Have you ever read the story of Martha and Mary in the Gospels and felt a little… confused?

I’ve always had a lot of sympathy for Martha.

Of course she wanted to sit at the feet of Jesus too.

If Mary had been helping, they could both have done it sooner.

Right?

Well, no. Why? Because Our Lord says so.

Let’s look at the passage a little more closely. I’ll quote it here in its entirety, as it’s quite short:

As they traveled along, Jesus entered a village where a woman named Martha welcomed Him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to His message. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations to be made. She came to Jesus and said, “Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her to help me!”

“Martha, Martha. You worry and fret about so many things, but one thing is necessary. It is Mary who has chosen the better part. It is not to be taken from her.”” Lk. 10:38-42

Several things stand out to me. Martha is described as “distracted”. She also does not speak directly with her sister. She goes immediately to blaming her and complaining to Jesus. She even is blaming Him somewhat, asking “Lord, do you not care?” She is focused on herself, saying “my sister has left me to serve alone… tell her to help me!” She is thinking that she is alone…

How many of us have believed the lie that we are alone. when in reality we always have the Lord with us?

All of this points, I think, to the fact that Martha’s heart was not completely in the right place. She had the good desire to serve the Lord, but she had also allowed some un-useful beliefs to take root in her mind. Her interior resentment created disconnection in both her relationship with her sister, and with Jesus.

Our Lord’s rebuke is so gentle and tender:

“Martha, Martha. You worry and fret about so many things, but one thing is necessary.”

What if this is always true? That only one thing is necessary?

There is a lot of evidence to support the fact that trying to focus on multiple tasks at once actually undermines our productivity. (Often called multitasking, but really it’s multifocusing).

What if at any given moment, God only gives us one thing to do?

Wouldn’t that be so freeing? To just know that one thing, and do it really well? To be fully present, focused, and, no matter how “small” the task is, doing it with great love?

Martha was operating with the mindset of “I have to do it all. It’s all important.”

This led her to:

• Be focused on the list of to-dos, on doing it all
• Not being a contemplative while she did it
• Not leaving space to hear the Lord’s voice

With all the extra noise in the world today, whether that’s our constant negative self-talk, or consumption of media on our phones, or just physical noise in our environment, it’s so easy to live distracted.

To not even have the space in our life to think about what that one thing necessary might be for us right now!

That is living with a Martha mindset.

I want you to imagine living your life with a Mary mindset. “Only a few things really matter. Only one thing is necessary right now. I choose to do this one thing in this moment.”

You would:

• Pause to discern what really matters
• Live an unhurried life
• Create space for their own needs to be met
• Say no to everything except what’s necessary

The Mary mindset is where it’s AT, my friends.

Doesn’t it just sound like such a calmer, more peaceful, more purposeful, and more enjoyable way to live?

THAT is the kind of abundant, light, free, unburdened life Jesus came to give us. That is the point of this whole Easter thing.

A Catholic coach can help you experience more of that.

I want to tell you that changing from a Martha to a Mary mindset is TOTALLY POSSIBLE for you.

Even if you’ve spent a lifetime operating this way.

Even if you can’t see how it could be possible.

Even if you feel powerless to change “how you are”.

Even (especially!) if you have “a lot going on”.

I invite you to book a call with a Catholic coach, whether it’s a discovery call or a monthly call within the Academy, and they’ll explore this very real possibility for you, and how together you will make it inevitable with Catholic mindset coaching.

It was the beginning of the pandemic.

The world had shut down, sacraments were scarce, and in the midst of all of  this, we discerned a cross-country move from Pennsylvania (my home state) to Texas (Albert’s home state) to be closer to Albert’s aging parents.

This move, made with good intentions, wreaked absolute havoc on the emotional well-being of us both, but especially on me. Almost no access to the sacraments, combined with leaving my parents and siblings over 1,500 miles behind was suddenly compounded by morning sickness: Baby #4 was on the way.

In the midst of this, I discovered the “Made for Greatness” podcast with Sterling Jaquith (who Albert cannot RESIST calling “Sterling Silver”), and voila! I was introduced to life coaching. For the first time, I learned the Model: I could actually choose my own thoughts (!!) instead of being a victim of my circumstances. Then Albert, attempting to pick up the pieces of his wife’s shattered emotions, surprised me by signing me up for a course he stumbled across on Facebook: namely, the Art of Being a Woman, with strategist Leah Darrow.

Between Sterling and Leah, I started to find hope.

The more hope I found, the more I wanted to share life coaching with others..but only in an authentically Catholic way. I emailed Leah, asking for input on coaching women, and she offered to schedule a Zoom meeting. As soon as that call was scheduled, Albert and I both felt something BIG looming on the horizon. We didn’t know what it was, but we were excited.

