What Is Identity Coaching? (And What It Isn't)
A plain-language look at identity coaching, how it differs from life coaching and therapy, and why it treats who you are as something you recover rather than something you build.
Become who you actually are.
Identity coaching for people who want to understand themselves more clearly and then live in a way that matches what they find.
A client-led coaching practice. I draw on values work, narrative inquiry, contemplative practice, and Aaron Antonovsky’s salutogenic model to help you understand who you are at the level of values and personality, and then to design a life that is coherent with that understanding.
Are you living someone else’s answer?
Most of us inherit a life before we have any say in choosing it. Sometimes the inherited version fits, and sometimes it carries us a long way before it stops fitting. Identity work usually begins when the answer you grew up with stops doing its job, and a quieter, more honest answer starts to make itself known.
What you might be feeling right now...
You’re successful but feel like a stranger to yourself
From the outside the life looks correct, even though something inside has been quietly telling you for a while that it doesn’t belong to whoever you actually are.
You’ve outgrown the path you were handed
What you were taught to want stopped fitting somewhere along the way, and you don’t yet have language for what would fit better.
Something has changed, and the old answers no longer work
It might have been a loss, a layoff, a milestone birthday, or the end of a relationship. Whatever the event was, the answers you used to rely on no longer quite hold.
You suspect you’ve been performing a version of yourself for years
You can describe the role you play in some detail, but it has gotten harder to say who is actually playing it.
You want a life that’s whole, not one that just looks impressive
You would like your health, your relationships, your work, and what you contribute to feel like parts of the same life, and right now they don’t.
How we work together
Identity coaching is less about reinventing yourself than about finding the version of you that has been there the whole time and giving it the space and the structure to actually live. The work usually moves through three phases together:Get oriented to who you actually are
We start with the ground underneath you, which usually means mapping your values, the experiences that formed you, your personality, and the things you have been carrying without naming. In most clients, identity turns out to be something you recover more often than something you build from scratch.
Translate values into virtues, and virtues into how you live
What matters most to you becomes how you show up in your body, your relationships, your work, and your community. We do that translation deliberately, instead of leaving it to luck and circumstance.
Build a life plan that holds across every part of your life
We end with a salutogenic plan that you write yourself, with enough structure for it to survive contact with your actual week and enough flexibility for it to adjust as you change.
Private coaching
Know yourself, and live from what you find
A client-led coaching practice for people who would like their work, their relationships, their body, and what they contribute to feel like parts of the same life. We draw on values work, the Enneagram, narrative inquiry, and contemplative practice inside a salutogenic, whole-life framework, with two goals: to give you precise language for who you are, and to build the structure that lets you live from there. Our work together includes:
One-on-one conversation, client-led
Values and virtues mapping
Life narrative and typology work
A salutogenic, whole-life approach to design
Contemplative practice as ground
I have done this work on myself, and I can sit with you in yours.
Identity Coach & Former Silicon Valley Leader
I spent two decades as an engineering leader in Silicon Valley. There was a title and a salary and the right kind of respect, and somewhere along the way I stopped recognizing the person looking back at me in the mirror. The burnout, the autoimmune collapse, and the long depression that followed turned out to be my body finally saying out loud what I had not yet been willing to admit: the life I had built did not belong to me.
Coming back to myself was not a dramatic project. It was a deliberate one. Over several years I went to India for Ayurvedic treatment, did real therapy, audited a two-year Buddhist chaplaincy program, took up a sustained Zen practice, and worked with functional medicine. None of that was about escaping who I had been. The point was to find out who I actually was underneath the role I had been playing. The work I do now is the same work I did on myself, with people who want the same thing for themselves.
Take the first step toward knowing yourself
A free thirty-minute conversation about where you are, what has been weighing on you, and whether the work I do is what you are looking for. There is nothing to commit to in the call.
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