brief bio/resume share Heather begins to introduce us to her own change process and some of the tools she uses to cope (mindfulness, journaling, asking for help, etc), her trapeze metaphor for change, and why she believes there is magic in the messy middle.
In future episodes we will hear from guests who will share their own stories of transformation, change, and the magic they found when they took the time to mind the gaps between point A and point B.
To learn more about Heather and Minding the Gaps Coaching - Transformation in Transition, check out her website here: Minding the Gaps
Next Up: On Episode Two of Minding the Gaps we'll meet Heather's husband Erik who will share how he handles change and stays grounded in the present moment as a maker of art and theater and in the drama classroom with his students.
Thank you so much for being here, and until I see you again traveling mercies on your journey of change. I hope you find a little magic along the way.
Minding the gaps: Finding the Magic in Life's Messy Middle is an affiliate of Minding the Gaps Coaching and Mindfulmess LLC.
Please explore Heather's website at https://minding-the-gaps.org/.
Hello? Hello? Hello everybody. This is Heather Leaf Melver, and you are listening to the first episode of Season One of Finding the Gaps, finding the Magic in Life's Messy Middle. This, I plan to make this an interview based podcast, uh, but today I thought we'd start out with just an introduction, a chance to get to know me a little better and find out why on earth I'm joining the Overpopulated podcast and vla. So who is Heather Lee Melver and what on earth is minding the gaps? Well, I am a 47 year old mother of three girls, ages 17, 15, and 11. I'm also a wife of almost 20 years. 20 years on New Year's Eve, and a daughter, sister, friend list goes. I'm also what's called a third culture kid, meaning, uh, I spent most of my childhood living outside of my parents' passport country. So my parents, who I'm sure you'll hear more about from time to time, uh, in this podcast were teachers and worked internationally. And now my husband and I are doing the same thing, living overseas, raising our kids overseas. I used to work as a school counselor. My husband is currently a drama teacher, but a few years back I transitioned outta my role as a school counselor to try and get a little more flexibility in my life, and we'll talk about that a a bit more later. Finally, I am a certified professional life coach. I studied social work in university, both my bachelors and master. Uh, for my master's. I studied clinical social work, which is, uh, a counseling track of social work, uh, with an emphasis in school based counseling. And then went on to get a certification as a school counselor. And I've spent many years after that, uh, working in the. But now I've transitioned into coaching, so I studied with the Certified Life Coach Institute, which is accredited by multiple organizations, including the International Coaching Federation or icf. I'm currently a member of ICF, and I'm working on my ICF certification with a mentor coach. I am a big believer in continuing education. That'll probably be a theme on the podcast. I'd probably be a professional student if I could afford it. Uh, so I'm currently also pursuing training to become a certified mindfulness teacher in coach, as well as further coaching training in diversity and inclusion and trauma and recovery, which are both big parts of my. So there is a not so quick overview of my resume, both personal and professional, and I'm excited, uh, to have a chance to dig into all of that a little bit more deeply as the podcast progresses. But for today, let's talk about why this shift, why this podcast, and why coaching. So if there's one thing that's been consistent in my life, it's change. I moved around a lot as a kid really every few years or so. I mentioned my parents taught in international schools, and that is traditionally a very globally mobile lifestyle. And so if you count changes between elementary and middle school, I went to nine different schools, K through 12, three different high schools, I was in boarding school for a while, uh, for high school and in university on different continents than my. And even as an adult, that is a theme that's persisted in my life. I've changed careers, moved around a lot. My role in relationships has changed as I alluded to earlier for a while. Um, I've been a caregiver to my daughters with some medical issues they have, um, in addition to just being their mother and an advocate and researcher of, of their medical issues, which are fairly rare and complex. Uh, as a side note, this is an area I really want to explore further on this podcast and possibly in my coaching. Um, really looking at what it looks like to be a caregiver. Uh, how to care for yourself so you can care for your loved one. And what it means for our relationship with a person giving or receiving care, because we definitely see shifts in that as the typical dynamic of that relationship changes. So, um, something I, I definitely wanna come back to and explore further with all of you. But I digress, as I will likely do from type to type. So yeah, so that is really what moved me away from school counseling. And it, it was that I needed something that was a little more flexible in my life in order to be able to support my girls' medical needs, maintain a work life balance, and, and