The day of the Zoom meeting arrived. I’m a chronic migraine sufferer, and minutes before the meeting began, a bad migraine abruptly hit. Albert suggested rescheduling, but I’d been waiting nearly two months for this call, so I rebelled. “No! Leah’s going to say something life-changing and I need to hear it!”

I got on the call. As we talked, beads of sweat started forming on my arms. My hands were shaking, and the notes I was taking became more and more illegible. I kept telling myself to tell Leah I needed to go, but I was positive she was going to say something magical… something God wanted me to hear. So I held on. And after a good 30-40 minutes of talking, it came, “You should check out Metanoia Catholic.” A wave of conviction washed over me: the Holy Spirit had come through in a big way. I immediately “confessed” how sick I was, and we ended our conversation.

This all happened in October 2021. With Albert’s encouragement, I reached out to Erin to talk about Purgative Way, and shortly afterwards, Albert expressed interest in becoming a life coach with me (though he was considering taking a different route to get there). As the time to sign up for the Purgative Way approached, we discussed using part of our tax refund to sign me up. But the tax refund came in, and life came right along with it. Almost immediately, it was delegated out to other necessary expenses. The door to the Purgative Way Spring 2022 seemed to close. That was okay… there would be other chances.

March 18th came. We were driving home from church and my phone went off. It was an email from Matt and Erin, announcing the final hours to sign up for the Purgative Way. “Consider where you want to be 4 months from tonight,” they prompted. And here’s the crazy thing. Just the day before, Albert had received a completely unexpected bonus… and it was almost exactly what we would need to join Purgative Way as a couple.

At first, I wasn’t going to say anything. We’d already decided to spend that money on house projects, and Albert had his own plans in regards to coaching. But apparently he can read my mind (thanks, Holy Spirit!) because out of nowhere he started talking about the Purgative Way, questioning if we’d made the right choice to pause on the process for me. I took that as an invitation and pulled up the email I’d just received to read it out loud. Then we started talking about him joining me. And by 10:40pm, just four hours and twenty minutes after receiving the email, we were officially signed up for the Purgative Way.

While we wouldn’t want to live over the hard moments again, we’re so aware now how the Holy Spirit has been orchestrating this journey for us. Albert and I have always been a particularly close couple, but mindset coaching is teaching us to communicate and understand each other at a level we didn’t even know existed. It’s encouraging our interior lives and inspiring new dreams for the future as we discern our path to sharing these truths with others.

The moral of our story can best be summed up by a quote from Bishop Barron. “When you have the Holy Spirit in your life, you are not in control. You cannot command the Spirit to come. You have to wait for him and pray for him…. And once he arrives, you have to be ready to move according to his prompting.”

Have you ever felt you couldn’t set any goals? Are you not sure where 2023 is going to take you? Are there things in your life you see as failures?

This is how I was showing up on a coaching call with Matt Ingold and a group of other Catholic coaches. I was looking and watching, and through my perception, everyone else was succeeding and I was being left behind. I didn’t have the energy to even want to try. I knew my temperament as a Sanguine/Choleric that by nature, I am happy, positive and like new challenges.

Normally, I love the last week of the year, planning and dreaming of what will come. I love early mornings, beginnings of the week, the new school year, anything that is new and offers the next exciting adventure. But that is not what I was thinking or feeling on this coaching call.

I decided to be vulnerable and trust a master coach. I raised my hand to get coached, and told Matt, “I’m really struggling with setting goals for 2023. I think back to December 2019, and how COVID completely changed 2020. I look back at what happened this year and how my life is not where I thought it would be. I think of all the things I haven’t succeeded in and don’t even want to try.” Tears came to my eyes as I shared this wound.

Matt was gentle and understanding. He asked me what my feeling was when I think about setting goals. I told him, “Disappointment which leads to this thought of why even try?”

As a wonderful guide, he talked to me about where disappointment comes from when we set goals. Knowing that my top Gallup CliftonStrength is Learner, he recommended a book to read. He, then, encouraged me to use the Metanoia Journal and invite the Lord into my goal setting.

When I found Metanoia Catholic April 2022, I knew in my heart I had found gold. I immediately ordered the journal, joined the Academy and requested a coaching session. These people were amazing and so on target! Every time I make an appointment for coaching, or request to be coached on our group coaching, I come away with a feeling of being heard and accepted. I go and do the work which my coach recommends, and I see progress.

I trusted what Matt had to offer. I ordered the book when we got off the call, and set the intention to invite the Lord into my goal setting.

This year, I journaled with the Lord on Christmas Eve morning about my goals for 2023. I have a business, Wisdom Wellness Coaching. I help women understand their unique gifts and talents through their own beautiful cycle. I teach and coach women to use the Billings Ovulation Method to better understand their bodies  and the gift of themselves. While I was journaling, many things about my business came up. My primary though that I captured was: “Can I do it this time?” Fear of failure came up… again. I found all of the evidence of all the times I hadn’t met my goals. I thought of all the times others succeeded and I hadn’t. As I looked at these thoughts, the Lord showed me that these thoughts were coming from vainglory and pride. I was depending upon what others were going to say about me. I was measuring my success by comparing myself to others. I was only looking at “winning” one way.

