I Thought a Coach Should Have Her Own Life Figured Out

I quit my job, and people congratulated me. Not “Oh no.” Not “What happened?” Just congratulations, usually said with a warm smile, as if they had been waiting for me to finally say it out loud. Then the next person reacted the same way, and the next. By the fourth congratulations, I stopped being surprised and started paying attention. These were people who knew me well, and apparently they had seen what I had been seeing for months: something was wrong, I was not happy, and it was becoming increasingly unlikely that the situation would change in any meaningful way.

That is the part I have not talked about much. It was not that I failed to notice what was happening. I noticed. I spoke about it. I questioned it. I tried to change what I could. The more uncomfortable truth is that I stayed even after I knew, and for quite a while I treated that staying as the more professional, more responsible choice.

I saw it, and I said so

I worked from home full time, and most of my working day took place in front of a screen. I was teaching people whose cameras were usually switched off, with very little participation and often very little visible response. There is something strangely exhausting about speaking for hours to black rectangles with names underneath them. You explain something, ask a question, wait, try another question, change your wording and hope that somebody on the other side is still following. Sometimes somebody answers. Often nobody does.

Teaching, at least the way I understand it, needs exchange. It needs some kind of reaction between people. A question. A face that tells you someone has understood. The slightly confused expression that tells you they have not. A comment that takes the conversation somewhere you had not planned. You respond to what is happening in the room, and that interaction is part of the work. When most of that disappears, the work changes. Over time, I became more and more certain that this setup was not right for me, not professionally and not as a human being.

It was not simply that I found the work difficult or that I had a few bad days. I increasingly questioned parts of the structure around the work and what was expected of me inside it. And I did not suffer in silence. I spoke up. I raised concerns. I said openly when I disagreed. I am at an age where I have learned that swallowing everything for the sake of being seen as agreeable rarely improves anything, so I did what I would tell another woman to do: I used my voice.

Some of the answers I received made the situation clearer rather than better. One response was: “You’re a woman, turn on your charm.” Another was: “I heard you, but we’re not going down that road.” The first one made me angry for obvious reasons. The second frustrated me in a different way, because there is a particular kind of powerlessness in being told that you have been heard when the rest of the sentence makes it very clear that nothing you said will have any consequence.

So I knew there was a problem. I had said it out loud. I had tested whether there was room for change, and I had received an answer. Yet I still stayed, and that is the part I find more interesting now. I kept wondering whether I should try harder, whether I was being too demanding, whether I was giving up too soon, whether perhaps I was the problem after all. Somewhere underneath all of those questions sat a very familiar belief: a capable woman should surely be able to handle this.

That sentence sounds harmless until you look at how much it can cost. “I should be able to handle this” can keep us in jobs, roles and situations long after “handling it” has stopped being a useful goal. It can make endurance look like competence and leaving look like weakness. This is not a story about settling scores with an employer, and I am not interested in writing a list of everything I thought was wrong there. What interests me much more is how long I kept trying to fix something after it had already shown me, more than once, that it did not want to be fixed.

Why stopping felt unprofessional

There was another rule running quietly underneath all of this, and I think this one mattered even more. I never said it out loud, but I lived by it: a coach should have her own life figured out.

I help women reflect, make decisions and reorient themselves. I listen for contradictions. I notice the sentence somebody keeps repeating and the subject she keeps avoiding. I ask what she wants, what she needs, what she is afraid will happen and what she is paying in order to keep things exactly as they are. That is part of my work. Somewhere along the way I had apparently concluded that being able to do this with someone else meant I should be able to do it flawlessly with myself as well.

Preferably quickly, of course. With calm insight, a perfectly sensible decision and very little mess.

There is an old saying that the cobbler’s children have no shoes. I used to smile at it. Then I recognized myself in it, although not quite in the way I first thought. My problem was not that I lacked the tools. I did not suddenly forget everything I know about decision-making, change or boundaries. The problem was not that I could not see what was happening. I could see it very clearly. The harder part was accepting what that information meant.

Speaking up had not changed the situation. Trying harder was not changing it either. Eventually the question was no longer “How can I improve this?” but “How long am I willing to keep investing myself in something that is showing me what it is?”

That is a much harder question when it is your own life.

