11/04/2025
LONG, REALLY LONG post alert. Kristina wants me to warn you to settle in. Full disclosure...this isn't to illicit comments of any kind or make anyone feel any sort of way. I am processing my own grief. If you know me at all, you know I do that via writing.
THE DIARY OF A LIFE COACH
Before the year 2017, I had never heard of a Life Coach.
This title/term would not cross my path until I sought a psychic medium to connect with my father who had passed a few years before. My father didn’t show up for the session, he apparently was busy butting heads with his mother who had also recently passed. That tracked so I didn’t question it. But what did happen in this session was that the medium kept asking me what it was that I did for work. I told her I was a buyer for art supplies. She disagreed. I really was, I was not making that up, but she was adamant that I was not doing what I was supposed to be doing. I had a higher calling. Therapist for sure. I joked that my sister had been calling me Dr Phil for years. As adamant as she was that I was supposed to be something else entirely, I was as equally adamant that I was not going back to school to be a therapist, nor did I want to be one because I carry everyone’s pain and I didn’t want that. I am a human sponge. Barely managing my own grief, I am confident I don’t want everyone else’s.
She continued that I could be a Life Coach, which required a year long certification instead of years more of college. Kristina and I left the session, me shaking my head, kind of pi**ed that the whole session was about me instead of my Dad and I dropped it. Kristina asked me to look into it, which I did and said hell NO to the certification, the $$, all of it.
Fast forward to March 2020. I spent much of the beginning of March in hospice with my mom. She didn’t have a normal passing, of course not. She who was so full of life, so vibrant, so commanding of a room, just quietly disappeared in front of my eyes. There was nothing quiet about my mom so for her to go quiet was very strange. She didn’t offer words of wisdom, she didn’t see people who had passed, she didn’t rally, she just stopped existing. But at the time her existence was dissolving I was grateful for the quiet so I could keep working. Keep doing my job. Not get behind or need someone else to do my work. I justified working because she was resting. She wasn’t resting, she was dying.
I was busy working for a company who relished in using my review every year to remind me that I asked too many questions. Why couldn’t I just do my job? Why did I have to challenge everything all the time? They would sprinkle a few accolades here and there but mostly it was just to tell me everything I needed to fix as if I was the something broken.
It was after my mom passed that I was able to look back with absolute disgust at myself and the place I worked. I busted my ass for a company who would replace me in a second, while my mom lay across the room dying. I should have used that time to just be with her, even in the silence.
I spoke to a grief counselor who made me feel slightly better about this by telling me that I did that, worked while she was dying, because we are wired to protect ourselves. I was protecting who I was and what I knew. The parts of myself I could control. But it was in that moment that she released me from my guilt, and also simultaneously put a huge spotlight on who I really was. On paper I was an employee who bought art supplies for a company. But underneath that title I was a compassionate, hard working, driven, analytical, passionate questioner.
In the middle of the worst grief of my life the world was shutting down because of Covid. I had a major meltdown in the grocery store looking for ketchup because there were now arrows to follow and I felt so removed from the world. I went into hospice with my mother, the world operating as normal, and came out and everything had changed. A family friend was working at the grocery store that day and happened to be in the aisle. I know everything happens for a reason because I believe I was seconds away from a major panic attack had she not been there.
By this time, Kristina had hired her own Life Coach. There is that word again. She was unhappy in her work (same company ironically) that she wanted to know what else there was for her great big beautiful life. (This is how Hidden Timber Soul Sanctuary and the hobby farm came to fruition by the way.) Because Covid had locked all social events down, her coach suggested she take a course online from Yale University called The Science of Wellbeing. I agreed to take it with her.
In this course you have to take a core values and strengths quiz. This quiz would change my life. (And it would be required for all future coaching clients of mine to take.) The quiz was designed to show you your core values and strengths and if your current employment didn’t meet any of those, you were just basically showing up and going through the motions, this wasn’t a career, it was just a job. I cared so much about my job. I took so much pride in my work and taking care of my vendors. I thought I had a career. I didn’t. My job, my work, didn’t meet any of my top 10 core values or strengths. Meaning I was either unable to meet them for whatever reason or the work didn’t check any of those boxes.
It was at this moment I looked at Kristina and said I think I need to become a Life Coach. I spent time researching all of the available certifications. Landed on the Martha Beck program ironically because she reminded me of my mother. Committed and registered. Class would start, again ironically, a year after my moms passing. Kristina and I were visiting the Grand Canyon when I started my life coaching certification. I also had my final review with my former company. Where I am sure it had been copied and pasted from the years before. I think I even laughed during it. And was asked what was so funny. So much clarity in this moment. So much resolution. To understand my path and reconcile that it was not the one I was currently on.
I fully intended to work my current job alongside the certification process since I had no clients, no experience. Sometime around June I received the last email I would ever receive from a superior telling me how I should have behaved in a situation they literally knew nothing about. I remember telling Kristina I had put in my notice. I remember her face. Her support. Her excitement. And I remember being as scared as I have ever been in my whole life that I had given up the stability and security of a FT job with benefits.
I officially became a Life Coach in December of 2021. Fast forward to the fall of 2024. Word of mouth got most of my coaching clients. I didn’t have to do much advertising. I have seen many clients, from all over the world actually and coached thousands of hours of people navigating every possible aspect of life. Grief, change, divorce. All of it.
