386. 44-Year Marriage Leads to Couples Coaching

Regina Partain

During her 44-year marriage, Regina and her husband created a successful staffing agency, a four-million-dollar enterprise with six offices in two states. Then came the great recession. “So, there I was—no spring chicken! —reinventing myself, learning coaching and internet marketing.”

Regina Partain was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1952. At the age of 18, she married her high school sweetheart, Kent. A wife, mother, and grandmother, her lifelong passion is helping others to live their dreams and achieve their potential. In 2015 she became a business and life coach as a way of fulfilling that passion. Regina is helping couples navigate the waters of marriage. Her own marriage lasted 44 years before her husband passed away. She brings all of her own marriage and life experiences to her coaching, writing and teaching. Regina has recently re-married. She and her new husband, Rendel, apply these teachings to their marriage.

How Did You Start Using Your Talents?

When Regina’s husband was stationed in southern Utah, she volunteered in a school on the Navajo Indian Reservation. She discovered there was no formal program for organizing volunteers and, although she had never done it before, she set about creating one. She helped secure grant money to create and fund a year-round school program to replace the previous nine-month term and three-month summer break. After students had been on the long summer vacation, they fell behind, and teachers were spending the first half of the new year bringing students back to where they had been at the close of the previous year. Then, they had to cram the entire year’s curriculum into the second half of the term. Under the new year-round program, the summer break was three weeks instead of three months, and students needed much less review time when they returned for the new term. “I developed a volunteer program, which was a first runner-up in a national school volunteer program competition. I learned a lot in the process of creating the program. It was exciting work.”

The Most Impactful Turning Point?

“After my husband passed away in 2014, I began a reinvention process. I decided to pursue another way of helping people, which has been my lifelong passion.” That new way is coaching. “I took some training to learn about coaching, and I also began to learn about internet marketing. In 2009, at my staffing company, people were just starting to use Facebook for business. I couldn’t fathom how that would work in 2009. So, there I was in 2014—not a spring chicken!—learning how to build a business online and how to coach. I’ve been on a huge learning curve. Now, I’m still learning new things as they come my way.”

The Most Powerful Lessons Learned?

“I think there’s a confidence that comes from doing what you are passionate about. I have the sense that I can do anything. The world is not going to stop me. What I set out to do, I can achieve. There’s a joy that comes with knowing that and knowing I am not constrained by the world’s limitations. I march to the beat of my own drummer. I don’t want to be constrained by the box that the world would put me in. I don’t like boxes!