My Story
How I left a life that looked good on paper for a life that actually felt good.
When I was outgrowing conventional success, I was desperate to hear from others going through the same thing. Our cultural gospel that striving should make you happy is loud and pervasive—and I yearned to hear from others who felt like they’d been chasing a false promise. Who felt hollowed out and disillusioned by the very thing they’d spent their lives being told to achieve.
Below, I share my story without sparing any details. I hope you find resonance here.
1. The Climb
I was a nerdy and precocious kid. From a young age, I faced a lot of bullying, and I never really felt like I belonged.
But even when I didn’t have any friends on the soccer team—even when I was the last one in class to find a project partner—achievement was there for me as my refuge.
When I got a good grade, or pleased a teacher with the correct answer, I felt the momentary rush of being seen. Of mattering.
As I got older, and my culture insisted that fulfillment came from striving for success, I didn’t question it.
I got straight A’s, chased gold stars, and climbed every ladder I could find. And for a long time, it worked. It led me exactly where I wanted to go.
In the late 2010s, I became a certified coach and built a business that helped people recover from people-pleasing. When my videos went viral in 2020, my coaching practice took off overnight.
2. The Misalignment
I was thrilled to be able to reach and help more people. But in truth, that moment marked my slow descent into years of overwork.
I lost full days monitoring social media.
Hours after hosting a successful event, I’d stand bleary-eyed at my whiteboard, clock ticking past midnight as I planned my next offering.
My connections to friends, family, and community were afterthoughts; I only made time for them when it was convenient (which wasn’t often).
Now, don’t get me wrong. I genuinely loved helping my clients. Watching a recovering people-pleaser say their first empowered “no” never ceased to give me proud goosebumps. (It still does!)
Coaching felt like my calling. But like many who start businesses from a place of true passion and service, over time, my energies were co-opted by the pressures to grow, scale, and maintain a public brand.
Professionally, I was burning out.
Personally, my life was narrowing.
As the years passed, I got a six-figure book deal with Simon & Schuster, features in the New York Times, and speaking opportunities around the world.
But the highs were brief, and the goalpost kept moving.
Once in a long while, as if released from a spell, I’d glimpse the sun sparkling on the Puget Sound. A nagging voice in the back of my mind would wonder: If this is living the dream, then why does it feel so hollow?
Anxiously, I tried to suppress the thought that I’ve now heard from many of my clients: “I got everything I was supposed to want, but it didn’t fulfill me like I thought it would.”
For a while, I ignored the empty feeling and kept pushing. I was flourishing by the standards of conventional success, and it would be foolish—ungrateful, even!—to change course.
Like many on the cusp of transition, I was in denial. I wasn’t ready to admit that the path to fulfillment I’d been chasing was a mirage.
3. The Wake-Up Call
My wake-up call was a series of events—some gradual, some sudden—that made me question everything I’d ever been taught about fulfillment.
First, I fell in love with an incredible man. His life had been full of challenges: losses, life-changing injuries, depression.
His struggles had broken open his heart and left a profound compassion in their wake, and he found purpose in helping others as best he could. He spent his days caring for the critically injured, his nights taking care of his children.
Loving him softened my heart in a million ways. After a lifetime of messaging to “hustle,” he showed me to what a life propelled by (non-people-pleasing) devotion to something beyond the individualistic self could look like.
Time passed. There was news of climate change. Attacks on trans rights. The genocide in Gaza. Social safety nets being dismantled.
And my social media content about self-advocacy started to feel… off. I would write about prioritizing oneself—about setting boundaries around over-giving—and wonder where healthy altruism and caring for the collective fit in.
Self-advocacy wasn’t incompatible with collective thinking—but as my values shifted, I felt called to elevate different conversations.
What about the individual sacrifices we make to be part of stronger communities? What about risking personal discomfort to stand up for what’s right?
And what about the issues I stayed silent about to avoid jeopardizing my success?
I didn't speak up about political issues because I didn't want to risk losing followers, income, or the algorithm’s favor. I was protecting my success, a choice I had every right to make—but that choice came at the cost of my integrity. And it weighed heavy like a stone.
And then—just as my debut book STOP People Pleasing was months from being published—a series of emergencies made the tension between my inner truth and outer life impossible to ignore.