When I am sitting with a client, I have distance. I am not carrying her fear about money, her history with responsibility, her need to be reasonable or her worry about what other people will think. I can hear all of those things, but I am not living inside them. In my own situation, I was standing in the middle of the picture. I was both the person asking the questions and the person defending why maybe I should just stay a little longer.

Walking away felt uncomfortably close to admitting that I could not handle it. And a coach who cannot handle her own life felt, in my head, like a contradiction. I can see now how unfair that expectation was, but that does not mean it was not real at the time.

What the congratulations actually told me

Handing in my notice felt enormous. It felt risky, uncertain and a little like failing. I knew I wanted out, but wanting out and feeling completely confident about what comes after are not the same thing. There was no shiny next job waiting. No perfect five-year plan. No immediate proof that leaving was the clever move.

To the people around me, however, my decision apparently felt overdue.

Their congratulations stayed with me because they showed me something I had not expected. It was not that everybody else had seen a truth I had completely missed. I had seen it too. What surprised me was how obvious my unhappiness had apparently become from the outside while I was still spending energy debating whether I was justified in acting on it.

That distinction matters. We often talk as though people stay in situations because they “do not know” what is wrong. Sometimes they know perfectly well. They simply have not yet given themselves permission to treat that knowledge as enough.

Quitting did not give me all the answers

I would love to tell you that I handed in my notice, closed the laptop and immediately felt free. That would make a much neater story. It is also not what happened.

At first there was barely any reaction. Then the tone changed. A supervisor who had previously been friendly became cold. I felt ignored and given the cold shoulder, and it affected me more than I had expected. Being treated differently after making a decision for yourself is not something I think we should dismiss as trivial. I had spent enough time already questioning whether my own reaction to the job was reasonable, and suddenly I was dealing with another layer of stress on top of it.

Eventually I took sick leave because I genuinely felt unwell. That matters to me, because I do not want to rewrite the story afterwards and turn it into some bold, triumphant resignation narrative. I was not standing there feeling powerful and liberated. I was tired. I was upset. I needed to stop.

Thankfully, our trip to Scotland was already close. At the time I thought of it simply as our vacation, something we had planned long before the final weeks at work became what they became. Looking back, I needed that distance more than I realized. I needed different air, long walks, landscapes instead of screens, and enough physical distance that my nervous system could stop reacting to the same environment every day.

I also apparently needed Highland cows and standing stones, but that is another story.

The real professional reorientation only began in September. Leaving did not give me instant clarity. It gave me space, and those are not the same thing. I think we confuse them far too often. We imagine that if leaving is the right decision, we should immediately know what comes next. Sometimes the first useful thing that happens is simply that the noise gets quieter.

Starting over at almost 59 is not a motivational quote

Here is where I am now. I am officially arbeitsuchend, which is such a wonderfully German word. It sounds like a status on a form because that is exactly what it is.

I am not floating into this next chapter free of worries. I turn 59 this October, and starting over professionally at this age makes me nervous. I know what I have done. I know what I can do. I know that my experience has value. At the same time, I worry that experience can sometimes be read as “too expensive” before anyone has even asked what I could contribute.

That is one of the uncomfortable things about changing direction later in your career. You are not starting with nothing. You are starting with decades of experience, opinions, working habits, knowledge and expectations. That should be an advantage, and sometimes it is. But it can also make you wonder whether employers will see the value before they see the number attached to your age.

I do not know yet how easy or difficult this part will be. I am not going to turn that uncertainty into a cheerful “It is never too late to reinvent yourself” slogan, because I do not know that yet. I am checking options. I am dealing with the employment agency. I am thinking about where my experience fits and what kind of work I am still willing to do. At the same time, I am giving more serious attention to the work I want to build around expatriate women, accompanying partners and Global Mobility.

There is no dramatic breakthrough to report. What I can tell you is that I am calmer.

I am taking care of myself again in ways that sound ordinary until you realize you had stopped doing them. I am cooking properly again, not just producing food because dinner needs to exist. I mean the slow kind of cooking where you chop, stir, taste and suddenly notice that an hour has passed without you checking your phone. I love that kind of cooking. I had quietly stopped making room for it.

I have even joked about filming myself at the stove for Instagram. I have not yet decided whether the internet needs that particular development.

These things are small, but I am beginning to think small things are useful data. When you have spent a long time feeling unlike yourself, noticing where you start to feel like yourself again matters. It may not tell you what your next job should be, but it tells you something about the conditions in which you come back to life.

