Home Coming
Home Coming Monthly Check-In (Your Story Matters and Tony Smith Coaching)
What does home mean to you? When you look up the definitions of home, you find some of the following:
Home: The center of one’s life, affections, and security, often characterized by feelings of belonging, comfort, and safety. It is also described as a place of care, sanctuary, retreat.
If that is the definition of home, what is the definition of Home Coming?
Home Coming (homecoming): A return of a group of people to a place frequented or regarded as home. A practice of welcoming back members or alumni to a place considered home.
I’ve been reflecting on these words and definitions over the past week after spending five days in an extraordinary place and event that was new to me but also felt like home as well as a home coming. It was a retreat and place of care characterized by feelings of belonging, comfort, and safety. Even though it was filled with new people I had never met in person before, everyone and everything felt familiar, caring, and a sense of uplifting each other professionally as coaches and personally. I’m talking about my time at the Gay Coaches Alliance (GCA) annual international conference and retreat in Easton Mountain. It was my first time attending a professional coaches conference as well as my first time facilitating a workshop for other coaches. I didn’t know what to expect but was curious and open to learning and growing professionally as a coach. What I got was so much more. I found a home and was part of what I consider a home coming experience that continues to inspire me a week later. And I look forward to what I now consider an annual home coming experience with this coaches conference and retreat.
After returning from the conference, I went to the National Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC, near where I live, to meditate and reflect on the conference experience, my current career and life journey, and key takeaways and actions I want to focus on that came up during the sessions and coaching practice activities. While reflecting and walking through the outside gardens, I noticed a sculpture I hadn’t paid attention to before, entitled, “The Home Coming.” The entire sculpture is made up of several different figures and components. It depicts a statue of a homeless veteran, his daughter, and her dog who encounter an elderly homeless African American woman on the edge of the woods. The daughter opens her daddy’s coat and invites the old woman into their camp to share the warmth of the fire, a place of care, sanctuary, and retreat from the bitter cold, indifference, and inhumanity of the world.
Upon reflection, what I realized is that I created this newsletter, Your Story Matters, to create a space that felt like home. A place of care and sanctuary where followers can find encouragement, insights, new awareness, focus, clarity, and inspiration along their journey to help them navigate changes in their careers and lives and thrive. And that is what I hope to do with my coaching clients as well. One of the things that a fellow coach at the conference mentioned doing was holding a monthly check-in with his coaching clients, alumni, and others interested in learning more about his coaching.
I liked the idea, and want to start a monthly check-in for a combined group of the Your Story Matters newsletter subscribers and my coaching clients and alumni to share and discuss (but not limited to) the following:
1. Reflections on our journey and stories.
2. What has helped someone while in coaching conversations with me or from some of my newsletter content topics.
3. Celebrate each other and lift each other up.
4. Identify new content or topics for the newsletter that would be of most interest and help others.
5. Identify any interests for folks to explore and learn more about coaching with me as a resource to partner with on your career and life transition journey
6. Other engagement opportunities for workshops, webinars, live chats, podcasts, special guest live events on dedicated topics etc.
As I was thinking about putting this monthly check-in together, I wasn’t sure what to call it. But upon reflection, I want to call it our Monthly Home Coming Check In. It is a space where I want people to feel a sense of belonging, safety, care, comfort and sanctuary. A place called home where you can be yourself, without judgement, and find a mini retreat for a short while to take a breath. This Monthly Home Coming Check In will be a combined audience of my newsletter, Your Story Matters, subscribers and my coaching clients, alumni, and interested guests.
We will start with 30 minutes during lunch time (East Coast time), but with feedback from invitees, we may expand it to an hour as well as consider moving it to different days and time. “Progress not perfection” is my mantra these days. So, we will start this timeline and adjust, however works best for the majority. As a coach and writer, I want to set aside this time together with each of you for our Home Coming, checking in to discuss how our journeys are going, and how I can best support and encourage each of you, and we can support and uplift each other.
I hope many of you may join me for the first Home Coming Check In (Your Story Matters and Tony Smith Coaching). And the details are shared below. As always, I encourage you to reflect on the topic and what home and home coming means to you. What unexpected places have you found a sense of home? How did that experience help you in your current journey and challenges? Is this a place you’ve been to before? Was this a reoccurring home coming? Or was it a first home coming and you plan to make it an annual event? What anticipatory emotional benefits are you experiencing or anticipating as you look forward to the next home coming to this place or experience? Home means many things to different people, but I posit that we all long for a sense of home, a place of safety, refuge, retreat, care, and encouragement. And when we find it, creating a regular home coming event may help inspire our career and life journey in ways we’ve never imagined, helping to write surprising new chapters in our stories, because as always, Your Story Matters.
Join me in the first Home Coming Monthly Check In (Your Story Matters and Tony Smith Coaching)
Event: Home Coming Monthly Check-In (Your Story Matters and Tony Smith Coaching)
Date: Friday May 15th, 2026
Time: 12 noon to 12:30 pm (ET) East Coast Time
NOTE: For the meeting link, it will be sent out to subscribers only, but if available for both paid and free subscribers. Simply subscribe, and I will send you the link. If you don’t receive it, send me a direct message. Hope to see many of you next Friday.
