Vision Powered Coaching and Widows Coach
Introduction by Lisa Salvatore
I met Iris 19 years ago when I started my search for an Adoption Agency. After interviewing and visiting several agencies, I chose Thursday’s Child, Iris’ Agency. Iris was knowledgeable and supportive and always available to answer questions and offer guidance. Best choice ever! Matched me with my beautiful Alice! Thursday’s Child is no longer a working agency, but Iris’ work to help others is still a priority for her and 19 years later, we are still friends. Read her wonderful journey below.
By Iris Arenson-Fuller
Hi! I’m Iris Arenson-Fuller, PCC, CPC, Life & Loss Transformation/Life Reinvention Coach. I’m the owner of Vision Powered Coaching and Widows Coach. I specialize in loss and grief of various kinds. People, especially women, often work with me to find motivation and inspiration for designing their next chapters. Sometimes they come for help just because they’re ready for something new and fulfilling, even when they haven’t been through difficult life changes.
Like most women, I wear, and have worn a lot of hats in my lifetime. I’m a mom of four adults, by birth and adoption, grandmother, former adoption agency founder and director, author and poet, having been a published writer in several genres, since my early teens. I am also a dog lover and have always had Scotties in my adult years, but recently fell in love with our new, re-homed Sealyham Terrier, who joined our Scottie boy.
I’ve had to reinvent myself multiple times at different life stages and I’m by no means done, just because I am now an “older woman”. I love helping women dig deep to find their inner creativity and passions, that they sometimes don’t even know they have, or maybe have lost, because life experiences and grief have dropped a dark curtain on their world. I love reconnecting people to hope and excitement for life.
After many decades directing the CT licensed, non-profit adoption agency I co-founded with my late first husband, (I was widowed at age 35) I decided it was time to do something new. I wanted it to transform lives like my previous career had, but in a new way. I also needed more time for myself and for my writing, as my job had gotten more and more stressful over time. I took some intensive and life-changing training for over a year and continue to enrich myself, always building new skills through ongoing training. I began my life coaching practice in 2008, while the adoption agency was still operating. The agency closed at the end of 2010.
I knew I was by no means ready to retire. I hated seeing people consumed by loss and grief and giving up on life when bad things happened to them. As one who was widowed young, lost my husband and home in a tragic fire, raised my kids on my own for many years, adopted my fourth child as a widowed parent, and who also has lost a large number of other close family and friends, I know that grief is forever but that suffering and misery don’t have to be. I was inspired to teach that message to others and to help them build their own unique tools and methods for living a purposeful life.
I’m all about relationships, so getting to know my clients well and watching them succeed and feel empowered, is super important and empowering for me too.
I offer a variety of small groups at different times, as well as doing one-to-one work with clients via phone or Zoom. I no longer see clients in person and now get to work with people from all over the world. That has been amazing and rewarding. I am also in the process of writing another book, this time non-fiction, the working title of which is “Taming Grief: Help, Hope & Even Joy After Death of Your Spouse or Partner.”My poetry collection, “Blooming Beyond Brooklyn-Poems of Roots, Sorrows & Lessons”, is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and at select local book shops.
Finding Abilities 