The Session She Almost Cancelled

This week, I closed a few client journeys at the same time.

It made me step back and look at the work. The patterns. What actually moves people forward.

There is one I see again and again… and this is her story.

She came to me last October.

Exhausted. Overwhelmed. Stuck in a job that was slowly breaking her.

In our first session, she said something I hadn’t heard quite like that before:

I’m not even sure if I need a coach or a therapist. But when I look at my life on paper, everything is fine.

And on paper, it was. A husband and a son she adored. A career that made sense. A life that looked right from the outside.

But something felt off. Did she need a new job? To move to a new city? She didn’t know. She could only feel that something was missing — and that feeling was getting louder.

She had spoken to a few coaches before reaching out to me.

When she reached back to me few days after our initial call, she said she wanted to work together, she told me she couldn’t stop thinking about how much calmer she had felt after our first conversation.

I was clear with her from the start: I’m not a career coach. I wasn’t going to hand her a job search plan or tell her what to do next. But I was here to help her get unstuck and figure out what was really going on beneath the surface.

We started working together. The overachiever in her kicked in immediately.

She made lists. She mapped her network. She planned outreach. She set goals for the week.

And then… she couldn’t move.

Returning an email took days. Sometimes weeks. It had to be perfect: the right words, the right tone, the right moment. She was all over the place, pulled in every direction, working until midnight and still feeling behind. The harder she tried to get traction, the more stuck she felt.

Then came the session that changed everything.

A few months in, she showed up and I could see immediately something was off.

She seemed out of breath. Scattered. She apologized for not having a topic, said maybe she should have rescheduled, that she didn’t want to waste my time.

I asked her to close her eyes. Take a few slow breaths. Just be here for a moment.

And then I asked a few questions. Gently. One at a time.

What came out wasn’t about job titles or networking strategy. It was the fear. The loss of control. The weight of holding everything together while quietly falling apart inside.

At the end, she apologized again. Said she felt like she’d wasted the hour.

I told her: this is exactly what you were supposed to do today.

Because something had shifted — not because the session was different from what we’d planned, but because she had finally remembered what was important. Herself. Why she actually needed to leave. What was really at stake.

Not the next job. Her.

What came after looked like a different person.

She started going to networking events and leaving with fifteen contacts. She picked up the phone instead of drafting the perfect email. She went from vague catch-up calls to asking directly: do you know anyone hiring?

She handmade a Halloween costume for her son. She started working out again. She booked a vacation. She took a Friday off, not because she had to, but because she decided to.

Small things. But if you knew where she started, they weren’t small at all.

As we close our ten sessions, I see a different person.

She smiles. She enjoys things. She’s present.

Did she find the perfect job? Not yet. But she has a much clearer idea of what she wants — and just as importantly, what she doesn’t. She’s learning that too is progress. She’s stopped waiting to have all the answers before she moves. She’s letting go of the need to control every outcome.

And something more important than the job has come back: herself.

That, to me, is the real result.

This is what coaching actually is.

Not advice. Not a plan handed to you. Not a shortcut to clarity.

It’s doing the work. Sitting with the hard questions. Sometimes for weeks. Sometimes for months. And often, especially if you’ve never done it before, you don’t even realize that’s what’s happening.

You think you’re wasting the session. You think you should have rescheduled.

And that’s exactly when the work begins.

The story I hear most often isn’t “I know exactly what I want.” It’s “something feels off and I don’t know what it is.” If that sounds familiar — that’s exactly where we start. I have two spots open this spring. Book a clarity call below.

Reflection question: Is there something you keep circling around but haven’t said out loud yet?