We were lucky to catch up with Tess Vergara recently and have shared our conversation below.

Tess, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you tell us about an important lesson you learned while working at a prior job?

One of the most important lessons I learned in a job came during what I now call my “cosmic 2×4” year: 2009

I believed that if I performed with integrity, carried responsibility, and showed up consistently, the ground beneath me would support me.

It didn’t. It cracked. And I unraveled.

Only later did I realize how much I had tied my sense of power and security to other people’s leadership and decisions.

That same year, my personal life reflected the same lesson. On Easter Sunday, a rental property I owned was destroyed in an arson fire set by the tenant I had allowed to stay through winter. In both places, I had chosen compassion. In both, I felt blindsided, betrayed, and unsafe.

By Christmas Eve, I tore my ACL in a ski accident. For the first time all year, I physically could not keep moving. Finally, I had space to grieve the fire, the death of my boss and confidante, and the loss of control I had been wrestling with

Three monumental events bookended by Easter and Christmas were God’s wake-up call. I just did not yet understand what and why this was happening to me.

What became clear to me is that burnout was not about workload. High-capacity leaders do not burn out because we are overworked. We burn out because we keep forcing what is no longer aligned and abandon ourselves in the process. I call this a split, when the physical, emotional, mental, and purpose-driven parts of a leader fall out of alignment.

Pressure doesn’t break leaders. It reveals where integration hasn’t happened yet. That realization eventually became the foundation of what I now call No More Split.

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 Tess Vergara, founder of Soul Powered Leaders and author of No More Split and Capacity Under Pressure. I work with high-capacity leaders who carry significant responsibility and refuse to stay split under pressure.

Before this, I spent three decades as a Financial Controller. I lived inside numbers, compliance, oversight, and accountability. I understood risk, structure, and what it means to be responsible for outcomes.

In many ways, I still am an accountant. I just do accounting for the soul.

I discovered this work when everything in my life cracked at once. Doctors suggested antidepressants. Friends suggested therapy. Everyone had a solution. My soul would not allow me to numb or bypass what I was feeling. I knew the answers had to come from within.

I had to confront what burnout really was. A huge part of that was coaching myself back to alignment daily, moment by moment. Soul Powered Leaders grew from that work.

Today, I provide private coaching and leadership development for leaders who want to expand capacity without sacrificing their health, freedom, or integrity. The work integrates strategy and soul. Structure and identity. External outcomes and internal coherence.

I help leaders identify where they are overriding themselves and rebuild internal safety so leadership is no longer driven by fear, overextension, or external validation.

What sets my work apart is that I do not separate strategy from soul. I understand the operational side of leadership and the internal accounting that sustains it. I understand systems, and I understand the human being responsible for carrying them.

I am most proud of helping leaders reclaim their soul power without abandoning their calling. I am proud that my work does not glorify exhaustion. And I am proud that Soul Powered Leaders is built on lived experience, not theory.

If you are encountering my work for the first time: you do not have to fracture to lead. You do not have to trade your well-being for success. You can expand your capacity and remain whole.

That is the work.

Reclaim your capacity. Lead fully. Remain whole.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Resilience is not the word that comes to mind when I think about a season in my life when I did not want to be here anymore. But I kept following the nudges. I did not want another cosmic blow. I needed to shut up and listen.

That was excruciating for someone who only knew how to go, go, go. By then, the exhaustion had reached a level sleep could not repair. Safety no longer felt solid. Trust had fractured. The rug got pulled out from underneath.

Resilience, for me, was not pushing harder. It was choosing to stay. Refusing to numb. Refusing to disappear, even though that was what I wanted most. Refusing to let bitterness take root. It meant confronting how depleted I was and being willing to undo the patterns that brought me there.

It required determined courage. I had to examine where I had given my power away. I had to rebuild stability from within instead of waiting for the outside to restore it. I had to remain with myself when everything in me wanted escape.

Resilience became a spiritual discipline. It was moment to moment alignment. Learning to recognize my own signals before they became sirens. Rebuilding self trust one aligned decision at a time.

Over time, that self trust sharpened into clarity. Not because circumstances magically changed, but because I did. I rebuilt my soul power from the inside out.

That season reshaped how I lead and how I serve. Today, I recognize the subtle signs of erosion in high capacity leaders long before collapse. I help them strengthen internally so they never have to reach the depth I reached.

For me, resilience was choosing to remain. And then rebuilding from alignment.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Early in my coaching journey, I subcontracted with a business development company as a wealth strategist. I coached around mindset, wealth creation, and accountability.

At the same time, a paid coach advised me, “You were an accountant. You’re a money coach.” It made sense. Together, we developed a signature talk titled Answered Prayers – Your Personal Prescription to Money in the Bank.

For a while, everything aligned.

Then two things happened at once.

I could no longer align with the pressure-driven tactics common in parts of the personal development space. At the same time, my private clients began saying, “This isn’t money coaching. This is soul work.”

That collision made the shift from money coaching to soul coaching much easier than the original career shift from accounting into coaching.

In 2020, I stepped fully into what the work had already become: Soul Powered Leaders.

The lesson was simple. The pivot happens when you refuse to stay split. For me, living divided between who I was and how I was working became unbearable. There is no peace, freedom, or joy in an inner split.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.tessvergara.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TessVergaraSoulPoweredExecutiveCoach/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tessvergarasoulpoweredexecutivecoach/
• Other: https://www.tessvergara.com/store

Image Credits

Modie A-more, Bobby Ramilo Amagan