After nineteen years working in the federal prison system, Amy was feeling tired, disgruntled, and low energy. She knew she wanted to move on, but hadn’t found a direction that she felt called to take. She had some ideas, but hadn’t gotten what she calls a “solid yes” that it was time to move. The inertia of staying in a “good job” was difficult to overcome. And now…

And now...

Today Amy is enrolled in the Aveda Institute in Washington D.C., with an eye on starting a spa and salon when she graduates. She is feeling the high energy that comes from being in alignment with what lights her up, and is continually discovering how opening herself to that alignment opens doors.

The process

While years of previous coaching helped Amy gain mountains of self-awareness, she needed a structure to help take that awareness and give it direction and focus.

“Over the course of 2001 to 2008 of my journey into myself, my level of self-awareness had really increased,” Amy says, “but it didn’t really come to a head enough to the point where it would catapult me into a life transformation until I went through the program with Curt. I give his structure, his program a lot of credit for getting me where I needed to be.”

Part of finding the right answers is asking the right questions, something she notes she hadn't always been able to do in the past. "With Curt's process," she says, "the structure and the navigation bring the questions up naturally.”

The process wasn’t just about clarity and structure. It was also about leaving the door of possibility open. The path that she ultimately settled on came from an idea that she normally would have discarded immediately. But as they were talking about the process of brainstorming potential career paths, “Curt told me that a bad idea is not going to harm you. Just let it exist until it’s time to eliminate it. That was a very important conversation for me.”

Working with Curt

I would do my homework,” Amy recalls, “and I was always amazed at where the answers or the things that I expressed in my homework took us. I was always amazed. I think that’s part of Curt’s intuitive capacity, part of his gifts as a coach. I found it really amazing how he was always right on with his intuition."

During their conversations, Amy remembers, “Curt would say, ’You might want to just ignore this, but I just feel like I really need to say this.’ And then he would say it, and it would make me smile, because it was exactly what I needed to hear, or it exactly summed up what I was trying to express, or it was a perfect metaphor to help me see something that I was maybe having difficulty seeing.”

“Curt is very articulate,” says Amy, “so he’s able to express what he needs to say, what he’s sensing, what he’s feeling. He’s also able to, in a very eloquent way, call people on their stuff.

“Basically,” she notes, “I’m a smart rat. And because I have so much self-awareness, and because I’ve been through so many coachings, I could have with a lot of coaches just told them what they wanted to hear and they’d think we were making great progress, but deep inside I knew I wasn’t.