Today we’d like to introduce you to Sherell A. McArthur, PhD.
Sherell, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I am a graduate of Grambling State University, where I majored in psychology and minored in sociology. My objective was to become a child psychologist. However, I was divinely placed on the path of education. I was a classroom teacher, spending most of my career teaching fourth grade. Now, I am an Assistant Professor of Education. Nonetheless, from that time to now, over the last 16 or so years, I have been informally coaching people from financial advice to relationships with partners or their mothers, coaching folks on their jobs, and self-development. All informal. Last year, I decided to get the training in order to extend my reach and take the passion and purpose to do this work formally.
Now, about 12 years ago, I prayed that God would bless me to be a blessing. I thought that meant that he was going to add unto me so I could add onto others. I wasn’t praying for stuff. It wasn’t a selfish prayer. I was sincerely praying to be blessed to be a blessing. But how I saw that was that He would give me whatever He wanted me to have in order to give it to others. Not knowing that the “whatever that He wanted me to have” was lessons. Lived experiences. To help the wide scope of women and girls that He was going to have come across my path or have me come across theirs and to help the community.
So what happened next, by this prayer, was a stripping; a stripping of me. At the time that I started this prayer, I had purchased my own home. I was a first-time homebuyer at the age of 24. I had already graduated with my Masters, was an elementary school teacher, and was enrolled in my doctorate program. I bought myself the car of my dreams that Christmas; it was a hardtop convertible.
But, eventually, in this “stripping,” so many things happened. I lost my home to foreclosure, had loss of employment and income which led me to use supports like food stamps, Medicaid, and WIC because I became a mother. A single mother. I was in a terribly toxic relationship. I lose my grandmother, both my grandfathers, my uncle, my little cousin who was like a little brother, to suicide. All this loss and I was still broke! With a baby. So in order to understand myriad experiences, I needed to experience. Life’s challenges grew me from sympathetic to empathetic.
There were many trying times. Many tribulations and lessons learned. Throughout that time, I would “coincidentally” (though I don’t believe in coincidences) encounter people, mainly women and girls, who would be going through what I was on the back-end of and I was able to coach them through the situation from what I learned from my time within it.
Becoming an Integrative Wellness & Life Coach enables me to be an ear, a guide on my clients’ journey, a cheerleader, and an overall support system that holds them accountable to the goals they have laid out for us to work on. And I help them gain the confidence to keep moving on their own.
In this way, my coaching is unique—it does not create a dependency on the coach, but instead makes the client more capable of being ‘able’ and reaching their own goals without assistance. I have no desire, nor am I claiming to have the capability, to be the hero of anyone’s story. To be quite honest, from someone who has gone through the “valleys of the shadow of death” and am here to tell the story, no one gets to claim to be the hero of my story and that makes me stronger. It makes me stronger, better, wiser, and able to tell the women and girls that I encounter and coach that they are the superheroes of their stories! And it’s okay if they don’t feel like superheroes when we meet, because I’m here to help!
Please tell us about Beyond…Life Coaching.
Integrative Wellness focuses on mental, emotional, physical and spiritual influences that affect one’s health and wellness. Beyond…Life Coaching is integrative wellness that is dedicated to the holistic well-being of women and girls of color as they strive to become their full, whole, healed selves. Through holistic integrative coaching programs, I support women and girls in moving beyond their limitations, fears, hindrances, and their past…simply, I work collaboratively to aid clients in living BEYOND!
Beyond…Life Coaching offers services for one-on-one coaching but has designed a model to offer group coaching for adult women, young adult women, as well as teenage and pre-teen girls. Group coaching programs are designed to draw them into a community with other women and girls looking to get clear about what they want, shed their limiting beliefs, and set achievable goals. Ultimately, they will have a clear, thoughtful plan to achieve their goals, a set of tools to keep their intentions on track, a refined view of what is possible, and accountability partners.
I greatly enjoy working with pre-teen and teenage girls of color! In my work as a professor, I research, write and speak about the identities, well-being and educational experiences and needs of girls of color. I learn these things through the collectives that I establish and facilitate that focus on critical media literacy, or how girls come to create and maintain their identities through the media they engage and I teach them how to read that media. I help them understand that all media has a message, and the better able they are to read those texts the better they will be able to read the world they live in as a text. I have facilitated 5th, 7th, 9th, and 12th grade critical media literacy collectives with girls of color in Atlanta, GA, Boston, MA, Cape Town, South Africa, and Athens, GA. Within these collectives, much of the feedback from the girls is how therapeutic the space is for them. I have been working with girls of color and their wellness for six years and through my networks, I have been a guest lecturer at universities to discuss critical issues that girls of color face. I have also been an invited panelist at the Penn Summit on Black Girls and Women in Education, the And Still We Rise Conference at Teacher’s College, the Girls of Color Conference at Rutgers University, and the Black Feminist Methods and Methodologies Working Symposium at Vanderbilt University. Facilitating girls’ groups may be my favorite!
Another one of my favorite group sessions are my mother/daughter coaching sessions. In these sessions, I support mother/daughter pairs (though additional daughters can join) in identifying the deeper roots to barriers in their relationship and roots to their triggers, and we work together to learn solutions, tools, and skills to help them move towards the goals they have for their relationship, rather than reacting or interacting in ways that take away from where they want to be.
I also greatly enjoy hosting Wellness Workshops for organizations or friend groups! Lastly, based on all the grief that I have experienced—particularly losing two brothers, a younger cousin who was like a brother, and a stepbrother—this loss has shown me that siblings’ grief is often forgotten. So, while Beyond…Life Coaching supports women and girls, the sibling grief support group is open to all.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I believe that all of my experiences have led me to where I am supposed to be today. Though I still don’t want to have gone through some of the things I have experienced, when I am coaching and able to share my experience with a client, who at that time needs to know someone else truly understands her experience, it makes me understand that it was purposeful.
Pricing:
- One-on-One adult women: $75/hour
- Small group of adult women: $55/pp for 1.5 hours
- One-on-One young adult (college aged) women: $50/hour
- Mother/Daughter session: $65 for 45mins (+$10 for additional daughters)
- Small group of young adult (college aged) women: $35/pp for 1.5 hours
- One-on-One pre-teen or teenage girls: $30/hour
- Wellness Workshop: $55/pp for 2 hours
Contact Info:
- Website: www.BeyondWellCoach.com
- Phone: 770.376.5678
- Email: DrMac@BeyondWellCoach.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondwellcoach/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BeyondWellCoach/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/beyondwellcoach
Image Credit:
Uptown Girl Photography
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