Kicking It Up A Notch with Christine

Hey there! I’m Christine and I am incredibly grateful to be part of this terrific blogging community.

I’ll be posting every 3rd and 4th Saturday. I consider my posts as the beginning of a conversation so I hope we can have a good chat in the comments!

Here are a few facts about me:

I’m a writer/storyteller/creative life coach.

That means I spend a lot of time up to my metaphorical elbows in stories. Either I am telling them aloud, I am writing them down, or I am helping people work through the stories in their heads that keep them from feeling effective in their own lives.

I like making things up and connecting ideas in interesting ways. I always urge people to be kinder to themselves. I want to make everyone feel a little better about their place in the world either with stories to entertain them or with reminders about how terrific they are.

I’m a martial artist.

I have my second degree black belt in ITF Taekwondo and I am working toward my third degree. I train at Downey’s Taekwondo here in NL. I can break boards, I can kick higher than my own head, and I like how much self-discipline TKD requires.

I have ADHD.

It’s the distractible kind, not the hyperactive kind. ADHD seems to manifest in different ways for different people but for me, it’s a challenge for me to stay on task, to make accurate time estimates, to break projects into smaller bits and to keep a lot of details in mind. The upside is that I am an ideas MACHINE and I have all kinds of creative energy.

Otherwise, I’m pretty average, demographics-wise.

I live just outside of St. John’s, NL with my husband and two teen-aged sons. I’ll be 45 in a couple of months. My pronouns are she/her. I like reading and drawing and board games but I sometimes forget to schedule those things into my life. I’m learning how to be a better judge of how much I can take on at any given time.

Okay, lady, but what will you write about?

As you may have already read in my guest posts (links are under this post), I’ll be writing about Taekwondo and my struggles with figuring out how to learn different parts of my martial art. I’ll be using myself as an example to discuss how challenging it can be to: make time for exercise, to make reasonable exercise plans, to deal with setbacks, and to allow myself to be seen. I will also get into more practical things like my efforts to have better balance, to develop more upper body strength, and to sharpen my TKD techniques.

As a coach and, as regular person, I am all about celebrating effort rather than just results, so I will end each of my posts with a KIYA! After all, self-reflection that moves you forward is a victory of effort.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next Saturday!

KIYA!