Except in the places where I did, which is how I know how much that costs.

My degree is in pre-med chemistry. I was on a track toward medical school and I got off it, because I could not face another seven years of classrooms.

So I went into manufacturing. Chemical, latex, fabrics. I loved the making of things and I could not survive the windowless labs, or the fact that everyone around me had decided this was their last stop. I quit.

I walked into a temp agency. They sent me to a bank. Within a year I was doing work for my boss's boss, who looked at what I was good at and pointed me toward marketing. Marketing turned out to be manufacturing with better clothes. Pull the sample, test the sample, report the sample.

Then one day I went to Pottery Barn to register for my wedding, found out employees got forty percent off, and asked for a job on the spot. I stayed eleven years. I managed a store and dozens of people. It was the first time I was in charge of anything so big, and it was the first time I was coaching without knowing there was a word for it.

When my kids were small, a children's museum was opening in Delaware. I talked my way in through a gala. I facilitated inside a nineteen foot inflatable globe, teaching plate tectonics to hundreds of schools across four states. Six years later I was the Director of Education and had written around four hundred lesson plans.

Then a woman named Cat asked me to write curriculum for her nonprofit. That turned into training facilitators. Then that turned into a role called Program Coach, where I was assigned two camp directors and given one job: find out what they actually want and help them build it. I loved it more than anything I had ever done. The next year every director asked for me, so they put me in charge of coaching all the coaches.

That was where I learned the phrase “change the narrative”. It is still on a post it note that I have moved from laptop to laptop for over a decade.

The part I was ashamed of

For years I looked at that list and saw a mess. Choppy. A woman who could not stick with anything. When a friend first told me I was a Life Coach, my honest reaction was: how could I possibly coach anyone on life when mine has been this scattered.

Then I sat down and made a different list. Chemistry. Manufacturing. Corporate. Retail. Nonprofit. Education. And not for six months each, for years each.

That is not scattered. That is range. There is almost no room I cannot read and almost no person whose work I cannot understand from the inside.

I had to coach myself through that one. Most of what I teach, I have needed to learn first. Change the Narrative.

Why adventure, why now

I am fifty one. I have two children who are nearly adults, parents I care for, and a lot of people who call me when things go sideways. I know exactly what it is to be the reliable one.

And I know, looking back at every real leap I have taken, that the growth was never in the comfortable part. It was in the part where I did not know if it would work.

Most people stumble into that by accident. I want to help you do it on purpose.