Jawno’s nurturing spirit touches all

EMOTIONAL growth happens when you are uncomfortable – and few know this as clearly as high-performance coach Lauren Jawno, who visited Port Elizabeth this month to share her message. “The pain of getting out of your comfort zone will always pale in comparison to the pain of regret,” she told an audience of businesswomen at Paragon Place in Newton Park, urging them to take control of their lives.

Jawno was in the metro to meet a group of 10 Bay women, whom she has been coaching via Skype and online sessions.

She is one of only 170 certified high-performance coaches around the world, and has 15 years experience in education, nutrition, fitness, psychology and spirituality.

After years of battling an eating disorder and an unhappy marriage, the South African-born Canadian took a new direction only when grief struck.

It took her mother’s death 14 years ago, to make her realise that she wanted to go in a different mental direction. “I sat on the plane for 17 hours, praying that I would get there in time,” she said of the flight from Canada to South Africa.

She made it to her mother’s bedside only a few hours before she died, but was shocked to be given a letter from her mother in which she spelt out her love for her children and her doubts that she had been a good enough parent.

“How could she not have known, or doubted, that she was the best mum in the world? She did not know because I never told her. She never knew that she was a rock star mom,” Jawno said.

That was the catalyst to make Jawno speak out and “since then I’ve been helping people find their voice – helping them to live a life of confidence, dedicated to excellence, truth and purpose”.

High-performance coaching differs from therapy, and life-coaching, in that it tries to help individuals gain “huge insights and change at all levels, in the shortest amount of time.

“The reality is that we do not know how much time we have left, so what are we waiting for?” she asked.”

“You need to take control because we are so busy in our day-to-day lives that the important things in life – the things that ‘We do not know how much time we have left . . . what are we waiting for?’ – Lauren Jawno really matter – are often put on the back-burner. You also need to put your feet where you want to be or it will not happen. We can say whatever we want to say, but if we are not doing it, we are not moving towards it,” Jawno said.

She said fear paralysed many women from reaching for their dreams, and promised “a simple strategy to knock fear out of the park”, saying that it centred on one of three issues:

ý Process: we fear it will be too hard;

ý Pain and loss: we fear we will lose something, such as sleep, security, income; and

ý Outcome: we fear that it may not be all that we hope it will be.

“People often start something and don’t finish it because they don’t have the right reason for doing it, or they don’t know why they want to do it. What is your goal? And why?

“I feel like I am living my dream – you have to find your own,” Jawno added.