The fall of 2024, something changed. The air, the frequency, something I could feel but could not see. It was universal, not specific to just me and my clients, because I remember a private spa owner posting about the exact same issues...but clients started ghosting me. They would not respond at all to my inquiries or check ins. Or they started cancelling at the last minute. Or they would cancel and not reschedule. Clients who were routinely regular started spacing their sessions out more. The coaching sessions started to feel like something on their to-do list that they kept wanting to put off. As a coach, you can’t take clients or anyone else’s actions personally. But it’s impossible not to. I allowed clients to cancel at the last minute without any repercussions. My problem, not theirs.
One of my biggest mistakes has been to define coaching as like having coffee with a friend. And in our certification that is how we are trained to describe it. To not feel sterile and systematic. But saying that implies that the client treats you like a friend back. And that is sort of how it felt. I can bail on my friend at the last minute because they are my friend and they will understand. Life is busy and chaotic right now, we will get together soon. But then it never happens. I started to feel like an administrative assistant and not an accountability partner or a professional coach.
I have spent countless hours feeling my way through this. Countless hours of continuing education to stay up to date on current events, issues, ways to help people cope and navigate and it felt like the more I did that, the further away I got from my clients as well as my love of coaching. I offered group classes. It went well for a minute. I tried to create a grief group, it got zero people and mostly chastised. I have reduced the cost of sessions to almost half of what a Life Coach is charging per session right now to try to help the ones who said cost was the barrier. I spend countless hours on content and things that I feel people will relate to and the only person liking and sharing my work is my wife.
Life Coaching is my career. It is how I pay my bills. If clients stop having sessions or new clients don't begin, it will be impossible to sustain continuing to be one. And going out and finding those people who are truly seeking a coach, comes with the price or marketing and advertising as well.
This post is not a cry for help. It’s not a request for suggestions on what to do with my great big beautiful life if coaching is not it. It’s not a sympathy post or an accolades request. Those things don’t motivate me. Helping people motivates me. Working with people who really want to make a fundamental change in how they view themselves and their own lives motivates me. Meeting people and hearing their stories motivates me. And for the past year that has felt entirely differently than it ever has before.
I have always coped with my own grief and struggles or questions by writing. I have done it as long as I can remember. That is what this is about. Me working through my own s**t. And the only way I can do that is to be authentic and transparent. This is me, holding a mirror up to myself and not liking what I see or feel.
Full transparency. I have spent the last year questioning every single solitary thing about staying a coach. I have talked myself out of it. I have talked myself into it. I have challenged myself to learn more, maybe even get a grief certification, and I have convinced myself I didn’t need one because a piece of paper will not change what I am already doing.
I am grieving. Who I thought I was. The “title” that was going to change everything for me. Which it did. Until it didn’t. Who am I if I am not this? This was the one that made the most sense. This was the one that had the writing on the wall from the time I was a little girl. This was the box and label that fit. And I hate boxes and labels.
I cannot accept responsibility for the actions of others. That is a recipe for disaster. We know as coaches that people do not seek counseling/coaching for a myriad of reasons. Financial reasons being the biggest. But at the core of it, they don’t want labels and boxes either and asking someone to sit down and unpack things with them seems harder than the struggles they are going through. We have also done a s**t job as a society of making mental health a priority and are trained through very specific profitable systems that mental health work comes last, after everyone else's needs are taken care of and met.
I don’t blame any client. For anything. Coaches teach you to ask different questions. To look at things from an entirely different perspective. To challenge the status quo or maybe even to believe in something you weren’t able to believe in before. Like yourself. This is the first time in my whole life I do not have a contingency plan. I don’t know what direction I want to go. It is completely unchartered territory for me. It feels weird. Strange. Scary. Void. A lot of different things honestly.
There are a handful of people on the planet right now who have heard me utter the words, “I don’t know if I want to be a coach anymore.” None of them have responded, “well, what do you want to be?” “Or what else would you do?” They have mostly listened and maybe felt a little melancholy about the statement. They know they can’t solve this puzzle for me. They know I have to figure this out on my own. And I know I was not doing that by walking around pretending like the last year has been normal because it hasn’t. And calling myself a coach right now feels a bit fraudulent.
I know I have helped people. I know I have changed lives. I don’t need a single soul on the planet to tell me that. I know that. And I am grateful for every single solitary human who has come into my life to seek guidance. You have changed me and helped me in more ways than I can express. Everything changed when trying to help people was met with silence. Everything changed when I started being ignored. Everything changed when the universe shifted on its axis and relationships I had spent years fostering just started to fade into the sunset. Quietly. Like another experience that I witnessed in my life. No goodbye. Just silence. The reasons don’t matter and they more than likely have nothing to do with me. Or maybe they do, that is honestly none of my business. How someone else feels about me.
Maybe it's PTSD. Maybe my coaching career has felt like an exact replica of watching my mom disappear. And I left that experience not having a damn clue what was next. All I could do was just put one foot in front of the other.
I don’t know what the future will bring. I don’t know if I will still be calling myself a life coach in a month, or 6 months or a year. I have no crystal ball.
One of my favorite authors, Glennon Doyle calls this the "messy middle." The difficult, often unseen process of change, healing, and growth where the most important decisions are made. She encourages people to embrace this stage instead of waiting for a "ta-da!" moment, arguing that it's where one can feel proud, make meaningful changes, and develop grit, grace and strength. The messy middle is not easy, but it's the necessary stage of growth between a beginning and an end. It's where you pull out the "junk" in your life and intentionally put back the healthy, true things.
Regardless of whether I am still calling myself a life coach in the near future, I wouldn't be a very good one if I didn't authentically share that I struggle too. I am human. With human feelings. And a professional who cares very much about the people I work with.
I am wholeheartedly in the messy middle. Not sure what it will look like but I shall see you on the other side...
