SAUSALITO | 04.01.2026

On a spring morning, deep into the pandemic, I began my coaching practice — five years ago today. I sat at my desk to begin my first coaching session, not knowing what was to come. It was a time of transition and uncertainty. I had left academic anthropology, a career I had spent 14 years training for. I wanted to create something that combined the insights of anthropology and Nonviolent Communication (NVC), but I was unclear about what that could be.

I was also alone for the first time in years. My marriage had ended four months earlier. My ex-husband and I were beginning a choppy, heart-wrenching, and sometimes bemusing process of shifting our relationship into the quirky friendship it has now become. Alongside this, my savings were dwindling, and I was feeling genuinely scared.

Yet, even in that fear, one thing was clear. I knew I wanted to bring a process of listening that had captivated me to help people access needs they hadn’t been able to see. I had spent years researching alienation. I knew what estrangement from oneself and one’s environment felt like. I left the academy wondering what could be possible if microcosms were built for people to feel safe and free to discover what they truly wanted to create in their lives. Through teaching and facilitating workshops, I began to get a sense of this. Yet, something was missing in the group work: I couldn’t figure out how to help each person navigate the deep internal barriers that showed up, creating eddies that kept them stuck. On the suggestion of a friend, I turned towards individual coaching to see if anything would shift.

That morning, I started working with my first client, entering into a deep state of listening. By the end of the call, from an inexplicable place of inner-knowing, I heard an unambiguous yes. This was the direction to move in.

Recognizing True North

How do you know that something is right for you? What is the embodied experience of encountering the right fit?

When I recall the moments in my life where I have felt this, the word that comes to mind is resonance. My first session was permeated by surprise at the strange mix of total newness and a feeling of coming home. As the session unfolded, I touched upon a sense of possibility that was different from anything I had experienced before, yet at the same time, listening led me into a process I loved and was so familiar that it drew me into my deepest self. I was absorbed in the experience, intensely present, aware of each moment, and attuned to the tiniest fluctuations of emotion within my client and between us. Emptied of all thoughts and ruminations, I felt no need to direct the experience. I eased into a state of openness to what was unfolding, finding the right questions to ask, sensing what was needed along the way. As I would experience in subsequent sessions, a breakthrough emerged of its own accord. At the end of the session, I looked out of my window with a kind of silent wonder—this was it.

I often say that love is recognition. The activities, experiences, and relationships that are right for us bring us closer to who we are when we feel aligned with ourselves.

This can come as a surprise. We are often socialized to think that in order to do anything of significance, we have to fix ourselves and become someone different. Coaching has shown me that the opposite is true. Many people, when they discover work they love, a place they want to be, or a person they want to spend time with, experience a powerful sense of connection with who they already are. Something lights up within them, returning them to a deep sense of self—even when that experience is new.

So many times, when my clients turn towards an interest or a line of work that is right for them, I have heard them say, “This doesn’t feel like work.” My hunch is that this is because they had come to associate work with some form of alienation and drudgery, where part of the exhaustion comes from having to force yourself to conform to a set of norms. These norms estrange you from yourself and what you find meaningful. The surprise and delight of the realization “this doesn’t feel like work” is another way of saying “I get to do what I feel organically drawn to and, in doing so, I get to be myself.”

One reason we feel surprised by the sense of homecoming in encountering work or people that connect us with what we love is a fraught relationship we may have with these passions. There might be some part of us that is blocking us from turning towards them.

I often describe the experience of alienation as akin to being locked out of your own house, where the things that matter most to you feel inaccessible. As a result, these passions live within us, sequestered in a corner of ourselves as “impossible dreams”—dreams we defer and tell ourselves we will explore one day. These dreams spark both longing and fear and tend to carry a narrative of impossibility. They activate what the mediator Max Rivers calls “forbidden needs.” These are needs that have remained unmet in our lives. We create stories around them that say: “I don’t get to have this.” Out of protection from the pain of facing an unfulfilled longing, we might tell ourselves we don’t need it, that we can go about life without it. We might convince ourselves that it is the kind of thing others get to enjoy, but it is not for us to experience.

Even if we pursue these passions, we might do so alone or keep them at the periphery of our lives, relegating them to “hobbies.” We might tell ourselves that these interests are arcane, that they set us apart from others, make us strange, and take us further away from the rest of the world. This was certainly the case for me. I kept my growing interest in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to myself throughout graduate school, feeling afraid to share that I was spending more and more time training to learn, and eventually teach, the skills of listening and conflict resolution. For many years, I felt like I was living parallel lives. The one I felt more at home in seemed like it would draw ridicule and make me an outcast in the world of the academy that I had set out to create a life in. For many years, I entertained the thought of doing something that placed NVC at the center of my life, but brushed it aside as an impossible dream. As time passed, I accumulated a laundry list of reasons for this.

Thus my surprise when I discovered it wasn’t true. By the time I had my first coaching session, I had gone through a painful process of telling people I was making a career transition, that I wouldn’t continue as an academic after finishing my PhD. I did encounter the response I had been afraid of—people reacting as if I were throwing my life away—whether or not they explicitly said it. Yet, the ground underneath me had shifted somehow. I had a sense that I was growing roots in a different soil, one that could hold the parts of me that felt aligned with my heart.