This is the reason I love the Metanoia Journal so much! While secular coaching, personal development and journaling can help us capture our thoughts and give us the opportunity to shift those thoughts, the Metanoia Journal has Exercise 6: Release and Exercise 7: Metanoia. These exercises are our opportunity to make our journaling a prayer and bring Jesus into these struggles.

Once I was able to identify my own pride, vainglory and self- reliance, I took all that to Jesus, seeking His forgiveness and asking Him to take these things from me in order for me to be who He created me to be. Whenever I do this, I think of Father Gaitely’s comment in his book, Consoling the Heart of Jesus, “It brings Jesus great joy when we allow Him to be our Savior.”

Now the deep and juicy stuff – METANOIA. The change! I took this fear of failure and my thoughts on goal setting to the Lord and asked Him what He had to say. His answer: “I have plans for you that are for good and not evil. I have called you by name.” My name.

I teach in my Catechism class how important our names are to God. He is a personal God who calls us personally. So I looked up my name: Jane Elizabeth. Jane means “God is gracious.” Elizabeth means “God is bountiful.”

Then, the day’s Gospel reading came to me: “You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way.” (Luke 2: 76) My name means I am to prepare the way for the Lord, reminding others that God’s grace is bountiful. But it goes even further than this. A dear friend nicknamed me, “Mama Jane”. This is the name I use for my business. This is how any Catholic coach addresses me. This is what my clients call me.

I talked to the Lord about this name. I gave Him thanks for allowing me to be a mother of the 6 in my family. But He showed me all the other children He has given me through my Business and in my life. The young postpartum mother who became my client and journeyed with me as she navigated postpartum, breastfeeding and having a healthy relationship with her husband; the young girl who wept in my arms after I taught her the beauty of her cycle and the gift of womanhood; the young girl who came to me after Church so I could pray for her as she approached her father about her discerning a religious vocation; a fellow entrepreneur encouraged through my comment on her social media; a priest encouraged through my prayers and words as he was suffering in a way he hadn’t anticipated. All of this God showed me as evidence that I was successful. I felt such joy and gratitude that He created me this way. I felt like a gift. And I knew God loves me.

I have begun to dream of what is possible. After I captured and reflected on the thought, “Can I do it this time?” a new thought came to me: “What if 2023 ends better than I could ever imagine?” I knew this was true after I heard the Lord call me by name. I knew that His ways are not my ways and He has a bigger dream and plan for me. I am Mama Jane.  People are waiting to be served. The Lord desires me to be His prophet. I am called to shine His bountiful grace.

If you are struggling with your own unique call, I want to encourage you to begin to use the Metanoia Journal, make an appointment to get some coaching and come join us in the Academy! It is a place where you will know your own gift of self. It is a place where you will be seen and heard because it is a place where you are called by name.

Do you feel like you have big things to offer the world, but you just can’t seem to get traction on anything? Do you have a deep desire to make a meaningful contribution, but you don’t see that legacy taking much shape right now?

Changing this one thing might be the game-changer for you.

Broadly speaking, we can divide all our activities into two main categories: learning and implementing.

“Learning” can encompass praying and ‘learning’ God’s will: taking a course, reading a book, evaluating a previous action, etc.

“Implementing” is any specific action you take as a result of that learning, to incarnate it in your life through application.

Here’s the key:

The smaller the gap between learning and implementing, the bigger the impact.

The bigger the time delay between learning something in a class and applying it, the more chance you have to forget things.

The longer you wait after you have discerned God asking you to take a certain step, the more time there is to get back into confusion, to be tempted or distracted in another direction, or to lose your strong conviction and purpose behind why you want to do it.

If you read an entire book and then implement one thing, it has nowhere near the same impact it would if you implemented one thing after you read each chapter.

When we delay taking action, we also delay the compounding effects available to us if we take action, learn from it, implement again from those lessons, learn again, implement again based on those lessons, etc.

Imagine this:

Person ‘A’ takes one step forward towards their goal over the course of a 30 day time frame. Maybe it’s even a “big” step, and they feel really proud that they worked themselves up to do it because it was scary and overwhelming.

Person ‘B’ takes one small, doable step forward every single day for 30 days. She learns from every single action and implements her lessons the next day. She is taking it all to prayer the whole time, it’s all part of her ongoing dialogue and intimate relationship with the Lord. She rarely gets overwhelmed because she always chooses small, doable actions.

Who has created more impact in their life after those 30 days? Person ‘B’ of course.

Here’s the best news, Metanoia readers: this is what determines how long these gaps are.

