When I decided to leave Toronto and start my new business as a life coach in Abu Dhabi, I knew exactly what I was building. What took longer to figure out was what I wanted to say about it, and even what a blog was, to begin with. I always kept a diary, on and off, long before I called myself anything. Watching Julie and Julia years later put a name to that need… something about writing your way toward a life, one entry at a time. So this is a way for me to share my voice and my thoughts on life coaching, psychology and the human condition.
What Abu Dhabi Didn’t Have Yet
I moved back to Abu Dhabi from Toronto to build Be You International here, and the decision had less to do with ambition than with what I’d needed myself and never found. In Toronto, going through my own divorce, I had group sessions, meetups, workshops… an entire ecosystem built to catch a woman mid-fall. Abu Dhabi had none of it. What it had was a psychiatrist’s office, a pill prescription pushed across the desk, and the quiet shame that comes with the stigma of being a divorced woman.
Women still walk into my practice here and look stunned that a room like this exists… one where they can talk without a diagnosis waiting at the end of the sentence. There were other life coaches in the country then, or so it felt, the kind of number you could count on one hand, though I never actually tried. Nobody outside that small circle knew what the word meant. I spent that first year explaining myself more than I coached anyone, the same conversation on repeat.
Nobody Agrees on the Number, But They Agree on This
Depending on the source you check, women need something like 20,000 words a day. Others say seven thousand. Nobody agrees, and after years of sitting across from women who talk, I’ve stopped trying to find the real number. What I do know: we talk to discover what it is we want to say, and what it is we’re actually thinking. Sometimes that means reporting it out loud too, needing someone to hear us talk it through, a sounding board as much as a mirror. The thought doesn’t exist yet when the conversation starts. It exists somewhere near the end of it, sometimes even after.
That, in one sentence, is why I do this work. Marcia Reynolds, former global president of the International Coaching Federation, puts it plainly in Coach the Person, Not the Problem: “Coaches are essentially thinking partners focused on helping clients use their creativity and resources to see beyond their blocks and solve their own problems.” A woman doesn’t need someone with answers sitting across from her. She needs someone who can stay in the room long enough for her own answers to surface, no matter the number of words she needs to get there.
What I’ll Be Sharing Here
I’m not going to pretend I already know. However, what I’ll be doing here, as I go, is write about what I notice: the thread that keeps showing up for all the different women, all the different stories, all the different reasons they end up sitting across from me. I don’t have it fully named yet. Finding it is as much the work of this blog as it is the work of the sessions themselves.
This is me. If you want to know more about my own story, how I ended up building this in a place that didn’t have it yet, I’ll be sharing plenty of that here as this blog goes on, or you can start with my About page. And if something in this post landed, if you’re reading this and wondering whether a life coach is what you actually need for whatever you’re carrying right now, you can book a conversation here.
