Why see me for resilience and change stuff?

You may have been roaming around my site scanning bits and pieces.  You might have a vague sense that it stacks up, but still wonder:  who is this Meg Carbonatto, and how might she have earned the right to work with people on these vitally important questions of personal change and resilience?  Excellent questions!

I have a number of passions in life.  A big one is sharing ideas with receptive people so that they have more choices for how they do/be/have life – but not just any life.  I am seriously interested in working with people to help them achieve the highest levels of personal hardiness and happiness that they can, even as I grow in those traits myself.  
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Photo by Martin Cole

I earned my academic degrees (B.S., M.A., and Ph.D.) in the United States.  They were interesting and sometimes challenging, and they gave me an excellent grounding in the basics of human growth and development.  I thus came to New Zealand (Wellington) with a strong framework for understanding human communication and behaviour.  I began to work as a consulting trainer with both public and corporate organisations.  Later, in Auckland, the client list was expanded to include tutoring at tertiary institutions.  The training topics in all environments chiefly have been around personal change/growth, interpersonal skills, and communication challenges.

While living in Wellington, I also competed successfully for grant funding and exposed systemic difficulties in achieving change (in the area of health promotion) through several qualitative research projects, one of which grew into my first book.  It was written to encourage employers to do health promotion in their organisations.  

All of this work was absorbing and hugely satisfying, but I yearned to understand more deeply the mechanisms by which human beings learn to survive and thrive – or they don’t, so I packed up my bags and headed for Auckland, completing the Diplomas of Counselling and Psychotherapy at the Institute of Psychosynthesis. 

As I gained psychotherapist experience, I began to ask how the wonderful skills leading to happiness and hardiness that my clients were learning could be shared with a wider audience.  Not wanting just a textbook on emotional survival, I came up with the idea of telling the stories of some “ordinary” people who showed extraordinary resilience in their responses to adversity.  They taught me much, and the result is my book “Back from the Edge”.  Watch this space.  I am developing more work on the general topic of resilience.

I wear three main hats these days:  as therapist/coach, writer, and trainer/speaker.  I love my work.  It is gratifying beyond description to watch clients go from “barely surviving” to “truly thriving”, and I am learning much.  I now see why Carl Jung used to say that in the process of therapy (but also true for training and coaching), the therapist as well as the client is transformed.  I admit:  I am hooked.  Learning about how to claim our full potential as happy, hardy human beings is a lifelong passion.  Though I have undergone much personal change, this remains a constant!