My sister had a life-threatening health scare.
My partner needed a serious heart surgery.
And days later, I received a call that a beloved family member had died of cancer.
Standing there with the phone pressed to my ear in the bright December sunlight, I felt like I was moving through water. Life’s fleeting nature hit me with full force, followed by a montage of regrets:
Family vacations I’d spent glued to my laptop. Phone calls from loved ones I’d never returned. Late-night emails that had distracted me from my partner. Days, weeks, lost to social media.
In that moment, I finally accepted what my heart had been trying to tell me.
I’d been fed a lie of where real fulfillment came from—and I’d sacrificed my connection to myself, my loved ones, and my community for success’ false promises.
I had tied my meaning and identity to a pursuit I didn’t believe in anymore.
I didn’t know what was next. I just knew I couldn’t go on like this.
It was terrible timing to reach this conclusion. My book was months from coming out, and it would bring more exposure and opportunities than I’d ever had before.
But I was learning that we don’t get to choose the moments that transform us. We only get to decide whether we heed their wakeup call.
So as soon as my book came out, I used the advance to stay afloat as I minimized my public presence, kept a tiny roster of clients, and stepped back to discover who I was—what life was—beyond striving.
4. The Wilderness
The following year felt like wandering through the wilderness, complete with messiness, uncertainty, and full-blown identity crisis.
I spent the first few months in acute burnout recovery, doing the bare minimum: sleeping, eating, tending to long-neglected doctor’s appointments. With nothing work-related to plan, the days blurred, and I felt like a shell of a person.
From the couch in my sweatpants, I opened Instagram to see my colleagues hustling harder, landing second book deals, and tripling their social media followings. I sat uncomfortably in the stillness—my heart racing, chest tight—thinking of all the momentum I was squandering.
Without success as my guiding light, I was like someone who had lost their faith, stumbling through the dark without a North Star.
I journaled a lot during this time, and confusion kept surfacing in the pages. I didn't want to stop coaching. I adored helping people, and I treasured the creativity of running my own business.
(During the transition from hustle to heart, some of us outgrow what we do; others outgrow how we do it. I was in the second camp.)
But ultimately, the heart-led aspects of my work had been co-opted by striving—for success, name-recognition, virality, prestige. And the greatest sacrifice of that striving had been deep, meaningful connection.
Deep connection, and contribution, to the people I loved. To the causes I believed in. To my community, locally and globally.
On the surface, this transition was about “my job." But deep down, it was about success being dethroned as my meaning, identity, and the orienting value I shaped the arc of my life around.
And I wanted connection to take its place.
I both craved this, and feared this. Success had kept me safe—and made me feel seen— for so long.
As often happens during transition, the part of me that found safety in my old ways got louder as I challenged it:
You’re so ungrateful to risk throwing your success away like this!
Other coaches hustle twice as hard and feel fine.
You’re being too sensitive.
Too weak!
It was like being caught in a painful tug of war between who I’d been, and who I was becoming.
I had compassion for my fear, but it was trying to drag me back to the one place I knew I couldn’t return.
5. The New Way
It was time to test my hypothesis that centering connection would offer a more meaningful life than centering success ever had.
As the fog of burnout lifted, I began pouring my time into the relationships and communities that made me feel most alive.
After years of letting my friendships wilt, I tended to them like I would a garden: proactively, intentionally, and with great care. I made a point to check in on my friends in hard times and good ones, celebrating birthdays, engagements, and album releases.
I helped weed gardens.
Moved furniture.
Gave airport rides.
I finally returned the family calls I’d been neglecting. I set up monthly Zoom chats with a cousin; visited my aunt in Florida; and spent longer stretches with my parents in New Jersey.
I started volunteering at the meditation center. Got coffee with elderly folks in my community. Participated in my local mutual aid group.
As the months passed, I began to feel less like a satellite in space, and more like a thread in a vast web of connection and care. It felt more fulfilling—more meaningful—than any of my successes ever had.
Hoping to anchor myself during this time of change, I joined a meditation community. Over the course of months, sitting silently and watching my mind, I began to develop a compassionate appreciation for me: this small being trying her best, breathing.
My mental health slowly returned, and my creativity with it. This time, instead of exploiting my creativity entirely for work, I let it roam free: guitar, book clubs, themed events.
