About Your Coach at Create-a-Life

Lynn Serafinn, MAED, CPCC
Certified Professional Co-Active Coach
Member International Coach Federation (ICF)

Hi, I’m Lynn. Originally from the US, I moved to England in 1999. I am now a British citizen and I absolutely love it here. I am a very happy 50-plus-year-old with a gorgeous grown-up daughter and a beautiful grandson. I feel it is very important for you, as a prospective client, to get to know something about any coach before you decide to work with him/her, so I thought I would tell you some things you might find useful to know about me.

My training and belief in coaching

When I first discovered coaching, people in my life told me that I had unknowingly been “coaching” for years in both my professional and personal life. They were probably right because, once I started to learn the actual practice of coaching, I took to it like a duck to water I knew in my heart that it was my natural vocation. I then made the huge decision to leave a successful long-term career as a teacher to start a full-time coaching practice. I did this solely because I love coaching, and because I believe in its power to set people free to express their true selves in a way that nothing else I have seen can.

I did my training and certification at the Coaches Training Institute (CTI), the largest and oldest coaching training organisation in the world. I really “shopped around” for a training organisation when I first decided to become a coach and, after much research, I selected CTI for its rich, holistic philosophy towards the coaching profession, and their excellent and rigorous hands-on approach to the training. But well beyond our formal training, we CTI coaches (called “Co-Active Coaches”) continuously support and learn from each other via a vast international network, community events, teleseminars, and other activities. This means that training is only the beginning, as we are ethically committed to continue to grow and evolve as coaches, so as to help us bring ever more and more to our clients.

As part of my ongoing professional development, I have also studied career coaching and creativity coaching, as well as Organisation and Relationship Systems Coaching, which enables me to work with couples and groups as well as individuals. I feel that my choices have given me a wide range of skills and allowed me to be the kind of coach I wanted to be for my clients—professional, experienced, confident, continuously growing, flexible, fun and fully client-focussed.

Professional career and beyond coaching

Prior to becoming a coach, I had a long career as a professional musician, teacher, mentor to other teachers, e-learning trainer and a college manager. I also ran my own record label and electronic music recording studio for 10 years, and even had one of my own records hit number one in the club charts back in the 90s.

I am a qualified teacher and have a BA in music and an MA in adult education and distance learning. Just before I started my coaching practice, I was an Assistant Director at a college in England, where I managed a thriving performing arts department, and in 2005 I received the Microsoft Innovative Teacher of the Year Award.

I have travelled all over the world and, over a 20-year span, I spent several extended periods of time in India, where I studied music, Asian languages and eastern philosophy. I was also a book editor for four published books on Indian philosophy through a prestigious publishing house in the US.

You can see from my background that embracing the “global village” and finding creative uses for technology, especially in teaching, are my personal passions. That is one of my most important motivators for my starting Create-a-Life: I wanted to bring coaching to the greater population by teaching people to self-coach via teleseminar and other means. My goal in doing this is to spread the impact of coaching to a wider population, who may not always be able to have a 1-to-1 relationship with a coach, for whatever reason.

Being a voice that reaches around the planet to provide information, foster personal growth and extend support to anyone who is seeking it, is my larger vision for who I want to be as a coach, and for who I want to be as a person.

International Co-Active Leadership

Something else that I bring to my coaching is my experience with a very special international leadership team comprised of 21 outstanding leaders (many of them coaches) from 11 different countries throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Together, we design workshops and training, and deliver them around the world. The strength and personal growth I have experienced as a result of being trained as a Co-Active Leader brings a power and fearlessness to my coaching that I know I would not have otherwise. This really helps me to serve my clients better, especially when they are faced with a particularly difficult life challenge or emotional issue.

As a leader, I am also the founder and leader of a project here in Bedford, England, called the Bedford Wellness Circle (BWC). The BWC is a community project aimed at joining holistic practitioners with the local community for regular events, for the purpose of sharing ideas, information, music, poetry, social interaction and fun.

Additional insights I can bring to our work together

Something that makes me helpful to some clients is my sensitivity to and experience with (as both a parent and a teacher) Autistic Spectral Disorders, such as Tourettes syndrome, OCD and Aspergers syndrome.

I also have first-hand experience of moving past and rising above domestic violence, and I am able to show clients how to achieve a shift in perspective of their situation that can help them regain their personal power.

My passion as an author

Apart from coaching, my other great passion is writing. I love to paint pictures and compose music with words. My greatest writing enterprise right now is my upcoming book The Garden of the Soul, which is an exploration into the process of becoming “whole” by the use of four easy to understand principles that can help bring balance and harmony to one's life (see the “P.S” at the bottom of this letter for more information). I had the pleasure and the honour of teaching these four principles to a group of African entrepreneurs in a workshop in South Africa in May 2008, along with one of my leadership colleagues. The participants called the workshop, “awesome, exquisite” and “a life-changing experience”. The book and audio book is scheduled for publication in August 2008.

Well that’s me for the first 50 or so years. I look forward to hearing from you soon and finding out all about you!

Warmly,
Lynn Serafinn, MAED, CPCC
Create-a-Life
lynn@create-a-life.co.uk

P.S. If you are interested in learning more about The Garden of the Soul, I show you how to use the metaphors from the book in my teleseminar series entitled “Find the Whole You”. People on the course also receive selected audio chapters from the book itself, even before its release.

P.P.S. You can also learn more about this book by visiting the “Give Receive Become Be” website.

P.P.P.S. Oh, and you can receive updates about this book, along with excerpts from it, by subscribing to the Create-a-Life ezine, Creative Living.