I do not know yet which door will open, and I am trying not to force a happy ending onto a story that is still happening. I am open to finding out what comes next. That is not a complete plan. It is an honest middle, and right now I trust that more than a polished conclusion.

What this changed about how I coach

I am not going to tell you that all of this made me a better coach. That would be far too neat and, frankly, a little self-serving.

What it did change is what I expect from a woman when she first sits down with me. Even less than before. She does not need to arrive knowing exactly what she wants. She does not need a beautifully organized explanation for why she is unhappy. She does not need a clear goal, a five-step plan or a convincing argument for why the decision she is considering is sensible.

She is allowed to arrive with contradictions.

She can know that something is wrong and still be afraid to change it. She can want to leave and want to stay at the same time. She can understand the problem intellectually and still need time before she is ready to act. Doubt does not automatically mean a decision is wrong. Sometimes doubt is simply what a big decision feels like when you are the one who has to live with the consequences.

The experience also sharpened something I now find very important: knowing that something is wrong and giving yourself permission to stop trying to fix it are two different things.

Some women I work with already know what is wrong. They are not lacking insight. In fact, they may have spent months analyzing it, explaining it, trying different solutions and wondering whether they just need to make one more effort. What they are struggling with is the idea that perhaps they are allowed to stop proving that they can make it work.

That changes the role I want to have as a coach. I do not want to be the person who tells a woman which choice is correct. I do not have to live with that choice; she does. What I can do is create enough quiet around the problem that she can hear her own reality again, especially if she has spent a long time explaining it away.

If you moved here for his career, you may know exactly what I mean

This is where my own story connects very directly with the women I increasingly work with.

You moved to Germany for your partner’s international career. Nobody dragged you onto the plane. You talked about the opportunity. You considered what it could mean for your family. You weighed the advantages and disadvantages, and eventually you said yes. Maybe you were excited. Maybe you were curious. Maybe you genuinely believed it was the right decision, and perhaps it was.

Then life actually happened.

Months or years later, you may know perfectly well that you are not happy here. You may already have said it to your partner. You may have taken the language course, joined the international group, gone to coffee mornings, applied for jobs, tried the club, accepted invitations and told yourself repeatedly that building a life in another country simply takes time.

You may have tried very hard.

And right behind all that trying sits the rule: But I chose this. Shouldn’t I be able to make it work?

That is the mechanism I recognize now.

The problem is not always lack of insight. Sometimes the problem is the belief that a decision you made back then creates an obligation to defend today’s reality. As though saying yes to the move once means you have somehow lost the right to notice what the move is costing you now.

But the woman who made the decision then did not have all the information you have today.

She did not know exactly how it would feel to give up her professional role. She did not know how easy or difficult it would be to make friends. She did not know whether the language would become a manageable challenge or a daily barrier. She did not know how the move would shift responsibilities inside the family, how long the loneliness would last or how much she would miss being known for something that belonged to her.

That does not mean the original decision was foolish.

It means decisions are made with the information available at the time, and life continues to provide new information afterwards.

You are allowed to use it.

You are allowed to say that something is not working. You are allowed to admit that you are unhappy even if your life looks privileged from the outside. You are allowed to want something of your own even if your partner’s career is going well. You are allowed to acknowledge that you have tried very hard and that another round of “try harder” may not be the answer.

None of that automatically means you need to leave Germany, end the assignment, go back to work tomorrow or make any other dramatic decision.

It simply means you stop arguing with the information you already have.

If you want to start somewhere, take a piece of paper and finish this sentence three times without editing yourself:

If I am honest, what I keep trying to fix is…

Then stop.

Do not immediately turn your answers into action steps. Do not decide what they mean for your marriage, your career or your future in Germany. Do not make them more reasonable before you have even allowed yourself to hear them.

Just write them down.

There is something surprisingly powerful about seeing your own words in front of you without having to defend them.

I thought being a coach meant I should have my own life figured out. I thought recognizing a problem should make the solution obvious, and I thought being capable meant I should be able to make difficult situations work if I simply tried hard enough.

I no longer believe that.

You do not have to have your whole life figured out before you are allowed to admit that something no longer fits. You do not need the next answer before you can acknowledge the current problem. And you do not have to turn every difficult realization immediately into a decision.

Sometimes honesty comes before clarity.

That still counts.

It is still real.

And you are allowed to say it out loud.