Those Years Weren't Wasted

I started my side business as a health coach.

I wanted to help people. I wanted to change lives. I love health and wellness. I'm certified in nutrition. I know how to help people build sustainable habits that actually stick. On paper, it made perfect sense.

And the work itself worked. My clients got real results — the kind that show up in how their clothes fit, how they sleep, how they show up for their families. By every external measure, I was a successful health coach.

So I should have felt successful. I didn't. I felt like a failure pretty quickly.

The wrong room

Most coaches pivot because the work isn't producing results, or because they're in over their heads. That wasn't my reason. My reason was harder to admit out loud: I couldn't see myself in my clients.

I have never struggled with being overweight. I have never had an emotional eating pattern. I could deliver the strategy and the structure, but I had not lived what my clients were living. And without that lived experience, I felt out of alignment every time I sat down to coach. I kept bumping into the same uncomfortable question — why is it so easy for me to stack twenty habits in a day, when one habit feels impossible for the person across from me?

I knew how to get them there. I just didn't truly understand them. And I needed to understand them to feel in alignment.

That's when I knew I was in the wrong room.

I stopped coaching for a few months to sit with what I was learning about myself. I didn't have a plan yet — I just knew I couldn't keep going in a direction my whole body was telling me wasn't mine.

The thing you can't see from the inside

There's a piece of advice people give you when you start a side business: pick what you're already good at and go do that for other people. What do people come to you for? What do they tell you you're good at that they wish they could do?

When I sat with that question honestly, the same thing kept surfacing. The question people ask me, over and over: how do you hold all of it together — the career, the family, the health, the household — and still actually show up for any of it?

Those things come naturally to me. They always have. And because they came naturally, I had never once considered that they were special. It was just how I operated.

That's the trap, isn't it. The thing you're built for is often the thing you can't see — because from the inside, it just feels like a Tuesday.

Here's the part that still makes me laugh.

Two years earlier, my own coach had told me — repeatedly — that my real wheelhouse was high performance coaching. She said it once. She said it twice. She kept saying it. And every single time, I waved it off and went back to the path I had already committed to.

When I finally got quiet enough to listen, I started researching high performance. And it stopped me cold. High performance was not something I had been striving for. It was simply how I was built. I have moved through the world this way since I was about seven years old.

The cost that comes with the capacity

I want to be careful how I say this next part, because I know how it can land.

Being built this way is not a trophy. For most of my life it was a problem I didn't know I had. I poured the capacity into a career and let everything else that mattered to me thin out around the edges — my marriage, my faith, my time with my kids, my own sense of self. I hit a wall in 2017 that I will never forget. The capacity is real, and the cost of using it without a framework around it nearly took me out.

I had to rebuild. I had to learn, the painful way, how to hold this kind of drive without letting it eat the rest of my life. The years between then and now are not a victory lap. They're me figuring out, in real time and with a lot of stumbling, how to be a high performer who also has a life worth performing for.

That is the part of me that understands my clients now. Not just the capacity and the drive — but the cost that so often comes with it.

What pivoting actually required

You'd think the realization that high performance was my real work would have felt like relief. A clean finally.

It didn't. I felt awful.

I am someone who always finishes what she starts. I do not walk away. And here I was, walking away from something I had built and was genuinely good at, to start again. The sunk cost was loud. Pivoting felt like proof that I hadn't been capable in the first place — like I was leaving health coaching because I had failed at it, even though I knew I hadn't.

But here's what I didn't have language for at the time, and do now: the pivot itself required courage. The kind that asks you to walk away from something that's working on paper because you know, in your body, that it's not yours to keep doing.

Courage is one of the six pillars I now coach my clients through, and I think about that often. I was living the pillar before I had a name for it. Pivoting when the work stops fitting you — choosing alignment over the version of success you'd already built — is one of the most courageous things a high performer can do.

We are wired to finish what we start. We are wired to optimize. Walking away looks, from the outside, like the opposite of high performance. From the inside, it's the highest form of it.

Translator vs. thought leader

There's something else I came to understand about the difference between the two chapters.

In health coaching, I was a good translator. I had studied nutrition. I could explain it clearly, meet people where they were, and help them take better care of their bodies. But I was, in the most honest sense, passing along what I had learned. The expertise lived in the curriculum, and I delivered it well.

High performance is different. I am not translating someone else's framework. I am drawing on two decades of lived experience — in corporate leadership, in process and operational excellence, in building a life that holds ambition and wholeness at the same time — and shaping it into something I can actually teach. This is the room where I am a thought leader, not a translator. And the difference shows up in the depth of the work my clients and I are able to do together.

Those years of health coaching were not a detour. They were the training ground. They were the reps I needed so that when I stepped into high performance coaching, I wouldn't stumble. Add to that nearly twenty years in corporate process improvement and optimization, and what looks like a winding path is actually the exact preparation my clients need from me now.

None of that exists without the path that got me here. Those years were not wasted. Those years are the foundation I'm coaching from today.

What I want you to know

The way I move through my life now — the systems, the habits, the clarity, the ability to hold a demanding career and a full life without one swallowing the other — none of it is personality. It's a process. It's repeatable. It's the foundation my clients build inside my program, and it's the reason they stop white-knuckling their lives and start actually living them.

What I once thought was just how I'm built turned out to be something I could break down, name, and hand to someone else — step by step. That's the work.

If you're in the middle of your own pivot — and the loudest voice in your head is the one telling you the years behind you were wasted — I'd offer this: they weren't. You are not starting from zero. You are starting from everything you've already built.

The pivot isn't the failure. Refusing to listen when your work stops fitting you is.

The room you're meant to be in is real. And every room you've already been in is part of how you'll know it when you walk in.

If you're navigating a season where the path you're on no longer fits the person you've become — that's exactly the work I do. Book a strategy session and let's figure out what's next.