Emily Stevens is a life coach and therapist who loves helping others let go of their anxiety, help them gain confidence, and set healthy boundaries for her clients to be able to live the life they want. What made you want to do both therapy and life coaching? Well, I started out just as a therapist, and I really liked working with my therapy clients. It has its limitations, though, as far as you can only see people in person and all that stuff. And I wanted to expand but I also wanted the ability to help people who maybe don’t have a specific diagnosis that maybe don’t realize that…
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I’m Not Courageous
She seemed nervous. When I asked Brynn if I could interview her, she didn’t know what for, she didn’t even know why I wanted to interview her or what it would be used for. I was nervous too. I didn’t know what was going to happen in the article and this was my first time doing a project so big. Courage was something so easily explainable and yet I had a tendency to ask the hard questions. Even though this was the case, she explained courage as understanding consequences and yet doing it anyway. She referred to Brene Brown, a researcher who studies shame, courage, and vulnerability. Brynn said that…
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I Shadowed a Stranger for a Day and This is What I Learned
Everyone, for the record, I didn’t follow around a stranger for a day. I followed the person who lives above me and I had permission. So, let’s move on. I did learn so much from “walking in someone else’s shoes” for a day. Right now, I am sitting on my couch, exhausted. What I learned from today is that One, people think lowly of themselves. Two, you never really get to know someone, and three, we are very different but we are also very alike. Because I learned these things throughout the course of a day, let me take you through what I did. People Think Lowly of Themselves I…
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Profiles in Forgiveness
Forgiveness is needed everywhere. Every day there is at least one person whose actions hurt another. Every one of us has felt hurt by another. With that in mind, it seems almost impossible to forgive every person who has wronged us. But when we forgive, we learn that we can overcome any challenge. In order to help me learn what forgiveness is and how we can have it for ourselves, I asked Krista from the Scripture Study Project if I could interview her and know her thoughts. In our discussion Krista described forgiveness as “A lightness of heart, true peace and strength.” This definition reminded her of a scripture in…
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You Are Going to Fail
Grit is not something that is used in normal conversation. When you are talking to a person, you don’t say that they were gritty. Instead, you say they were hard-working and that they persevered despite challenges. No one talks about failure. Until I asked Niel what he thought grit was. At first, when I asked him what he thought grit was, he answered the same answer I have heard for the past two weeks. “Well, I think it’s probably more mental than physical. It’s related to determination or toughness,” he said. “Just keep hanging in there and keep fighting and keep plugging away.” Niel then started to talk about failure.…
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How to Use Confidence to Stand Out
Brittany is my older sister. She is two years older than me and is the most confident person I know. She is also the bravest. About a month ago, she and her husband moved from Utah to Tennessee. She moved there in order to complete her education in occupational therapy. Moving wasn’t an easy thing for her. She had no idea what anything was going to be like. “You couldn’t see the neighborhood,” Brittany said. “We were living in a different culture and I didn’t know what people were going to be like.” But even though she was afraid, she moved anyway. “I had fears and anxieties but I knew…
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You Are Not Alone in Motivation
I have always wondered how people can motivate themselves to exercise. When I exercise, it feels good for a moment and then I feel like death has personally invited me to die. Some people find their own motivation to complete spartan races and others find help in the people around them. The latter was the case for Brittanee. Brittanee is a mother of three and loves to build things. She says that while she is a mess in the kitchen, her friends rely on her to help them build and create. She also recently completed a spartan race. A spartan race is like a military obstacle race. It has many…
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A Converted Buddhist Shared What Faith Means to Him
It’s funny how the first interview I wanted to do for this month ended up being the last. I learned about world religions in my church class and the two that piqued my interest where Hinduism and Buddhism. When all of my ideas for this month started to swirl in my head, I knew that I wanted to interview one of these two religions. What ended up happening is that I couldn’t find anyone until this past week. That’s when I found a Buddhist from the Awakening Valley Sangha named John Judd and he helps to run the sangha in Provo, Utah. John has always lived in Utah. In fact,…
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I Talked with a Rabbi About Faith
I knew that one of the religions that I would be interviewing for the month would be Judaism. I have learned that it is an amazing religion and I wish that I could have spoken with my interviewee a lot more than I did. When I started asking people from that religion to interview with me, I got a varied amount of responses. Most people didn’t answer my calls or emails but one member told me that I should take a world religions class before asking her again. Finally, after a couple of days, a rabbi said that he would be happy to. Rabbi Samuel Spector has always been an…
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The Faith of a Jehovah’s Witness
After writing about faith from a Muslim perspective, I was thinking about other perspectives that other religions have too. I started searching for my next interview and somehow ended up searching for someone from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Thankfully, after some failed attempts at interviews, I was introduced to Emily. Emily is a friend of my roommate who was so kind as to agree to do an interview with me. Because she is in Iowa, we set up a time to do an over-the-phone interview. When I first started talking to her, I could tell that she was passionate about what she believed in. She explained to me that Jehovah’s Witnesses…
