Long before positive parenting had its own hashtag, the Parent Encouragement Program (PEP), was teaching life-changing parenting education classes (rooted in Adlerian psychology, which will surprise no one who knows me) to parents across the Washington area. It started in 1982. Forty-four years later, PEP has helped thousands of families […]
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Tackling Life’s Challenges
Life throws curveballs. Relationships stretch us. Transitions shake us. And sometimes, the hardest part is simply standing still in the middle of it all.
At The Challenge Coach, we believe that every challenge—no matter how messy, painful, or unexpected—is an invitation to grow. This blog is your space to pause, reflect, and reconnect with your courage.
Written by seasoned coach Pascale Brady, each post offers a blend of radical honesty, practical wisdom, and gentle humor. From communication tips to emotional resilience, from personal confessions to professional insights, we explore what it means to live bravely even when life gets complicated.
It is a little after seven in the morning on November 4th, and I am walking in the woods. The leaves are letting go one at a time, in no particular hurry, and the sun is coming up through the branches the way it has every morning since long before […]
Jagged Edge Podcast featuring Pascale Brady You can be very good at your job and still dread Monday morning. You can have the title, the team and the salary you spent twenty years working toward, and still lie awake at 3 a.m. wondering what on earth you’re doing there. Most […]
Dear Clients, Colleagues, Associates, Friends and Family, One morning not long ago, I woke up later than usual. Before I had even made my coffee, something felt off, the way it sometimes does when you leave the house and can’t remember whether you locked the door. It took me a […]
Dear Clients, Colleagues, Associates, Friends and Family, You may have noticed you didn’t hear from me in August. Most years, I spend part of the summers in Europe — partly vacation, partly working remotely while I’m there with family. It’s not time off so much as a change of address. […]
Entitled adult kids don’t happen by accident. They happen because we loved hard and protected harder, and somewhere along the way, protecting turned into rescuing. That’s where Cenita Johnson-Jackson and I started our conversation on her Aging With Purpose podcast: how does entitlement actually take root, and what does it […]
“Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.” ~Megan Devine Dear Clients, Colleagues, Associates, Friends and Family, I finished a coaching engagement recently with someone I’ll call John. John came to me with a career conundrum. Forty-one years old, married at twenty-three to the love of his life […]
Noticing the good, the bad and the ugly and how to deal with it. Dear Clients, Colleagues, Associates, Friends and Family, Three things happened to me recently, all within the last few weeks. 1️⃣ I was facilitating a workshop at a conference I care deeply about. At the beginning, the participants […]
My 13-year-old used to tell me everything. I know exactly when it stopped. No fight, no incident… Just one week she was chatty, and the next she wasn’t. Door closed, one-word answers. And that awkward feeling of standing on the other side of the door not quite knowing what to […]
A few weeks ago, I found myself surrounded by rejection stories everywhere I turned, almost as though life had suddenly decided to place the topic directly in front of me over and over again until I paid proper attention to it. By the end of that week, I realized that […]
Dear friends, clients, colleagues, and readers, Last month’s newsletter ended with a question I asked you to sit with: What would you do, what would you say, what would you attempt, if you no longer needed perfection first? Did you? (sit with it?). If so, please don’t hesitate to share […]
… SERIOUSLY??? Read this email in English 🇺🇸, French 🇫🇷 or German 🇩🇪 by selecting the flag in the navigation bar! Dear Clients, Colleagues, Associates, Friends and Family, A few years ago, I was booked to deliver a parenting workshop at a school. Not a casual conversation — a real event. A room had been […]
For those of you who have followed my work over the years, you may know that one of the communities closest to my heart is the Parent Encouragement Program. My relationship with PEP began not as a professional, but as a very overwhelmed young mother. In 1999, I walked into […]
Every morning somewhere around 7am I drive by my supermarket on the way back from the gym. There is a homeless man sitting at the light, on the ground. He is this little pile of grey— all his clothes are grey, from his shoes to his hat. He only gets […]
A quick note before we begin: I hesitated about how to open this newsletter. If you’ve been reading me for a while, you already know this about me: I don’t pretend that life is neat, predictable, or fair. I work with real people facing real lives — and those lives […]
Dear Clients, Colleagues, Associates, Friends and Family, A few weeks ago, someone close to me told me a story that has stayed with me. A young woman, new to a sports team that she played with after work, was injured badly during a competition. The kind of injury that changes […]
I had coffee recently with a man I’ll call Jean-Pierre. A gentle soul, freshly retired, someone whose life has been full of meaning and contribution. Now that he finally has space — real, uncluttered space — to turn toward the projects he has always dreamed of, you would think he’d […]
Are You Affected by Current Events? Have You Lost Your Job or Been Furloughed? As many of you know, part of my mission as The Challenge Coach is to make coaching accessible — especially during difficult times. In the spirit of this month’s theme — from self-doubt to self-trust — […]
Dear Clients, Colleagues, Associates, Friends and Family, It’s so good to be in touch again. Thank you for taking the time to read my newsletters and for so often responding, reacting, or sharing your reflections. It truly means the world to me and keeps me motivated to continue. I appreciate […]
Dear Clients, Colleagues, Associates, Friends and Family, Even though I have been away last month, taking some much-needed vacation time with family, I almost didn’t want to write to you this month. (Heck, I didn’t want to come back at all …). Not because I had nothing to say, but […]