My Path to This Work

DIFFERENT CHAPTERS OF MY LIFE HAVE SHAPED THE WORK I DO TODAY

I became independent early, moving out on my own as a senior in high school. Soon afterward, I found my way into the insurance industry—a field that offered me continual opportunities to learn, grow, and take on greater responsibility.

Throughout my 22-year career, I often caught myself saying, “I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up.” I meant it. Although I valued much of what my career gave me, I could not shake the feeling that I was being pulled toward work that felt more personally meaningful.

What Brought Me to Coaching

As my career progressed, I naturally gravitated toward mentoring and developing others, which eventually led to leadership opportunities. Wanting to become the best leader I could be also led me to work with coaches and deepen my commitment to personal development.

When I was offered a larger leadership role, I expected it to feel like the natural next step. But as the conversations progressed, I could feel my energy fading. The increased operational responsibilities would take me further away from the part of leadership I found most meaningful: helping people think differently, recognize possibilities, and move through complicated situations with greater clarity.

It became clear that supporting people could no longer be only one part of my work. With that realization, I began translating my experience into a coaching practice of my own.

Coaching Became a Bridge

Coaching gave me a way to bring the most meaningful parts of my professional life closer to the center of my work. It also created space for me to return to something I had loved for much longer: writing.

I have always communicated most naturally through writing. It is how I make sense of experience, examine assumptions, question the systems and expectations we inherit, and give language to things people often feel but struggle to articulate.

I now understand that coaching was not simply a new destination. It was the bridge between the professional life I had built and the broader body of work I am creating today.

How My Path Shapes My Work

My professional life taught me how much I value helping people examine complicated situations, see possibilities they may not yet see for themselves, question assumptions, and make thoughtful decisions.

My personal life taught me something equally important: our choices rarely exist in isolation. They are shaped by our earliest relationships, the roles we learned to play, the responsibilities we were given, and the stories we came to believe about ourselves.

The responsible one. The caretaker. The peacekeeper. The achiever. The independent one. Even the difficult one.

These roles can become so familiar that we carry them into adulthood without recognizing how much they continue to influence us. They can shape what we believe we owe other people, what we tolerate, the relationships we choose, how we respond to conflict, and whether we trust ourselves to make decisions that others may not understand.

Where My Work Is Now

Today, I write and coach about family-of-origin experiences, parentification, attachment patterns, and the ways our earliest relationships can continue to shape our family relationships, romantic partnerships, friendships, and relationship with ourselves.

Parentification remains an important part of my lens—particularly how becoming responsible too early can affect identity, boundaries, guilt, self-trust, and the belief that caring for others requires sacrificing yourself.

I do not believe growth requires repairing every relationship or maintaining connections that continually cost us our well-being. My role is not to decide whether someone should reconcile, redefine a relationship, create distance, or leave it behind. It is to help them understand what shaped them, clarify what they need, and move forward in a way that feels more aligned with who they are now.

If you are beginning to recognize how earlier relationships may still be shaping your life—and you want to consider what belongs in the life you are intentionally building—I would welcome the opportunity to connect.