I didn’t become a life coach because I wanted to leave consulting behind.
I became a life coach because consulting kept turning into coaching.
The longer I stayed on a project, the more likely it was that someone would close the office door, lower their voice, and tell me what was really going on.
Sometimes the problem was personal. A client was dealing with something at home that was affecting the work. Sometimes a team had stopped functioning as a team. Sometimes the personalities involved had become more difficult than the schedule, the scope, or even the mission everyone was supposed to be serving.
And sometimes the project looked technical on paper, but the real problem was that the people involved no longer trusted each other enough to get the work done.
That was certainly true on one of the most complicated projects of my career.
Responsibility Without Automatic Cooperation
I was brought onto a major federal project by the contractor responsible for the technical team and document production. The contractor’s senior leadership supported me. The federal client trusted me. The people I had to work with every day were another story.
The subject-matter experts were frustrated. The desktop publishing team resisted me. The former project lead was still working from the contractor’s Washington, DC, office while I came in every morning and stepped into work he had previously controlled.
I was originally hired as a liaison with the federal client, but I soon became the document manager because the project needed someone who could hold the whole thing together. That gave me a great deal of responsibility. It did not give me automatic cooperation.
At one point, the desktop publishing lead simply refused to do what I asked. Someone from the company’s headquarters eventually had to step in and tell her, in more professional language, to knock it off.
That incident was dramatic, but it wasn’t really the heart of the problem. The deeper issue was that the project had developed layers of mistrust, resentment, divided loyalties, and bruised egos. The federal client no longer wanted to work with the existing team lead. The contractor’s technical team disliked the people at the agency. Many of them disliked me because I had been brought in to work across a relationship that was already badly damaged.
Meanwhile, the actual work still had to get done.
The Technical Problem Wasn’t the Only Problem
For months, the document moved back and forth between subject-matter experts and the federal legal team. Each round of review produced more questions, more revisions, and more frustration.
On a project schedule, that looks like a review cycle. Inside the project, it felt more like two groups standing on opposite sides of a canyon and throwing documents at each other.
The technical issues were real. So were the legal concerns. But by that point, neither side was responding only to the words on the page. They were responding to the history of the project, the people involved, and all the tension that had accumulated along the way.
That is one of the lessons long projects eventually teach you: the document is never just the document.
A missed deadline may be a planning problem. It may also be a trust problem. Resistance to a process may be about the process itself, or it may be about who introduced it. A person who appears difficult may be overwhelmed, defensive, angry, frightened, territorial, or simply tired of feeling ignored.
None of that excuses bad behavior. But it does explain why the right schedule, process, or project plan may still not be enough to move the work forward.
People Had Already Been Telling Me Everything
The complicated part is that none of this was entirely new to me. People had always told me things.
Clients told me about problems at home. Colleagues told me what they were afraid to say in meetings. Team members explained why they couldn’t stand someone they still had to work with every day. People talked to me about career decisions, relationships, money, frustration, disappointment, and the private pressures they were carrying into the office.
I wasn’t inviting confessionals into every status meeting. They simply happened.
Some people have a way of making others straighten their posture and stick to the agenda. Apparently, I have a way of making them tell me their life story.
A client who was a serious golfer once told me that all the really good golfers had coaches of some kind. That comment stayed with me because it framed coaching in a way that made sense professionally. Coaching wasn’t only for someone whose life was falling apart. It was also for people who wanted to perform better, think more clearly, and have someone help them see what they couldn’t see alone.
By the middle of that federal project, I knew I wanted more training for the work I was already being asked to do. So I pursued my life coaching certification while I was still managing the document, navigating the team, and helping keep the relationship with the client from coming apart completely.
Coaching Wasn’t a Detour
From the outside, consulting and life coaching may look like two unrelated careers. They never felt unrelated to me.
Both require listening closely enough to hear what someone is actually saying. Both require asking the questions that help uncover what’s missing, what’s unclear, and what no one quite wants to say out loud. Both involve helping people separate the immediate frustration from the larger mission.
A consultant may be trying to move a project forward. A coach may be helping someone move their life forward. Either way, the work often begins with confusion, competing priorities, and a person who knows something needs to change but can’t yet see how to make it happen.
The coaching training gave me language, structure, and additional tools for the human work that had already become part of my projects. It also helped me understand that being good with people wasn’t merely a pleasant extra. On many projects, it was the difference between having the right process on paper and getting anyone to follow it.
The Work Is Always Done by People
Projects need schedules, requirements, procedures, budgets, quality controls, and clear deliverables. I believe deeply in all of those things. I’ve built much of my career around them.
But none of those systems does the work by itself.
People do.
People interpret the requirements. People make the decisions. People miss deadlines, solve problems, protect their turf, share knowledge, withhold knowledge, take responsibility, avoid responsibility, and decide whether they trust the person sitting across the table.
Eventually, every project reaches a point where the technical structure runs directly into human nature.
For me, coaching training wasn’t a departure from the work I had been doing. It was an acknowledgment of what the work had been asking of me all along.
Every project may begin with a schedule, a scope, or a mission. Sooner or later, though, it becomes about the people.