Five years later, after coaching many people through career transitions, I have come to see that this fear was not mine alone. It is deeply shared. I work with it every day. We may carry a narrative that the aspects of ourselves that feel central to us, yet remain sequestered from the front stage of our lives, will make us outcasts. Yet, I have seen again and again that the very aspects of ourselves that we think cut us off from others turn out to be our bridge to the world. We discover that our strangeness has a home.

For that bridge to be built outside, we often need to first build one towards ourselves. This requires listening—the kind of listening that sifts through our surface thoughts into our deeper depths. I call it listening for the voice of our unalienated self.

It can be hard to access, as it speaks in a different language from the cacophony in our heads. Like the needle of a compass pointing north, it orients us in a direction. It communicates with us through a flash of an idea, an image, or a spontaneous impulse to take action outside of our ordinary habits. It can come as a feeling of being drawn to something. It can speak as the small voice in our heads that sounds a note of caution. It can emerge as a thought of clarity that provides perspective about something that has left us confused, a revelation where an inner curtain opens to reveal why a situation or relationship played out the way it did, and what our role in it was.

At times, I have heard my clients describe this as a softer side of themselves, a voice that gets drowned out in the rush of life. At times, I have heard them describe it as the aspect of themselves that provides unambiguous truth-telling. The kind of truth we feel compelled to sit back and digest, especially when it involves things we have avoided facing until we reach a point of crisis.

This voice of our unalienated self offers an inner knowing that is the foundation of self-trust. In order to hear it, we need to clear space inside, to slow down. It involves putting aside what we know and approaching our inner worlds as a mystery that we can’t decipher with our logical minds. Truly listening requires a surrender of control. It requires waiting for clarity to emerge. It involves inner sensing, like tuning into a radio station, moving the dial back and forth until you can distinguish the signal from the noise. I call it listening for congruence.

This is what I love most about coaching—that I get to enter a process of listening that creates space for the voice of the unalienated self within a person to come forward. Often, I first need to listen to all the other parts—the aspects that are alienated, that feel afraid to look inside, that are gripped by fear, that feel compelled to conform to societal norms, or seek validation in the eyes of others, including those who simply do not see them. As all of these parts are heard and begin to relax, an internal voice emerges as a truth from deep within that has been obstructed from speaking.

This voice reshapes a person’s view of the situation. It redirects their attention, reframing the problem from what they initially thought was the issue to something deeper, more fundamental, revealing the grooves of conditioning and patterns of relating that run underneath the situation they are facing. As my clients and I keep listening, tiny flashes of insight arise—small actions that can be taken, micro shifts that can be made.

Week after week, month after month, year after year, as we listen together, these whispers of the unalienated self gain greater and greater permission to speak. Over time, they begin to reorganize a person’s life. The need for external validation, inherited ideas of success, and fears that held people back slowly relax their grip. These influences may still remain in a person’s mind, but they become a low hum in the background, rather than shaping their choices and directing their decisions.

In place of this, a different way of navigating becomes operative. More time is spent looking quietly into oneself, sensing which way the inner compass is pointing, clarifying one’s intentions, checking what feels aligned and what feels off, and cultivating a sense of discernment. People start moving in directions that feel aligned without necessarily knowing where they will lead, often without having answers about what the outcome will be, but increasingly trusting their capacity to find their way.

At times, it can feel like walking in the dark, on an uneven road with ruts, and learning that if you open up your senses and pay close attention—if you listen with your whole being and look for the small flecks of light along the way—you discover that you can trust your feet.

This feeling of navigating in the dark is often a part of the process of cultivating self-trust. This was my experience of it. The five years that followed my first coaching call were some of the hardest years of my life. The beginning was marked by financial hardship and many sleepless nights as I stumbled forward without a steady paycheck or the support of a partner, feeling alone. Exacerbating this, an undiagnosed health crisis emerged and continued for years, cutting off my capacity to do most of the things I loved. On many days, when there was no energy to move about, I lay down and took my coaching calls in bed. Yet, even as I couldn’t see anything ahead of me, I had an inexplicable feeling that I had chosen the right path and simply had to stay on course.

What was more surprising was that even while everything else was impossibly difficult, coaching felt effortless. No matter what was going on in the rest of my life, when I closed my eyes and listened, the same feeling I had in that first session flowed back to me. In each session, it returned—a sense of dropping into a still, quiet place; a soft, warm quality of attention that felt like listening with my whole being; a process of sifting through the foggy places, tuning into unalienated voices within my client that were longing to speak; a feeling of wonder and awe at the insights that would emerge in the co-created space that neither of us could predict.

As time passed, I began to witness what would happen, not only during the sessions but also over the arc of a person’s life. Through this, a powerful insight emerged. I saw how an intention that is deeply aligned with oneself—when held with care and consistency—orients itself towards its own actualization by navigating the twists and turns in the road that appear to derail it. As my own life stabilized and reorganized around this way of being that I loved, I realized that it was through returning again and again to that aligned intention—amidst all the challenges—that the meaning of self-trust came home to me.

As my clients—and I—have learned to find our way into lives in which we can recognize ourselves, lives that mirror back to us our deepest values, this sense of wonder has continued to grow. Alongside it, my conviction has deepened that this process of inner listening can bring a person’s sequestered dreams into a realm of possibility, making them a lived reality.