“I wasn't looking for a career change. I was looking for an improv class.”
A client had sent me a LinkedIn profile for a woman in San Francisco who ran an improv group. I read it the way you read something you're half hoping won't matter. But then I stopped. Read it again. She had spent 15 years in healthcare, the kind of career where the path forward is always visible….but then she just left. She became an executive coach.
I felt something shift in my chest. How had she done that?
I had been circling that question my entire life without knowing how to ask it. Since college, I had known I was drawn to psychological work; I had intended to become a Jungian psychotherapist. Years later, I went back to school for my Master's in Social Work.. Got within four credits of finishing. Couldn't make the field hours work. I filed it away. Another door I'd cracked open and quietly closed. I told myself the timing wasn't right. I let obligations pull me back into the grind.
But here was this woman who had just done it. She simply changed her career.
So, I did something that surprised me. I reached out to a total stranger and said, “Hi, you don't know me, but...”
She wrote back. Said yes to coffee. And sitting across from her on a cool, gray morning, one December in the Financial District, I asked the question I hadn't known to ask: What is this coaching thing?
Three weeks later, I was sitting in my first coaching class at CTI. That afternoon, driving home across the Golden Gate Bridge, I cried in the car.
Not from sadness. From recognition.
The restlessness you feel is not a malfunction.
It is the self, insisting on more than you have given it.
"I cried in the car. Not from sadness. From recognition.”
What I recognized, in that moment, was the full weight of what I'd been carrying. I had spent 25 years building an exceptional career in media sales, rising from sales executive to VP of a small rep firm, to founding my own company, counting Esquire, HGTV, and Town & Country among my clients. By every external measure, I had succeeded. And the further I climbed, the more hollow it felt.
What I hadn't been able to name was this: the gifts that made me effective in sales were never really sales gifts. My ability to hear what people weren't saying, to feel the subtext beneath what was expressed, to understand what was driving someone's behavior - - those came from somewhere older and deeper. They had been pressed into the service of revenue goals when what they were built for was something else entirely.
I had studied psychology in college because I was fascinated by a question I couldn't stop asking: why do people make choices that work against them? I had found Carl Jung and never fully left him. I understood, intellectually, that the unconscious shapes everything - every stuck pattern, every repeated dynamic, every moment of self-sabotage we attribute to bad luck or circumstance. I understood it. I just hadn't yet found the form through which to work with it.
I also understood it personally. I could see my own unconscious patterns operating against the very things I said I wanted. I could see the fear beneath my inertia. What I didn't have was a guide, someone who could help me see what I couldn't see from inside my own life.
The leaders I work with are not failing. They are, by most measures, succeeding. They are also operating from psychological patterns they cannot fully see - patterns that were adaptive once and are now quietly limiting them. The restlessness they feel is not a malfunction. It is information. It is the self, insisting on more than what it has been allowed.
I know that restlessness from the inside. I also know what becomes possible when you finally stop managing it and start listening to it.
I found my way through it. That's why I know how to help you find yours.
"As you start to walk on the way, the way appears"
-Rumi