My Approach to Life Coaching for Women
For overachievers who know better and still can’t seem to do better.
If you’re an overachiever, you’ve probably listened to the podcasts. You’ve been in therapy. You may know, intellectually, what your patterns and unhelpful loops are. And that hasn’t stopped you from doing them.
That’s not a character flaw. Insight alone is not sufficient to make a noticeable change. Willpower, affirmations, new habits, none of it is enough by itself.
What does make a difference is embodying that knowledge. This means putting it into your body, truly making it yours, trusting yourself, valuing yourself and, dare I say, loving yourself.
The good news is that we are talking about your body. You don’t need to wait for other people to change their behavior so that you can feel better.
You can take responsibility today for how you’ve been showing up in the world up to now and start showing up differently.
Personal responsibility and self-worth are the cornerstones of this drastic change, rooted in psychology and, to the extent you are open, spirituality.
My promise to you is this work is only based on what YOU can tangibly do yourself. There are no energetic blueprints or aura cleansings here.
And the best part is you don’t have to go through this alone.
What’s Actually Keeping You Stuck
Most women who come to work with me are self-aware and introspective. And yet they feel stuck because they don’t know how to function differently without upending their life (or without other people changing their behavior first).
I’ve been there myself and know this path intimately.
The unfathomable idea of saying no to a request or of asking for help. The resentment against your loved ones or colleagues who don’t see how much you are doing behind the scenes, all without appreciation or support.
And the bone-deep exhaustion that no amount of sleep or vacation can fix. You don’t have to live this way.
I can usually identify what’s keeping you stuck within the first conversation. Not because I have a magic formula, but because I’m not inside it. It’s the only way to see the blind spots of the Overachiever Pattern.
You can’t read the label from inside the jar.
And that’s what changes things quickly.
Life Coaching vs Therapy:
How My Approach Is Different
Therapy is valuable. I’ve been a therapist myself. I used to watch people come in week after week, gain real insight, and still go home and make only marginal changes.
Most women go to therapy by default. That’s all they know.
The expectation is that the therapist will always be on your side and get horrified at how others are disappointing you. Who doesn’t want to talk to a supportive listener for months or years.
Who doesn’t want to process their feelings and learn where they come from, with no end in sight, so there is no urgency to act differently. Besides, therapists are only trained to get you to your baseline: surviving, coping, functioning.
Life coaching, or specifically what I do, is focused on addressing the obstacles standing in the way of thriving. The solutions are often obvious: let go of resentment, stop feeling guilty, say no.
But if you don’t address the obstacles to the obvious, you will feel like you’ve failed. So we go straight for the obstacles.
Most clients walk away from our first conversation knowing something about themselves they’ve never been able to name before. This doesn’t take as long as you’ve been told.
What the Work Looks Like
There are two things I come back to with every client, regardless of what brings them in.
Not blame. Responsibility. There’s a difference.
Most of the women I work with are exhausted partly because they’ve been waiting, consciously or not, for someone else to change so they can feel better, or because people pleasing has them saying yes when they want to say no. A partner, a colleague, a parent.
When you stop making your wellbeing dependent on other people’s behavior and start taking full ownership of your choices and reactions, everything changes. Not because the other people change. Because you stop being at the mercy of whether they do or not.
Making choices based on healthy self-interest (not selfishness!) might upset someone else.
You don’t have to stop caring that they are upset. You just have to learn a new experience: they can be upset with your decisions AND you are still okay, you are still worthy of being loved and accepted.
Everything I teach is something you can do yourself. Success results in not needing our meetings on a weekly basis for years.
The goal is that you walk away with the tools and a meaningful transformation, so you can choose yourself and give to others without resentment. (This is not about learning rigid boundaries that damage relationships.)
And you are always welcome back for a quick tune-up.
Where I am Coming From
I spent years as a corporate lawyer before I became a therapist, and then a coach.
I’ve been exactly where my clients are: taking care of everything, saying yes to everyone, and achieving things that looked impressive from the outside while feeling hollow on the inside.
It took me years to unravel my identity tied to prestige and performance in order to become the person I am today: someone who knows and appreciates who she is, not needing external validation, and someone who values relationships but no longer at the expense of my relationship with myself.
Self-abandonment was the pattern underneath my own exhaustion, and learning to stop was what made the difference.
On the one hand, I wish I had a guide to help me through my transition.
On the other, I know that my long and challenging transition was there to serve a purpose: for me to discover a new calling, a passion to help women stop being a good girl and over-functioning for others to the point of exhaustion, and to discover what it is like to care about oneself, to be relaxed enough to want intimacy, and to give to others without resentment.
What I’ve learned over the years is that this work creates changes in your thoughts, feelings and behaviors that radiate to multiple tangible areas of your life: how you relate to your loved ones, work, other people, finances, and more.
You’ll be asking yourself why you hadn’t done it sooner.
What Changes
Here’s what shifts when this works.
- You can say no to someone without spending the next three hours replaying it.
- You stop snapping at the people you love because you’re no longer overfunctioning, carrying responsibility for what isn’t yours.
- You stop running on mom guilt or partner guilt or work guilt.
- You make choices from your own values instead of guilt and obligation.
- You know where you end and someone else begins.
- Your relationships get more authentic because you’re being your true self in them.
- You treat yourself more compassionately and you stop being irritated by everyone who isn’t behaving the way you want them to, including no longer reacting when someone cuts you off on the highway.
- You learn to stay in your lane and let others be in theirs.
This isn’t a personality transplant. It’s clarity about who you actually are, where your responsibilities end, and what you desire, plus the capacity to act from that, even when it disappoints someone.
Ready to get yourself out of stuckness?
Book a free discovery call.
In one conversation, you’ll walk away knowing more about your patterns than you probably have in years of trying to figure it out on your own (or in therapy).
Book a Discovery Call →