Israel Martinez, LMSW
My Journey
Sweaty palms. “Those lights are sure bright, focused on this stage.” Butterflies fluttering freely in my stomach. “There must be over 1,000 people out there in the audience.” I am introduced. “Okay, you have given plenty of presentations and speeches, you can do this.”
In March of 2005 I received a call from my alma mater, Grover Cleveland High School, a public school in Queens, NY, requesting that I give a speech at that year’s graduation. It being ten years since I graduated, the school thought it would be fitting for me to return and share with the newly graduating class what I was able to accomplish since departing from Grover Cleveland High School.
I accepted the invitation and went on to write something that I thought the seniors and their family, friends, and teachers would find inspiring. I made sure to touch on how I was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn (the same year that a black-out in New York City left Bed-Stuy one of the worst looted neighborhoods in the city), was raised in a single-parent household, went on to an Ivy League college, managed to climb the corporate ladder in a very short time, and achieved this all by understanding that I had to take chances and dare to do great things.
When I completed delivering the speech I felt confident that the crowd enjoyed the speech and that some were motivated to consider whether they should be doing more with their lives. However, I realized that I left someone very important unimpressed by my speech – me.
I realized that I was not living up to my true potential. The career I was currently in was not the career I wanted to be in for the rest of my working life. Understanding that I wanted to feel fulfilled by and passionate about my career, I created a strategy for figuring out what I wanted my career to be, how I would accomplish attaining that career, then motivated myself to ensure that my new chosen career became a reality in the shortest time possible – in essence, serving as my own life coach.
Through my self life coaching I became a mental health therapist, receiving my Master of Social Work from Columbia University and performing a vigorous clinical internship at the second largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community center in the world.
While gaining experience in the mental health industry, I learned about the benefits of life coaching and the skill set necessary to be a life coach. My passion for wanting to help others maximize their potential, the way I was able, made me dare to face the sweaty palms, butterflies, and exposure once more, in establishing my own Life Coaching practice (in addition to working in the mental health field), with a specialization in career coaching for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals.