The path that led me to coaching
For most of my career, I was the person other people came to when they felt stuck.
Book a free discovery call →Twenty years, and one conversation I kept having
I have been designing for about twenty years. Fourteen and a half of them were at one company, Credit Karma, and the last five or so of those I spent as a design manager, which meant my actual job stopped being about pixels and started being about people. Hiring. Developing reports. Giving feedback that actually landed. Sitting across from someone who was capable and successful on paper and still felt like something wasn't working, and trying to help them see their own way through it.
I was good at that part. Better than I was at almost anything else I did in twenty years of working. And at some point I noticed that the conversations I looked forward to most, the ones I kept thinking about after they ended, weren't about roadmaps or specs. They were the ones where someone found their own answer to something they'd been carrying around for months.
That noticing didn't happen overnight. It built for years before I let myself take it seriously.
What actually changed
I didn't leave my job because I hated it. I left because I kept running into the edges of what a management role could give someone, and I wanted to work in the part that had no edges. A manager can coach you for twenty minutes in a one-on-one and then has to go run a sprint review. A coach gets to stay in the conversation until something actually shifts.
So in 2026, after fourteen and a half years at the same company, I left my job and trained formally as a coach through CTI's Co-Active program. I wanted the real thing, not a title I gave myself. I wanted to know how to sit with someone in the messy middle of a decision without rushing them toward my version of the answer.
The short version
Years in product design
Years leading design teams
Hours of coach training logged
Coaching hours booked
People at a crossroads
I'm not only a coach for designers, even though that's where I come from. What ties my clients together isn't an industry or a job title. It's that something in their life or work has stopped fitting, and they're ready to look at that instead of pushing through it.
New and newer managers
Going from doing the work yourself to being responsible for other people doing theirs. It never announces itself as a crisis. It just quietly makes everything harder.
Ready for something new
Switching teams, or leaving a role you have outgrown. Sensing it is time for a change well before you can name what the change is.
Doing everything right, still stuck
Successful on paper, with a gap between the life you built and the one you actually want. A quiet, persistent feeling that there is more.
The outside follows the inside
Titles and roles and decisions shift once something shifts underneath them first. That belief is the whole shape of how I work.
I listen first
You watch people relax when they realize nobody is about to hand them a five-step plan.
We start with what's true
Not your resume or your org chart. What is actually true for you right now, inconvenient parts included.
I stay in your corner
Honest with you, sometimes more than is comfortable. I push back when it helps and remind you who you are.
Every so often, when it fits, I'll bring out the cake decorating supplies. Hands busy, guard down. It sounds unusual until you are forty minutes into frosting a cake and realize you just said something out loud you hadn't let yourself think all week.
The easiest way to find out if this lands for you is to try it.
Book a free discovery call →Honest about the road, not just the destination
I still remember what the bridge period actually felt like: the month before client income even started, the slow climb after that. I'm not going to pretend a transition like the one my clients are considering is simple, because I didn't experience it as simple, and pretending otherwise isn't the kind of coach I want to be.
That's the whole name. Honest Club isn't a claim that I have it all figured out. It's a commitment to telling you the true thing plainly, even when a softer version would be easier to say.
How I work with people
If this is where you are
You don't need to have the next step figured out before you talk to me. Most people don't. That's usually the point of the first conversation, not a prerequisite for having it. Free 25 minutes, and no pitch.
Book a free discovery call →