Love Lessons
Deb Garraway is an acclaimed advocate for authentic feminine potential with extensive professional and life experience. Formerly a self-power coach, Deb has helped women across the country realize their personal power and highest potential in partnering and life.
As an author and designer of transformational tools, she combines her coaching experience with more than 30 years of business expertise as a researcher, marketer, and strategic planner. She is now committed to helping women identify and claim what they truly want through her unique, interactive visioning tools.
* Deb is a contributor to Barbara Stanny’s anthology Breaking Through: Getting Past the Stuck Points in Your Life
* She is an associate producer of Barbara Marx Hubbard’s Humanity Ascending series
* She produced Flocreation, a CD about the art of living in flow in your own life while supporting the passions in others
* She trained with Clarity International Executive & Leadership Coaching
* She is a graduate of San Francisco State University and has an MBA from Pepperdine University
Deb lives an extraordinarily full life with her husband and four stepsons in Alamo, California.
My life just got fuller
At 47, I never would have imagined in my wildest dreams that the love of my life would have small children. I’ve always preferred men closer to my age and expected them to have older kids, like my own 23-year-old daughter. I was a workaholic, type-A personality, and with my busy career I hadn’t even considered having more children. But something happened that I hadn’t expected.
After two failed marriages and a long-term relationship that didn’t work out, I decided to take a close look at my past relationships and try to understand what I was doing wrong. How could I have been successful in business and such a failure in relationships? I was frustrated and actually angry, not at any of my exes or men in general, but I was perturbed at our culture that tells us that women must be chosen by men, and that we must meet what we’ve been conditioned to believe are male standards of beauty and desirability. On top of that is the pressure we feel from movies and media to be thin, to enhance our breasts, and to be seductive goddesses in order to attract a man. Then add to that being in my late forties with the perception (false, by the way) that I must compete with younger women for limited available men.
Here's the surprise package
When I wrote out the story of the man and life I really wanted, I decided to do it in the same way I approached my professional life. I had pursued career objectives through clearly defined goals and focused intention. I’d read about the Law of Attraction when I was a teenager and was impressed by the idea that you can manifest what you want in life with your thoughts and feelings. Since that early time, any time I wanted something important, I made it happen through writing it out and then imagining what it would feel like to have it already. I would think about it with confident expectation in vivid detail and hold the positive feelings inside me many times a day.
He was 50, but hadn’t started having children until he was 40. I already had a 23-year old daughter at the time and had long been an empty-nester. Young children weren’t in my story, but it’s incredible how life can work out: these boys were the best thing that could have happened to me. I had a second chance to create a bustling home life that was very different from the one I’d experienced with my daughter who was an only child. I hadn’t realized this was something I deeply desired.
My husband’s strongest qualities, his spirit and core values are what make our marriage work today. It’s not the circumstances or specific events that have occurred in our life. I learned a great lesson, which I pass on to my friends and clients, about the importance of being clear about the feelings I wanted to have with the love of my life and to keep an open mind. When you’re looking for a man who is compatible and satisfies your deepest desires, he may come packaged in a way you never expected.
In the afterword of Choose Him, she shares her difficult journey toward embracing her authentic self and achieving self-acceptance. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s as a light-skinned, bi-racial African-American, she faced discrimination from both blacks and whites and struggled with identity, guilt, shame, and rage into adulthood. (To read more about Deb’s inspiring personal story, click here.)
