Tracy is a writer and a designer who is up to some super cool stuff. We met at a writing workshop and hit it off. We worked together for about eight months.

Tell everybody who you are and what you’re up to.

Deborah is the mother of two, a freelance translator, a former academic librarian, and (maybe still) a poet. She also authors a blog about living with cancer. She and I worked together for three months.

Tell everyone who you are and what you’re up to.

Think back to when you reached out to me, what made you consider coaching?

A month or so before reaching out to you, I had been laid off from my job after the 2016 election was over. I was pretty devastated. I’d never been laid off or fired. I was feeling a little lost and like, OMG what am I going to do now, no-one is going to hire me. Part of this was because I felt so incompetent the entire time I worked at that job. I was good at the stuff I was normally good at, but I never felt I was great there. As a perfectionist and an over achiever, that was hard on me. I was a support person. It was hard on me not to be leading things.

You were one of my first clients. Think back... what made you want to work with me?

I was kind of in a rut. I was questioning who am I and what am I doing with my life? I couldn’t really sustain a relationship. I wasn’t crazy about my career at the time either. I didn’t know how to focus my emotions and they got the best of me sometimes. I was unhappy.

I’d been in therapy for so many years and I’d stopped going because we were talking about the same things every time and it didn’t feel like it was really helping me. So I was interested in what coaching was and how might it help me in a different way.