There definitely was, this defining moment took place in 2019 and gave me the push I needed to start my business.

For about 6 years before I started my coaching practice, I had been writing a blog about everything that I help people with now: self-love, emotional mastery, open-mindedness, and growing through the adversities and traumas of life. In my heart, I knew I wanted to help people more directly as a coach, but I didn’t feel ready to make that leap, and I wasn’t sure exactly how to either.

Friends would often come to me for help with different challenges, either in their life or relationships, and in 2019 a good friend in San Diego asked me for advice regarding something he had been carrying with him for over a decade. We made plans to talk over lunch, but little did I know how much impact this exchange would have on me.

I listened as he described a serious injury that took him from one of the best runners in San Diego – ranked #2 at the time – to barely being able to run, in just the blink of an eye. This crushed his dreams of competition and his scholarship opportunities. He recovered only to repeat the same exact injury a few years later in college. Though he healed physically, he never quite got back to the top of his sport, and he never truly processed those traumatic experiences and the deep emotional pain that came with them.

After listening to his experiences, I guided him to expand his perspective of those traumatic events with some questions to reflect on. Questions about how he thought and felt towards his body at the moment of those injuries, how he viewed the trajectory of his life as a result of those events, and perhaps most importantly, to think of all the good opportunities and experiences that have happened since those injuries and to ponder whether they would have happened if he hadn’t had them. I left him with a question to journal about later, and we each went back to work.

All in all, it was about 30 minutes, just a simple conversation from my perspective, but the next day he texted me a photo of the journal entry that he wrote in a coffee shop, saying that he couldn’t help but burst out in tears of joy while writing it. The relief he felt as he finally let go of that emotional baggage and began to fully accept and love himself was just that intense.

Just reading his words brought me a truly indescribable sense of joy and gratitude that still brings tears to my eyes today. Money can’t buy that feeling – it’s the reward for creating a deep and lasting impact on someone’s life. That was the moment I knew that I needed to get into coaching and help as many people as I can.

I’m an emotional health coach who helps anxious adults master their emotions and build better relationships with self-love. My approach is very holistic, I help my clients improve their health from all angles at the same time by teaching balanced nutrition and fitness habits alongside the inner work. To give a better picture of who I am and why I help people the way that I do, let me share my journey with you – emotional health wasn’t always my forte.

Fourteen years ago, I came to the big realization that all the depression and anxiety I had been experiencing throughout middle school and high school was a symptom of years of repressed emotions that I had pushed away since I was little. In fact, I was so disconnected from my emotions that when a therapist asked me how I was feeling, I could only think about how I should be feeling based on logic! That was the beginning of my journey to emotional mastery – I started from scratch.

It wasn’t easy. There was much pain and difficulty as I worked to build emotional awareness, and learned to become comfortable being vulnerable – yet every challenge brought with it twice as much growth. I dove into books on psychology, consciousness, religion, and spirituality, taking what resonated as true within me and merging it all into my personal philosophy.

Being naturally curious and inclined toward abstract thinking helped me greatly through all of this. As I opened up my capacity for intuition through writing and reflection, I began to share my ideas on self-love, emotional mastery, and personal growth through my blog, Project Self, which I started back in 2014.

After 7 years of writing, I decided to turn Project Self into a coaching practice where I help anxious adults master their emotions and build better relationships with self-love.

Through my flagship program, Wholesome You Academy, I teach my clients how to accept and honor emotions healthily so they don’t linger and cause unneeded suffering, how to fully accept and love oneself, how to grow through trauma and adversity to become more resilient with inner peace and calm, and how to build balanced fitness and nutrition habits that create optimal health and longevity. If needed, I also teach how to shift to a more secure attachment style so my clients can create healthy relationships they can be confident in.

I’m so proud of the huge transformations that my clients are experiencing and how that’s impacting everyone around them. One of my recent clients has gotten her whole family on board – they’ve gone from living in stress and anxiety to living with a sense of ease and excitement in just 3 short months! In her words: “For the first time in my life I feel like I have control over my emotions and am able to process the hard stuff in a healthy way.”

The most important things for success in coaching are lived experience and empathy, which go hand-in-hand. You could have all the book knowledge in the world, but without those two skills, it would be very difficult to connect with clients, make them feel heard, and establish mutual trust.

Trust is a crucial foundation for any relationship, but especially in coach-client relationships. Otherwise, there will be communication breakdowns, and the client will be unlikely to follow through with the changes you’re helping them with.

Yes, I absolutely would! Not only that, but if I could go back I would start my coaching practice sooner. My passion for personal growth and helping others has deep roots within my being – I was already reading books on Zen and other eastern philosophies in elementary school. The mind has always fascinated me, there’s so much to explore. We’ve only really touched the surface when it comes to understanding ourselves and what we are capable of.

Unfortunately, mental health is an issue of pandemic proportions, and it’s only getting worse. As a country, we do an extremely poor job of setting our youth up for success. There’s little, if any, education about how to healthily process emotions. People are mainly left to fend for themselves when it comes to dealing with difficult emotions. If I can help, even just a little, it’s all worth it.