We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Melissa Treuman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Melissa below.
Melissa , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
They say we teach best what we most need to learn. That sentiment is at the core of how and why I became a leadership coach. After working for years in the nonprofit sector, I found myself deeply passionate about the work, but I kept encountering the same challenges across different organizations—struggling cultures, distrust, burnout, poor communication, and the list went on. What frustrated me most was that despite the fact that these cultures were often problematic, the people working in these organizations were among the kindest, most passionate, and hardest-working individuals you could ever meet.
I kept hearing that nonprofits were known for being “messy” and “dysfunctional” and that my experiences were just par for the course, but I refused to accept that. I knew that the compassionate people who were drawn to this work, and the causes they championed deserved better.
In the early days of my nonprofit career, I was also deeply focused on my own personal growth, routinely examining my beliefs, behaviors, and the patterns that were either serving me or holding me back. I began to see that the challenges I was facing in my professional life mirrored many of the struggles I’d experienced in my personal life. The more I spoke to colleagues, the more I realized I wasn’t alone. Just as we tend to gravitate toward relationships that echo our early experiences, we also find ourselves drawn to work environments that reflect what feels familiar. And when we continue playing the same roles, we continue creating the same outcomes.
While interpersonal challenges are not unique to the nonprofit sector, I do believe they are disproportionately amplified there. Nonprofits often attract sensitive, caretaking individuals—many of whom have faced their own hardships. This is not a bad thing; it’s part of what drives us to help others. But without the deep, ongoing personal work needed to confront our own beliefs and patterns, we can struggle with things like healthy communication, setting boundaries, navigating conflict, and advocating for ourselves. These issues don’t just affect our personal lives—they also hinder our professional success and, ultimately, the impact of the causes we care about so deeply.
After more than 15 years of supporting others through these struggles in 12-step recovery rooms, I decided to pursue a coaching certification that integrates parts work, inner child work, and energy work. I wanted to create a coaching model that addressed not just the tactics and actions necessary for success, but also the underlying factors that hold us back from taking those actions in the first place. Because, as I’ve learned, the blocks that prevent us from moving forward often extend into multiple areas of our lives.
Today, I’m proud to offer my clients a powerful model that blends traditional leadership coaching with transformational tools for healing and growth—empowering them to lead with courage, integrity, and strength in every area of their lives.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m an Integrative Leadership Coach with 15 years of leadership experience in the nonprofit sector, and I provide coaching and support to individuals who want to become better leaders in both their professional and personal lives. I believe that we are all leaders—whether we preside over organizations, families, teams, or our own precious lives. And as Brené Brown says, “Who we are is how we lead.”
Many of us struggle as leaders, not because we lack knowledge or skills, but because we’re still carrying around old beliefs, outdated stories, and limiting programming. What’s tricky is that most of us aren’t even aware of it—I know I wasn’t. We think that, as adults, we’re running our lives, but in reality, our decisions and actions are often driven by very young, unskilled parts of ourselves.
I help individuals become happier, healthier, and more effective leaders in all areas of their lives by identifying and transforming the parts of them that are stuck, and helping them adopt new habits and skills that align with who they are becoming and the lives they want to lead—today.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Yes, I was struggling in a job where I felt like I was consistently overachieving, but wasn’t receiving the recognition I believed I deserved. This job had become my world. I put it above everything else, and as a result, the rest of my life suffered. I wanted to make a real impact at the organization, but I wasn’t in a position to do so, which left me feeling burnt out and resentful.
Fortunately, because I was doing a lot of personal development work, I eventually came to understand that the person responsible for my suffering was me. No one was asking me to make my job my entire life. I wasn’t a victim of the situation—I was a volunteer. I was choosing to be miserable.
One day, I woke up and decided to focus on what I could control: how I wanted to spend my one precious life. I couldn’t control how others viewed or treated me, but I could control my own actions. So, as challenging as it was at first, I began prioritizing a better work-life balance. I stopped trying to be a martyr and focused on doing a good job because I wanted to, not because I expected something in return. In my free time, I turned my attention to improving my life and circumstances, independent of anyone else’s approval or validation.
It was this decision that ultimately set me on the path to coaching.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I love this question because I actually “learned” this lesson through my own experience with the coaching model I now use. Before I began doing parts work, I held on to many entrenched beliefs that I never questioned. I simply assumed they were truths. It never occurred to me that they were just stories I’d told myself, based on my own subjective experiences.
One of the biggest stories I clung to was the belief that people would only like me if I stayed small and unassuming. For years, I essentially hid. I hid at work, in my personal life—I was terrified that someone might think I thought too highly of myself and, as a result, would try to take me down. I believed that my happiness was threatening to others, so I tamped it down. I tamped it down so much that, for years, I struggled to even find it.
Through parts work, I realized that this was a very old story that had formed when I was young, and for good reason at the time. But I came to understand that this belief was no longer relevant—it wasn’t representative of the world at large. Most people genuinely want to see others succeed, and if they don’t, it’s more a reflection of their own insecurities than a judgment of us. Furthermore, when we expect the worst in people, we often experience it; but when we expect the best, we tend to experience that, too.
My adult self didn’t realize that I’d been carrying this story for decades. But once I connected to the part of me holding onto it, I was able to rewire that belief and adopt new, healthier behaviors.
Too often, I meet people who have tried traditional coaching or therapy for years, but still haven’t experienced the shifts they hoped for. I remind them: Information does not equal Transformation. We don’t struggle with a lack of knowledge; we struggle to let that knowledge land because of the emotional blocks and limiting beliefs we carry.
If you’re ready to break through those barriers and step into your fullest potential, I invite you to book a free consultation today at www.melissalorinleadership.com
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.melissalorinleadership.com
- Instagram: @Melisst15
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MelissaTreuman
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissatreuman
Image Credits
Christina Turino for all three photos