Heart Wisdom Leadership Academy

If you are feeling stuck in life, I whole-heartedly recommend working with Daniella Cotreau. Her guidance has changed my life forever. For years I spent life living from a contracted place of fear. Fear that I wasn’t enough; not good enough, smart enough, organized enough and on and on and on. My life was a series of cyclical self defeating, self-sabotaging behaviors. Every time I got close to what seemed like my truth I would create a way for it to all blow up in my face. I wanted desperately to be content with myself, to show up in life and to be taking great care of myself so that I could truly be present for others. I wanted to believe in ME and what was getting in the way of being able to show up in life was ME.

One day, sitting at my computer an email from Daniella caught my eye and for once I took the time to read it from start to finish. I remember putting my hand to my heart as I read it and getting goose bumps. My heart! What would life be liked if I lived from the place of my heart?

I count my lucky stars everyday that I connected with Daniella and that she agreed to take me on as a coaching client. The “me” getting in the way of ME I quickly learned was my ego. One of the first questions Daniella gave me was,” who am I being while I am doing what I am doing?” The answer illuminates whether I am coming from ego or the heart. I realized that very often I was coming from a place of ego and blaming others, projecting my disappointments onto them or being self sacrificing and expecting others to be appreciaitive. My husband and children took the brunt of this behavior. When I come from the love and compassion in the heart I move though my day with the day with grace and ease.

Daniella was tremendously valuable each session in telling me what she heard me saying and either asking very powerful open ended questions that got me to tell more of the story and thus hear my own answers or by taking what I had said and succinctly summarizing for me so that I could see an answer right in front of me. The short writing prompts that we did during calls helped tremendously to give me the courage to write more and to have that become a part of what I do each day. I like to think of courage now as expanding into my heart, to be in heart. I loved the writing prompts and sometimes go back to them now and write again. Some of my favorites are: ” Who am I going to be without guilt?”; “What are the excuses I have to not take care of myself?” ; “How would it feel to be in relationship form the heart with X (person)?”

Each month Daniella built on something from the month before strengthening my ability to check in with my heart, to let go of stories that no longer serve me, and most important to build structure in my life that allows for me to be taking care of myself so that when I interact with the rest of the world I am coming from a place of compassion, awareness, loving kindness, integrity, grace and equanimity. I see now how often I was self-sacrificing to please another and that is not coming from a place of the heart. I have clearer boundaries now. Best of all I love me and want to take care of myself and share my passions with the rest of the world.

The work goes on as I continue to develop the muscle memory of checking in with my heart, of being in the moment, of keeping my ego in check and of having the structure of routine so that feeding my body, mind and spirit comes before the wants and needs of others. Thank you Daniella!!