She’s been a hairstylist, an addictions therapist, a university professor – and even a Reiki master teacher. But the profession for which Paula Flint feels she has been called is a life coach. After working in that capacity for the last five years – and gathering important life lessons through all her other experiences - Flint has written a book for the sole purpose of guiding others through their life’s journey.

 

“I’ve always known I wanted to write a book. All my life I’ve been taking notes and doing research I just didn’t have a name for what it was I was preparing to do,” said Flint, the former Paula Snyder and Bridgeport High School graduate. “After I became a life coach, I was crying out to God, ‘Why can’t I have a life coach. I have cool ideas to share with other people, but I don’t have one. Then it donned on me that life has been my coach.”     

 

Flint believes one’s inner life coach can be whatever he or she chooses to make it. For her, it is the highest power available on earth. For others, it could be science, nature or a higher self. She says there is no right or wrong in the choice.

 

“Life is always talking to us. There are always signs and symbols. Everything in life has meaning – but only the meaning we give it,” Flint said. “Everything happens for a purpose.”

 

But with 7 billion people walking this earth, each has to interpret each experience he or she has and decide the best response to it, she said.

 

“We are all on uniquely individual paths,” she said. “We have the ultimate gift of free will. We can learn to use that gift to create the best possible life.”

 

By those responses to life’s happenings and our own expectations, we create our own experiences, Flint said.

 

She knows she’s a deep thinker and she has devoted much time to her book, striving to share her message in a straightforward way.

 

It’s been a passion project for the last four years and has consumed so much of her time and energy that she left her job at Fairmont’s “New Beginnings.” She has remained active in her own business “Reiki Energy Healing” where she is a life coach. Flint also teaches a class titled Race, Class and Gender at Fairmont State University and this fall, she will also teach Interpersonal Dynamics – a class relating to communication and cooperation. She also currently works with nurses who self-report substance abuse through the organization, WV Restore.

 

In penning “Life Coach,” Flint said she has been really honest about her own life, naming many things that she didn’t handle so perfectly.

 

“If I was going to write a book, I had to be honest about my own life,” she said. “Everybody can learn from their mistakes – which really aren’t mistakes; they are a new way of seeing things, a new avenue and new choices.”

 

The book includes a study guide and chapter-by-chapter topics and questions. It also includes a glossary and is ideal for group settings.

Having formerly worked as a therapist at a women’s long-term addiction center, Flint writes about addiction newly-published book. She also points out the importance of God and the Holy Spirit.

 

“The Holy Spirit is always working in our lives and opening new doors,” she said. “We just have to not be afraid of walking through them.”

 

A 1971 BHS graduate, Flint was 57 years old when she obtained her master’s degree in counseling and psychology. After earning a bachelor’s degree at Fairmont State, she attended Waynesburg University in Connellsburg, Pa. It was a nine-year journey and it was hard, but she is thankful and happy that she completed it.

 

“I have a lot of life yet and I want to do service to people,” she said.

 

As a life coach, Flint works with people of all ages, as young as 12 and as old as 85.

 

“They are people who just want assistance; not necessarily a mental diagnoses, but they want help and they have questions and need insight and guidance about how to do things,” she said. “We spend years thinking we want to do this and that, but sometimes we don’t know how to do it. We need someone else’s perspective to allow us to see a problem through a different window – and that makes all the difference.”

 

Subject matters with which she deals include relationships, parenting, addiction, family support, depression, behavior issues and illness.

 

“I work on the perspective of doing the best we can without medication,” she said. “Addiction, an altered state of consciousness, God and healing – they all go together.”

 

Flint said somehow the world’s “medical model” has determined that all pain is bad and that we should be 100 percent pain free.

 

Oxycodone and other opium-based drugs literally take away all pain – physical, mental and emotional. That’s not a good thing, Flint said. Furthermore, it’s the beginning of a potentially deadly cycle.

 

“(Pain medication) takes over our bodies and we have to take more and more until finally we end up with heroin – which is next in line, coming from the same opium plant,” she said.

 

Flint believes that life is an intimate journey and that nothing happens by chance. In her book, she conveys her further beliefs that the soul – one’s real self – is camouflaged by pain and drama stemming from drugs, alcohol, hate, war, anger, family circumstances, gambling, sex, religion and even the Internet.

 

“This drama can cause us to hide the real self under the covers,” she said. “We can get caught up in our own thoughts, our own sticky InnerWeb. It is easy to find reasons to cower in fear, to dissociate from a world of great turmoil. It is also easy to come out angry and with fear-gun a blazing!”

 

However, we also have reasons to live life full-out, to connect with a world full of love, acceptance and forgiveness, Flint said.

 

“There are a wide array of experiences available to help us find peace of mind, to find our way out from under the covers,” she said. “This book reflects the experiences that occurred to me when I let my real self come out and play.”

 

Flint is also co-author of “F.A.I.T.H. Finding Answers in the Heart.” She and her husband Roger live at Maple Lake. They have three children and four grandchildren.

 

“Life Coach” is available for purchase through Amazon.com.