The phone call came on a Thursday evening in October — about eight months after I had left my job and begun living differently. I was cooking dinner. My former colleague — I'll call her Ana — was crying. Not the polite, controlled kind of crying that professional people permit themselves in limited contexts, but the kind that comes when the effort of containing it finally costs more than releasing it.
"I don't understand," she said, when she could speak again. "You were just as in it as I was. How are you not burned out anymore?"
I turned off the stove. I sat down. And we talked for two hours.
"I realized that night that the most useful thing about my experience was not that I had escaped burnout — it was that I remembered exactly what it felt like from the inside. I could meet Ana precisely where she was, because I had been there."
When Personal Experience Becomes Professional Credibility
I want to say something carefully here, because I think it is important and often gets glossed over in the stories people tell about how they became coaches or consultants or whatever they call themselves. Personal experience is not, by itself, sufficient qualification to help others. Suffering burnout does not automatically make you equipped to guide someone else through it. Recovering from something does not mean you know how to guide that recovery for someone whose circumstances, psychology, and resources are different from yours.
This is why, in the year following Ana's phone call, I got serious about training. I completed a certification in coaching through an ICF-accredited program. I read extensively in the research literature on burnout, recovery, organizational psychology, and behavior change. I worked with a supervisor. I began taking on clients — slowly, carefully, with the appropriate humility of someone who knows what they don't know.
What my personal experience gave me was not expertise. It gave me something different: credibility to sit in the difficulty with someone without flinching. The ability to say, truthfully, "I know what this feels like from the inside, and I want to help you find your way through it." That combination — the visceral knowledge and the trained competence — turned out to be more powerful than either alone.
The First Clients
Ana was my first client, in the informal sense — though I didn't think of her that way at the time. We talked for months: weekly phone calls, mostly, and occasional in-person meetings when we were both in the same city. I wasn't charging her. I was helping a friend. But the process of helping her — of asking good questions, of holding space for her to find her own answers, of drawing on everything I had learned and experienced — began to clarify for me what I was actually good at and what kind of work felt genuinely meaningful.
She made real changes. Not all at once — the process was nonlinear, with setbacks and plateaus and unexpected breakthroughs. But over about six months, she renegotiated her role, established meaningful boundaries, started sleeping properly for the first time in years, and reconnected with interests she had abandoned when her career had consumed everything. She told me once, toward the end of that period, that our conversations had been the most useful thing she had tried — more than the therapy, more than the productivity books, more than the meditation apps.
I don't say this to flatter myself. I say it because her feedback crystallized something I had been circling for months: this was the work. This was my ikigai intersection — the place where what I loved, what I was genuinely good at, what the world needed, and what could sustain me all pointed in the same direction.
Building the Practice
I took on three more clients through the first half of that year — all through personal referrals, all through the quiet word-of-mouth that seems to be how this kind of work spreads. I charged modest rates. I was honest about where I was in my professional development. I got supervision. I made mistakes and learned from them. I built slowly, which felt philosophically consistent with everything else I was trying to practice.
What I noticed, working with these early clients, was a pattern. Almost all of them had the same core confusion: they believed that the problem was their workload, or their company culture, or their manager, or their time management. And those things were real factors. But the deeper issue, in almost every case, was a misalignment between the life they were living and the values they actually held. They had optimized for external measures of success while neglecting everything that gave their lives texture and meaning. The burnout was not a malfunction. It was feedback.
My job, I came to understand, was not to help people work less. It was to help them work — and live — in alignment with who they actually were. That's a more nuanced and more lasting change than any productivity system can produce.
The Unexpected Gift of My Particular Journey
There is something I know, because I have lived it, that is genuinely useful in this work: I know what it costs to stay in a life that doesn't fit. I know the specific flavor of exhaustion that comes from performing wholeness while managing invisible damage. I know the fear of the choice that needs to be made, and I know that the fear is not a reason not to make it.
I also know what the other side feels like — not the perfect, Instagram-curated version, but the real one. The slow mornings. The meals that are actually tasted. The conversations where you are actually present. The work that is challenging and meaningful in equal measure. The particular peace of a life that is, for the most part, honest.
This is what I bring to the people I work with. Not a formula. Not a program. A companion for the journey — someone who has made the crossing and knows both shores, and who can help you navigate from one to the other with as much clarity and as little unnecessary suffering as possible.
That is the purpose that grew out of the practice. And I am grateful every day that Ana called.