not run myself into the ground, which I was doing very quickly. Um, my health, both physical and mental, was really suffering. So for a while after I left the schools, I was working in online event producing, supporting online webcast, webinars, workshops, uh, with a fabulous woman owned company that a friend of mine from high school is a co-owner of. And that worked really well for me and for our family for a few. Well, last year, I, I found that I had started to miss working with people in a similar capacity to the role I'd had as a school counselor. So, with Eric's support, Eric, my husband, you're gonna hear a lot more from Eric over the course of this podcast. I'm hoping that I can twist his arm into being my first guest, um, with his, you know, cheerleading. I decided, well, I realized that I didn't wanna go. Into working at the school full-time because our family and I still really needed some level of flexibility. Um, at 46 year or at 40. Well, 46 then 47 now years old. Uh, the ship had really sailed for me to get my counseling licensure in order to open a private practice as a therapist. So even though I studied clinical social work, which is a counseling degree, I went the school counselor route. And so I got certified as a school counselor and never pursued my clinical licensure to be a therapist, and it's just not something that's really possible for me living overseas. Um, and at my age. So instead, I started to get inspired by the fact that over the last few years I personally actually moved from working with a therapist, which I, I have worked with many therapists, um, and for, for quite a long time, um, in my late teens and into my thirties. And this was a critical process for me and for my growth and therapy. Um, Is its own world and is greatly needed. Um, however, I had made a shift to working. You know, I felt like I'd kind of gone as far as I could go in therapy, and I shifted to working with a co. I just lost my earring, shifted to working with a couple different coaches, and I found. Really began to change my life almost instantly. Um, it provided just a real powerful shift into the present. Whereas when I was in therapy, I found myself living in the past so much. Um, you know, I am someone who is prone. I can't give this earring back in. Oh, well, I am someone who is prone to, um, both depression and anxiety. And, uh, when we're living in the past, we tend to experience depression. And when we're living in the future, we tend to experience a lot of anxiety. And, and I had, I had both those things and what I was missing was living in the present and really getting grounded in where I was. Where I was at at that moment in my life, and that is what allowed me to start to dream and to build a future. And so I began to think to myself, why not me? You know, I, I'd done, I've been doing this great work with two different coaches, and I thought, why not me? I have this skill set of connecting with people. Really listening, you know, building a strong relationship, creating a safe space where I can hold up a mirror to them and help them to see, you know, to see what it is that they can't see for themselves. Um, You know, coaching is really rooted in the philosophy that the client already has everything they need within them to, to live their best life, to reach their goals, to become the truest, uh, version of themselves. And I wanted to find a way to incorporate that into my daily life again. So, as I mentioned before, I went about getting certified as a coach, and because coaching is different than counseling, uh, I just wanted to talk a little bit about this certification process. What's the, what this means? So I, I mentioned that I am certified as a professional life coach, but. Also working on the next level of certification, which similar to counseling, requires a certain number of supervised hours with a mentor coach continuing education exams. And I'm really encouraged that the coaching profession is moving toward that model because. It empowers and, and requires all coaches to work within, within a certain framework of ethics and policies and procedures, which is so important. It's not there yet, uh, as a field. But in preparation, I'm doing all the work I can to align myself with the highest standards of coaching, um, and. So as part of the coaching, I thought, you know, as I'm starting slowly to, to build up a clientele, create classes and workshops, um, you know, move into group coaching and peer support groups, I thought I, I would start a podcast. Um, also because my co so my coaching business is called Minding The. And the tagline is Transformation in Transition. It really focuses on transition and that kind of magical space between where we are and where we wanna be. Um, and while I specifically coach women, anyone who identifies as a woman and and teens, I am hoping that this podcast can be accessible to anyone. So this, this coaching niche of supporting people through transitions really grew out of my own transformation over the last four years or so when I began my own coaching with two fabulous women that I also hoped to have as guests on the show soon. Um, as I alluded to before, I wanted so badly for so long to get from point A to point B. I just wanted to get there and I would come up with these elaborate plans and. Tons of money on programs and opportunities and things that other people had created and, and try to get, to, try