Why Life Coaching?
Nearly fourteen years ago I stood outside the door of my soon-to-be new advisor aka the Head of the Psych Department as he looked down at me sternly and said, “If you become a psych major you’re going to have to go to grad school.” I nodded. “Yes, I know.” He narrowed his eyes. “What do you wanna do?” Nineteen-year-old me looked up at him and said, “I want to be a counselor for teens and young adults.” Translation: I want to help people who have experienced what I’ve experienced. He shrugged, said “okay,” put my transfer paper up against the door of his office and scribbled on it, and thus I became a psych major.
The cliff notes version of the next four years? I fell in love with personality psychology, applied to grad school for that instead of counseling, (a girl coming from a school whose Psych Department was a part of the School of Education, squished onto the second floor of the Divinity school whose professors did not participate in any research applying for a position at 3 of the best programs in the country for a specialty that only 20 universities even offered… I was a bit naive.) When I didn’t get accepted, I landed in a perpetual spiral of trying to figure out what I wanted to do in life, and sometimes it feels like I’ve lived nine lives already since then.
Just about seven years ago I found myself working in a salon for the first time and I quickly became enamored with the beauty industry. I worked in and then managed that salon for two years and then managed another salon for a little over two years, and without even realizing it began to experience what coaching looked like. I learned all about goal setting and breaking down goals into achievable pieces. I supported stylists as they worked towards achieving their goals, and even began educating on things like product sales and social media marketing to support them in meeting those goals.
And every so often, I would feel a pull to use my psych degree, and consider going back to school to get my counseling license.
While managing salons, I was also growing my creative services business—selling art and creating for local small business owners. In 2019, I took that business full-time and for pretty much exactly one year, that was my whole everything. Personal life challenges and creative exhaustion combined, and in early 2020 I went back to the beauty industry part-time. But just before I did that, at the end of 2019, I attended a retreat for creative female entrepreneurs and met several different coaches there. It planted a seed that I didn’t even realize had been planted and I left knowing one thing—the writing I was sharing on Instagram about self-love, my body love journey, mental health, and personal development was what I was meant to continue doing.
As 2020 continued, I couldn’t ignore this pull I felt to be doing something more with my life. To be pouring into a career that would support others on similar journeys to my own. I finally admitted that what I really wanted was to become a life coach. In the first week of 2021, after obsessively reading the Beautiful You Life Coaching Academy website over and over for weeks, I finally decided to take a chance on myself and sign up for the course.
It felt like everything I’d been called towards since I was a teenager—supporting others on their life journeys—finally clicked into place. Every single aspect of the six month course absolutely lit me up. Connecting with my fellow trainees on Zoom every other week.. learning all about how to support someone in setting inspiring goals.. learning about how to craft a heart-and-soul-led business.. I loved every minute of it.
It took over a decade after graduating for me to finally realize what I was meant to do with my passion for psychology, but now that I’m here, I know this is my calling and my purpose. I just needed to gather some of that whole “life experience” stuff first.
