Hi there, I’m Penni.
Leader. Counselor. Creative. Coach. Human.
My life’s work has been about helping people discover what’s inside of them: The strength, the courage, the worthiness.
I began my career teaching middle school English. Teaching my students to write showed them the power of stories, especially their own.
I then pursued a Master’s degree in Social Work and became a counselor. This afforded me the amazing privilege of helping people find their strength to navigate and overcome the many human challenges we all face.
As a leader of my department, I helped my team find their collective and individual talents, purpose and potential.
In the spring of 2020, I discovered coaching.
In the spring of 2020, like so many, I found myself in one of the most difficult and bewildering times of my life. I was the leader of an Employee Assistance program in a health care system. My department’s mission was to support the mental health and well being of the front line health care workers fighting the pandemic. I was terrified that one of my staff would become ill. I was consumed by how to do right by the health care heroes we served. My worst fear was that our organization would lose one of our own, as so many had. At home, my husband’s business was disrupted and my kids’ lives upended. Everywhere there seemed to be impossible choices and black holes of need.
I wondered each day how I could muster up the strength needed just to keep going.
My lifeline was my morning walk with my headphones on, listening to podcasts. I found that I had to consciously feed my brain constructive information as an antidote to the daily news, the case counts, the images of death and despair. One of my podcasts introduced me to life coaching. I knew that this new chapter of my life called for a new set of skills and tools, and I found them there. I was amazed at how targeted coaching was and how immediate its effect on how I showed up for the next day, the next conversation, the next seemingly unsolvable problem.
You’ve seen the movie: 2020 didn’t get any easier, and neither did 2021. All the while, thanks to coaching, I was transforming my life, taking it to the next level at work, in my leadership and my capacity to serve my clients, and at home in my parenting, my relationship with my husband, most importantly, my relationship with myself.
It wasn’t long before I knew that I had to learn to coach my clients and bring the same transformative tools to my work with them. I enrolled and became certified at The Life Coach School, one of the best coaching schools in the world, and this coaching practice was born.
I sought out coaching as a way to survive the pandemic, but coaching taught me how to thrive.
All those years ago, as my younger self cut and pasted pictures from Seventeen, I had no awareness of the toxins I was consuming and falling for: the hidden messages in those pages. Messages like, “You must be pretty/giving/selfless/perfect – that is your permission to exist.” Thus began my life’s shadow struggle: never feeling good enough, hustling for approval, people-pleasing, and overfunctioning just to prove my right to be here.
I know what it feels like…
-
- to be overwhelmed with doing too much while also feeling you are never “enough.”
- to feel out of control because you’re trying to control everyone else
- to have things “all together” on the outside while fraught with worry on the inside
- to exhaust yourself with perfectionism
…And I know what it feels like to break through those struggles, and create a completely new relationship with yourself.
I know what it feels like to transform your life — and create a life you actually love — with intention.
Coaching changed my life, and I know it can change yours, too.
Hi there, I’m Penni.
Leader. Counselor. Creative. Coach. Human.
My life’s work has been about helping people discover what’s inside of them: The strength, the courage, the worthiness.
I began my career teaching middle school English. Teaching my students to write showed them the power of stories, especially their own.
I then pursued a Master’s degree in Social Work and became a counselor. This afforded me the amazing privilege of helping people find their strength to navigate and overcome the many human challenges we all face.
As a leader of my department, I helped my team find their collective and individual talents, purpose and potential.
In the spring of 2020, I discovered coaching.
In the spring of 2020, like so many, I found myself in one of the most difficult and bewildering times of my life. I was the leader of an Employee Assistance program in a health care system. My department’s mission was to support the mental health and well being of the front line health care workers fighting the pandemic. I was terrified that one of my staff would become ill. I was consumed by how to do right by the health care heroes we served. My worst fear was that our organization would lose one of our own, as so many had. At home, my husband’s business was disrupted and my kids’ lives upended. Everywhere there seemed to be impossible choices and black holes of need.
I wondered each day how I could muster up the strength needed just to keep going.
My lifeline was my morning walk with my headphones on, listening to podcasts. I found that I had to consciously feed my brain constructive information as an antidote to the daily news, the case counts, the images of death and despair. One of my podcasts introduced me to life coaching. I knew that this new chapter of my life called for a new set of skills and tools, and I found them there. I was amazed at how targeted coaching was and how immediate its effect on how I showed up for the next day, the next conversation, the next seemingly unsolvable problem.
You’ve seen the movie: 2020 didn’t get any easier, and neither did 2021. All the while, thanks to coaching, I was transforming my life, taking it to the next level at work, in my leadership and my capacity to serve my clients, and at home in my parenting, my relationship with my husband, most importantly, my relationship with myself.
It wasn’t long before I knew that I had to learn to coach my clients and bring the same transformative tools to my work with them. I enrolled and became certified at The Life Coach School, one of the best coaching schools in the world, and this coaching practice was born.
I sought out coaching as a way to survive the pandemic, but coaching taught me how to thrive.
All those years ago, as my younger self cut and pasted pictures from Seventeen, I had no awareness of the toxins I was consuming and falling for: the hidden messages in those pages. Messages like, “You must be pretty/giving/selfless/perfect – that is your permission to exist.” Thus began my life’s shadow struggle: never feeling good enough, hustling for approval, people-pleasing, and overfunctioning just to prove my right to be here.
I know what it feels like…
-
- to be overwhelmed with doing too much while also feeling you are never “enough.”
- to feel out of control because you’re trying to control everyone else
- to have things “all together” on the outside while fraught with worry on the inside
- to exhaust yourself with perfectionism
…And I know what it feels like to break through those struggles, and create a completely new relationship with yourself.
I know what it feels like to transform your life — and create a life you actually love — with intention.
Coaching changed my life, and I know it can change yours, too.