to get there, to try to get from point A to point B, and it just never worked. And what I finally realized was that I was skipping over the best part, the two coaches that I worked with. Really helped me to realize that I didn't even know what B was. I thought I knew what B was, but I was basing that on a past reality of who, who I was and not who I really was in that present moment. So I started to do a lot of work to try to connect to myself and to the present. The here really, really live in the here and. And the more I did that through mindfulness practices and through journaling, which I hate, by the way, I could do a whole podcast on why I hate journaling and, and why I now won't go a day without my version of it. I have an adapted version of it. See, this is, this is, you're gonna learn about me. I, I have a little bit of black and white thinking. I, a little bit of perfectionist tendencies I think. That things are supposed to be a certain way, and if I can't do it exactly that way, then I might as well not bother at all. Right? So, uh, anyway. Once again, I digress. Uh, so I found that the more work that I did on my journaling, um, and with coaches through and through my own sort of meditative practices, slowly but surely I started to find myself again and really feel the ground under my feet, both metaphorically and physically. And it was like all of a sudden the path in front of me started to. And I started to feel the momentum and, and like I could trust my intuition again as I found myself being, being pulled in a certain direction instead of what I'd been doing in the past of pushing myself in a certain direction. And that is what brought me. And so in my coaching practice, I hope to really help women and teens who are in some sort of transition period of life, a season of change. Um, could be career, relationship changes, school changes, friendship, friendship changes or issues. The change in a role you have in a relationship. Maybe you have a new health or mental health or developmental diagnosis and you're trying to figure out how to live with it or how you relate to the world now with your new role, or maybe you care for somebody, you're a caregiver for somebody in that situation. There's all sorts of different kinds of transitions in our lives. Life is a constant flux and change. And what I wanna do is meet women or anyone who identifies as a woman and and teenagers who are in the middle of that, and help them start to embrace what I have come to call the magic in the messy middle. So you might notice that my logo is a trapeze, and I love this metaphor, this idea of the trapeze is how we approach change, right? I was first introduced to it in a group coaching call by yet a third fabulous coach that I'd worked with. Um, I was first introduced to this metaphor of change through a poem, and I will definitely share that on a future podcast. Um, but with the trapeze, there comes a point in time, if you imagine swinging on a trapeze where you have to let go, oh, there goes an airplane. I live near an Air Force base. You can hear that sometimes too. Um, where you have to let go of that first trapeze bar. And you let go and you're swinging and you're, you're reaching for that next thing, that next bar. And sometimes it feels like you're falling. Right. But sometimes it can also feel like flying and we just don't wanna miss any of it. Even the heart. Even the heart, cuz change is messy and messy can be magic. You know, I love exploring the idea of how two things can kind of exist at the same time and creating balance between them. So there'll be a little bit of all of that in this podcast and more as, as I meet new incredible people, um, in my life and on this journey, and I bring them. So we can discuss all of this together. And again, while my coaching practice focuses on women and teens, I am hopeful that there will be a little something, uh, helpful for everyone, anyone in transition in this podcast. So this is where we're going from here. We're creating a space together, you and I, and the folks that I bring on to interview, where it's safe to explore these concepts of change, who we are in change, how to connect to ourselves in the here and now. Trust ourselves enough to let who we wanna be unfold rather than trying to force ourselves into a mold of what we think, who we think we should. Gotta get rid of those shits. Um, we're gonna get really grounded and present. Mindfulness is part of my practice and. And I'm hoping we're gonna have a lot of fun. So stay tuned. I'm gonna link my website here if you'd like to find out more. Also, some of my social media. And I'm just really looking forward to getting to know all of you as we embark on this adventure together. And, uh, let go of that trape. Yeah. Um, and let's see if we're gonna if it feels like flying. Um, Or what it feels like falling. Well, we can, we can be there for each other to create that safety net to catch us, because we all want to feel held and safe and seen. I have a feeling it's gonna feel like flying and no matter what, I'm glad to be here and taking that risk with you. So let's do it together. Oh, thank you so much for being here, and until I see you again, traveling mercies on your journey of change, I hope you find a little magic in the messy middle. Mining the gaps, finding the magic in the messy middle. Is a podcast affiliated with Minding the Gaps Coaching and Mindfulness llc.