Life began to feel rich. I began to feel whole. And my resentment at the long year of struggle slowly gave way to gratitude for the chance to open my eyes to what really mattered.
After a year in the trenches of transition, I finally felt clear enough—grounded enough —to return to my business in a new way.
New boundaries around my time.
More accessible pricing structures.
More focus on authenticity, collective care, and community-building.
The willingness to lose income, followers, and opportunities in order to maintain my integrity and live by my convictions.
And most importantly—a new topic. I had always coached from the heart—from the place where my training and my lived experience intersected—and I felt called to help other disenchanted high achievers find meaning and purpose and beyond conventional success. Because throughout the confusion and fear of my own process, I had thought—so many times—about how grounding, normalizing, and reassuring it would have been to have someone who knew my story walking beside me.
Someone who understood the unfamiliar terrain of transition; who knew its phases. Who normalized my disorientation, messiness, and identity crisis not as problems, but as vital parts of the process.
Someone who offered frameworks. Structure. Who helped me explore my changing meaning, purpose, and values so I could build a reliable inner compass to chart my course.
Someone who held space for my fear. Who helped me root down in courage. Who helped me strategize my next chapter.
So I spent months deep in research, exploring how to bridge my coaching expertise and training with this new constellation of topics.
I researched the things that actually give people a sense of meaning (hint: not achievement!) and learned how traditional success keeps us stuck on the hedonic treadmill: constantly striving, but never arriving.
I listened to hundreds of stories of people who had trusted their gut when they’d outgrown conventional success—and who had found real fulfillment on the other side. And I researched the science of life transitions, learning how they shift not only our external worlds, but our identities, values, and beliefs.
Ultimately, every person’s transition from hustle to heart is different—but all involve similar growing pains; common sets of shifting beliefs; and relatively predictable stages, each rich with invitations to grow.
6. The Return
Today, I help disenchanted high achievers find meaning and purpose beyond conventional success. And in truth, this work shares so many common threads with people-pleasing recovery that it’s less of a departure, and more of an evolution.
Both transitions are a shift from external to internal validation; from should to soul; from hustling for approval to grounding from within. Along the way, we seek greater authenticity; firmer boundaries; stronger connection to our own intuition; and the felt sense that we’re living in a more meaningful way. A way that, when we’re on our deathbed, we’ll look back on with respect: proud of our bravery and certain we chose authenticity over others’ approval.
Like all things, trading hustle for heart is a process—but I can say with certainty that I no longer sacrifice the things that give my life meaning for the fleeting highs of success.
I create far less “content,” host fewer events than ever before, and when I close my computer on Friday, it stays closed till Monday.
I use my platform to speak authentically, and to stand up for the causes that I believe in—not just the messages that will go viral or attract followers.
As a result of these shifts, I’ve absolutely lost income. I’ve lost followers. And I’ve lost opportunities.
By the metrics of conventional success (ever-increasing income, getting more and more, ascending endlessly up the ladder), this transition has been a sign of “failure.” But by my own metrics of success, it’s an enormous accomplishment, because the things I’ve lost are nothing compared to the things I’ve gained.
With connection as my North Star, how I spend my time—and how meaningful that time feels—has shifted radically.
I nurture a rich social circle and feel more connected to my community than I ever have before. Stillness is a common companions—not a fleeting visitor—and I feel present for the hundreds of small moments that make life ordinary and transcendent at once.
Of course, I still live in a culture that champions individualistic success. I’m not immune to passing comparisons between me and my peers, or a moment of disappointment when a social media post performs poorly.
But now, these fleeting feelings last mere moments instead of days. I unhook from them quickly by reminding myself what really matters.
My transition made one thing abundantly clear: It can be terrifying to step away from the familiar, safe, socially-condoned path of conventional success. But when the tension between our inner truth and outer lives becomes impossible to ignore, our vitality and happiness depend on us taking that leap.
Certified by the International Coaching Federation and Erickson Coaching International, I’ve helped hundreds of meaning-seekers go against the grain, trade hustle for heart, and step into a new chapter that feels radically alive. You can learn more about my coaching approach and methodology here.
Your heart-led life is waiting for you. I hope you will join me there.
