◈ TRUECOACH NEWS · ARTICLE 1 OF 6
Six weeks ago I was sitting in the same chair I'd sat in for eight years, staring at the same spreadsheet, feeling the same hollow emptiness I'd learned to call normal. I was 34 years old, a senior analyst at a financial services firm in Chicago, and I was disappearing.
Not in a dramatic way. I was still showing up. Still hitting my numbers. Still smiling in meetings. But something essential had quietly switched off. My relationship with my partner was held together by routine and politeness. I'd stopped exercising three years ago. I hadn't laughed — really laughed — in months. I'd started waking up at 3am with a tight chest and no idea why.
My colleague Maya had been seeing a life coach for about a year. I'd been skeptical — it sounded like expensive therapy for people who had too much money and not enough problems. But one day after a particularly soul-crushing leadership meeting, she said something that stuck with me: "You look like someone who's been slowly turning down the volume on yourself."
She showed me TrueCoach. I booked a free discovery call that night, mostly to prove to myself it was nonsense.
My coach — a former corporate attorney turned ICF-certified coach based in Austin — opened the call by asking: "What would have to be true for you to feel like your life was fully yours?"
I didn't have an answer. I hadn't been asked a question like that in years. I'd been asked about targets and timelines and quarterly projections. Not this.
The first session was hard. Not in a dramatic, breakthrough-movie way. Hard in the way that honesty is hard. My coach asked me to describe my ideal day in five years. I started talking about a promotion, a better apartment. She stopped me.
"That's what you think you should want. What do you actually want?"
I sat with that silence for a long time. What came out surprised me. I wanted to write. I'd wanted to write since university. I'd buried it so completely I'd almost forgotten it existed.
She didn't say "go be a writer." She asked: "What's in the way?"
We spent week two unpacking the fear. Not career fear — the fear underneath that. The belief, installed somewhere in my childhood, that wanting things for yourself was selfish. That security was the highest value. That the responsible thing was to stay small.
My coach had me write down every story I told myself about why I couldn't change. The list filled two pages. She read them back to me and asked, one by one: "Is this actually true, or is this something you decided was true a long time ago?"
Almost none of them were actually true.
Something shifted physically in week three. I started running again — not because my coach told me to, but because I noticed I was angrier when I didn't move. I started sleeping better. My partner noticed something was different. I was more present. Less defended.
"You seem like you're actually here," she said one evening. That hit harder than any performance review.
My coach pushed me to have a conversation I'd been avoiding with my manager — about where I actually saw my career going, and what I'd need to feel engaged again. I'd been avoiding it for two years.
I had the conversation. It didn't go perfectly. But having it clarified something important: I'd been blaming the job for my unhappiness, when the real issue was that I'd stopped making choices about my own life.
By week five, the writing thing had moved from a vague wish to a concrete plan. I'd started getting up at 5:30am to write for an hour before work. I'd completed 8,000 words of something that might become a book. More importantly, I'd started to trust my own instincts again.
My coach asked me: "If you weren't afraid, what would you do?" The answer came immediately: I'd give myself one year to build something of my own.
I handed in my notice on a Tuesday. Not impulsively — I had three months of savings, a clear plan, and for the first time in years, I wasn't making a decision from fear. I was making it from choice.
I'm not going to tell you it was easy or that everything worked out perfectly. What I can tell you is that I hadn't felt like myself in so long I'd forgotten what that felt like. Six weeks of coaching didn't fix my life. It helped me remember that my life was mine to fix.
If you're sitting in the chair I was sitting in — doing the math on whether coaching is worth it — let me save you some time: the question isn't whether you can afford coaching. It's whether you can afford another year of the version of yourself you don't recognize. Find your coach on TrueCoach.
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