Most fundamentally, it’s your mindset.

It’s your thoughts about your goal.

It’s your thoughts about yourself.

It’s your thoughts about the action.

It’s your thoughts about fear and failure.

It’s your ability to manage your emotions.

It’s your ability and willingness to feel negative emotion.

This is the biggest determining factor for how long it takes you to go from knowledge to application.

And then from repeated application and learning, to mastery and creating your legacy.

The best hack for moving the needle forward faster?

Get coached!

It will help you clean up your thinking, find the thoughts that are slowing you down, and go co-create your unique impact in the world with the Lord!

One of my old spiritual directors hated how much I used the “F” word.

The F word. Ya know, F… for “feel.”

In spiritual direction, I would preface a lot with “I feel like…”, or “I don’t feel like…” And he noticed that much of my assessment of my spiritual life or Vocational discernment was based around my feelings. He never shamed my feelings or emotions, in fact he was very respectful of them, but he challenged me to rather consult my intellect, not my emotions, for my discernment.

I had no idea how to do that, though. I sort of understood what he was saying in theory, but it didn’t click with me until I went through coaching with Erin and when I went through the Purgative Way course offered by Metanoia Catholic.

In the past, I have been guilty of making my emotions my compass. Well, that’s actually a really nice way of putting it; more accurately, my emotions dictated everything. I let them determine how I was doing in my prayer life, my job, my marriage, even my physical health. “I don’t feel like working out,” or “I don’t feel in love with my husband today,” or “It doesn’t feel like God has a plan for me.” I definitely labeled myself as an “emotional person,” so I really limited myself by not tapping into my reason, intellect and will. Which, by the way, we’re all emotional people, as well as intellectual and spiritual and physical; just watering ourselves down to one of those things fragments our humanity.

Because I let my emotions dictate the status of my life, if I wasn’t getting an emotional high on a daily basis, the important parts of my life (my relationship with God, my marriage, and family – to name a few) would then suffer. As a result of me not taking my thoughts captive, like St. Paul instructs us to do, I would fall often into sloth or despair – thinking that God was holding out on me because I wasn’t feeling heightened emotions. So, to avoid being let down, I resorted to numbing myself by spending hours of precious God-given time on my phone, not adding a single iota of joy or creativity or peace to my life, just letting the screen suck me dry. As a result, I believed my goals were always unattainable, my marriage never good enough, and my prayer life dull or nonexistent.

My first coaching call with Erin turned my whole philosophy upside down. She searched for what my thoughts were that were creating these emotions. My whole life I thought that my emotions existed on their own, that there was nothing behind them, that they should be exalted as the best way to make decisions. And in one 30 minute phone call, Erin debunked that myth pretty easily. She explained how our thoughts are the root of our emotions and that we cannot have an emotion without having a thought.

We cannot have any emotion or behavior without a thought behind it.

So really, the emphasis I put on my emotions and not my intellect, reason and will, was a bit dehumanizing. I was living a counterfeit life, short of the way God has designed me to live – a full life of exuberant joy! When put in the proper order (thoughts -> emotions -> behaviors), my emotions flourish, because they’re a part of being human! They are a good thing, a very good thing, but they are not the only thing to rely upon.

Metanoia Catholic made sense to me from the start. It clicked with me, and I knew my gifts would come to life if I decided to become a coach, and I am deeply grateful I did. I have done a ton of work, training and retreats in regards to healing of the whole person (Unbound ministry, Dr. Bob Schutes’ ministry, healing prayer ministry); Metanoia Catholic is the missing piece. When we are wounded, we create a belief system around that wound. Metanoia Catholic has helped me become an expert (but always in training and always learning!) in how to really identify those thoughts that exist in that belief system, the thoughts that keep that wound protected and hidden – which is what the enemy wants. The goal is to expose the thought, so that the wound can be exposed to God, who wants to love and heal, and who wants to replace the lie with His truth.

I am constantly humbled working with clients, and witnessing how the Truth sets people free. And I am constantly amazed at how Metanoia Catholic has taken deep theological truths, doctrines and scripture and made them supremely practical so that we can live them out daily.

The Holy Spirit is very active in the coaching sessions; He is always invited in to be the One to lead and guide. After my most recent call, I was reflecting on the fact that the nature of the Holy Spirit is Love. And the effects of the Holy Spirit is transformation. The opposing spirit wants us to sink into silent despair, which inevitably agitates and frustrates us. How will the enemy bring us to despair? In our thoughts! Feasting on lies will always keep us chained and stuck. But the Holy Spirit wants to set us free from those lies, so that we can live to our fullest potential as Sons and Daughters who were created for joy and peace and greatness.

To put it simply: Metanoia Catholic has helped me understand and live out what St. Paul says in Romans, “Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,” (Romans 12:2). <-That sums up Metanoia Catholic.