All my strengths

What if my greatest strength is the one I am most afraid to claim?

As a child, people called me wise beyond my years.

I remember knowing things — having a sense about situations, about people, about what was coming — that I couldn’t explain.

Somewhere after high school, I lost touch with it. I went to Yale, then Columbia, became fluent in Mandarin.

I built a damn good front-of-house.

But it wasn’t the whole me.

It came back during a cognitive coaching course in Hong Kong. The facilitator guided me through a single session that unlocked an insight I had been holding deep inside.

I burst into tears.

It was like I had been cracked open. I could hear myself again. Even if only for a moment.

And it was all so professional. Legitimate. So many frameworks.

Throughout my years as a school leader, I used cognitive coaching to help people access their own inner authority, to hear what they already knew.

And when I found myself on sabbatical, I got credentialed in executive coaching.

And then, a few weeks later, I did something else.

I took a psychic medium course.

I had spent years by then receiving things I couldn’t explain — a dream about flying toward my grandmother’s yard, a wave of ancestral presence outside a chapel, a plane crash that turned out to be beautiful.

I’d always felt the porous boundaries between this world and whatever comes next.

I wasn’t hoping to learn something new. I was hoping to recover something I’d lost.

From the very first practice, I was bowled over. Not only by what other people seemed to understand about me (of course, they have the gift), but what I seemed to know about other people (wait, what? You’re actually an accountant?! That’s actually what your Dad looked like?!)

In one particularly poignant moment, I had a visit from my mother’s mother, the one who died when she was 13. She was so warm, so tender, so appreciative of me. And she told me clearly: you’re going to use all of your strengths.

I knew what she meant.

Not just the planning and organization and two decades of education leadership. But also the intuition. The knowing. The part of me that sits in a cemetery with a pad of paper and trusts what comes out of my pen.

But I got scared.

Having built this perfect resume of Yale and Columbia and twenty years of school leadership, was I going to blow it all up by admitting to being psychic? Or even more woo, a psychic medium?

Way too risky.

But then, it’s the damndest thing. I just keep having these dreams.

And in my coaching work, things come through. Not frameworks, not best practices. Directions I know to take a conversation without having to understand why. Scenarios I offer seemingly offhand that make people feel deeply seen.

In my training, that’s ascribed to coach’s intuition. Somewhere else, it would be called a psychic reading.

It all seems to be helping people.

In a few weeks, I’m going back for another course. It’s been more than two years since the first one.

I’m nervous. What if I don’t really have it? What if I’m bad at it? What if I don’t feel anything or see anything or get any messages? What if there’s nothing there?

But this time I’m nervous because I see how much this can help people. And I really want to help people.

Using all my strengths.

🕊️

SAM

wise beyond her years