Meet My Client: Meredith Adams
Meredith is a design researcher living in Porto, Portugal. She’s also a writer and all around cool gal. We talked about making your dreams real.
What made you want to work with a coach?
I was feeling quite stuck. I was really attached to the company that I was working for and it was also a place where I was having a difficult time making the kind of progress I wanted to make on the timeline I wanted to. I couldn’t really see what was next for me there. I also didn’t really feel like I was qualified for the next thing. I wanted some help figuring out if I could leave (I felt like working there had become a part of my identity and a place that I felt very connected to because of the people there) and also what I might do after I left.
We worked together for about six months. What has stayed with you from our coaching?
The thing that stuck the most with me is a piece of homework you gave me, which was to get any dreams or ideas for my life out of my head and make them visible somehow, for example, by writing them on post-it notes and putting them up on a wall, so I could see them often.
My husband and I had a stack of notecards next to our typewriter and when ideas came we would type them out and tack them up on a wall in our guest room. What was really helpful about this was that it made me feel a little less wavery about things. I would feel all over the place and once I got things up on the wall I could see, you’re not as scattered as you think you are.
It was also a way to see that our ideas weren’t crazy or unattainable for us, oh, you really want a bird feeder? Okay, get a bird feeder. It felt like a good grounding exercise. One note card said, live abroad, live somewhere temporarily. It didn't say where, it didn’t say what it had to look like, or when it had to happen, it was a way to see, yeah, this wanting to live abroad thing is a thing that is consistently true for me.
So, these ideas and dreams are up on the wall, how did making your dreams and desires visible change their shape or your relationship with them?
The thing that changed was a sense of momentum, these things were becoming real over time. One of the things on the list was, buy a house in Chicago. So then we bought a house in Chicago. And once we did that I was like, ah ha! I did a thing that was on the wall! And so when I would feel rudderless in other areas, I would tell myself, it’s cool, you’ve actually done like three things on the wall. With the house, also came a little garden, which was also on the wall.
I think about the kinds of things you’re talking about as a way we keep promises to ourselves and through keeping promises, big and small, we learn that we can trust ourselves, which builds confidence. Whether it’s flossing our teeth or moving to Portugal. There is something really powerful about following through and doing a thing we tell ourselves we are going to do. What does being able to see the things on the wall that you have accomplished or completed do for you?
Part of the struggle I have is feeling like I’m always on this hamster wheel of my own design. Where I somehow never get to the thing that I think I want. So even working where I worked before, eventually I got the role that I wanted when we first worked together. And eventually I got promoted beyond that role, but there was still a sense of well, I’m still not very good at it. I had a sense of, yeah, but it’s not real.
When I can step back and get some perspective away from the yeah, but it’s not realnarrative, and the inner chatter that’s telling me, you’re floundering and scattered and you have all these ideas and dreams and you never make any of them happen, once I can get some perspective, I can see, no, you do actually make things happen.
Speaking of making things happen, in our first session you expressed a wish to live somewhere else, and one of those somewheres was Portugal. We’re talking right now and you’re IN PORTUGAL! Tell me how this adventure came to be!
Right before you and I started working together, I had come to Portugal for about ten days and fell in love with it. When we came back to Chicago, my husband and I had this running joke, oh yeah, when we move to Portugal…when we live in Portugal…we’ll start our tinned fish cafe when we get back from Portugal. One day, I happened to see an email from a company that was looking for a design researcher in Porto. I didn’t even give it a second thought and sent an email saying tell me more. It unfolded from there and became a real possibility and at each point we were like, do we keep going? It just kept working, so we kept going. Even when the pandemic happened. The obstacles came up and we kept finding a way around them.
You’ve been in Portugal for a couple of years now, what’s it been like for you, this dream made real?
I was able to make a little community of friends really quickly, mostly with other immigrants because we all moved here without knowing anyone so there is a sense of openness and willingness to make and sustain new friendships. There is so much I love, too much to list, but I will say that in my experience (and in talking to Portuguese friends here) there is a strong ethos in the North of Portugal to try to help each other. The number of times that people would offer to help, answer questions, and call bureaucratic offices for me before I knew enough Portuguese, it has been really touching to experience that after the COVID years in the U.S. where our detrimental individualism and division felt so stark.
What else do you still come back to from our coaching?
There was something you said in a session around writing. I studied writing in school, a few jobs I’ve had were different versions of writing, it’s a real love/hate relationship. I remember feeling a lot of guilt around not writing, and you said something like, what might it be like if you stop thinking of yourself in that way — as a writer who struggles to write, or has stopped writing, or who doesn’t do it often enough? What if you just free yourself from that? That is something I go back to often when I get into the, why aren’t you doing it kind of feeling.
After a year of working for a Portuguese company I decided I wanted to try freelancing. This was a big, scary leap for me and something that I’ve never done. I realized that here I could finally try to change the nature of and my relationship to my work. Before I put in my notice I went back to my Pam Notes and saw that I talked to you about wanting to freelance in early 2018. Reading that in January of 2022 I was like, Now is the time! How long are you going to dream of this thing without giving it a go? The conditions are all here so it’s now or never. I’ve been freelancing for a year now and am really happy. I’ve been able to rest, to grieve over the pandemic, and finally to start writing regularly again. I realized that for me I can’t squeeze creative work into the tiny windows of time between full-time working hours. I need more time to think, to walk, to read, to swim, and just generally slow down.
Hooray for creating the conditions for your creative work to happen! I love the idea of you walking around, swimming in the sea, pondering words and sentences!
A big part of coaching is reframing the stories we tell ourselves or how we see ourselves, or as you said, getting some perspective. If you had to sum up the value of coaching, what did it help you do?
It took on a really practical touchstone for me. At times when I was starting to feel like, ahhh you’re all over the place, you don’t know what you want, or what’s next, it was a way to be like, no, you do know. You actually have extremely strong themes that keep coming up, you just keep ignoring them, so maybe start listening to some of those things, they’re not impossible and they’re not coming out of nowhere. And so that helped me to feel more grounded. When it came time to quit my job of seven years, I did go back to some of our coaching exercises and was playing through and remembering some of our conversations, and I could be like, okay, lady, the things you were struggling with and unhappy with then are the same things as now, so you know what to do.
Damn straight, you knew what to do!
This originally appeared in my Spring 2023 email newsletter. To get on the list and receive this and other goodies in your inbox from time to time, sign up at the bottom of the home page pamdaghlian.com .