A coaching session is a way for
your true self to contact you
The Grow to Glow Approach
This is not a text about quick insight, better habits, or becoming a “better version” of yourself.
It is a text about safety, truth, and relationship.
Many women I work with are already capable, self-aware, reflective, intelligent, and deeply responsible. They have read the books. They understand the patterns. They can name their childhood, their attachment style, their inner critic, their stress responses. And still, something does not shift.
Not because they are resistant, incapable, broken, or unwilling.
But because self-awareness and insight alone does not create change.
Transformation happens when your nervous system really feels safe enough to explore yourself on a deeper level and to begin to actually get to know you.
This work starts from a simple but often overlooked premise:
We do not discover who we are in isolation. We discover ourselves in relationship. And when our early relationships required us to adapt, perform, stay small, or stay pleasing in order to belong, feel loved, or feel safe, our authentic self learned to wait — or to hide.
For many women, the ways they feel stuck or hesitant are not flaws, a lack of courage, or failures to heal — but intelligent survival strategies. These patterns often formed early and on a subconscious level, in response to parents or other significant adults, family dynamics, cultural expectations, and gendered norms about who a girl is allowed or expected to be. They helped preserve connection, belonging, or emotional safety when authenticity felt risky, because as children we were dependent on the adults around us.
This work does not try to override these strategies. It seeks to understand them first — because what once protected us cannot simply be pushed out of the way.
A coaching session, as I understand it, is not a place where someone is fixed, corrected, or led toward a predefined outcome. It is a relational container — a space of attention, presence, and ethical restraint — where defenses can finally rest.
In our space, you are not asked to perform clarity, strength, or readiness. You are allowed to be conflicted, slow, contradictory, or unsure. You are allowed to meet parts of yourself that had to remain hidden in order to stay connected, safe, or loved. And this can really hurt. It can be painful and tearful to look at underlying thought patterns and belief systems that once served us very well, but now keep us from living a fully lived life. And of course, we are hesitant to go there.
This is why the presence of a regulated, patient, non-judgmental other matters. Not as an authority, but as a witness. Not as an expert who know best, but as a steady, safe, reference point. Over time, the safety of this relationship can be internalized — not as dependency, but as re-earned trust in oneself.
This text is long because we, as individuals, are complex. Truly holding a careful, deeply ethical relationship is complex. It is careful because power exists in all helping, mentoring, coaching, teaching, and counseling relationships.
If you are willing to slow down, stay present, and meet yourself honestly — this work is for you. I invite you to continue reading.
A coaching session is a way for your true self to contact you
A coaching session, as I understand it, is a space, an experience, a process where your true self can contact you.
Not because someone tells you who you are, or is an expert on you or your life.
Not because insight is being delivered or conclusions are drawn.
But because the conditions finally exist for you to listen. Really listen to yourself.
Most of us spend large parts of our lives managing ourselves and others: monitoring what is appropriate, acceptable, reasonable, or expected. We speak from habit, from role, from adaptation. We stay functional, articulate, and composed — often at the cost of contact with ourselves.
As young children, we had to adapt to parents, family systems, society. We learned that we had to be something in order to belong:
“good”
“not too much”
“quiet”
“bright”
“beautiful”
“smart and successful”
We learned that love, worth, and connection were not always unconditional.
So as children, we learned to hide the parts of us that were not acceptable, not appreciated, or did not serve us in relationship with others. We disconnected from them and created a more polished, more acceptable, more shiny version of ourselves.
And that fear — of not being loved, not being seen, of being judged — often stays with us into our grown-up lives..
As women, we often try to arrive at a place where we are beyond reproach: highly skilled, educated, attentive, good, smart, successful, following the rules. We try to get it right.
But usually at a cost.
At the cost of ourselves.
At the cost of not being whole.
Often, we do not even know what this “authentic self” could look like anymore. Our inner critic, our perfectionist voice, judges us and keeps us from even looking there.
In a well-held coaching space, these voices can soften.
When the nervous system no longer has to stay on guard, something else becomes possible: an internal conversation — one that is usually interrupted by urgency, self-judgment, lack of self-compassion, or performance — can unfold. Thoughts slow down. Sensations become noticeable. Contradictions are allowed to exist without being resolved too quickly.
This is not introspection in isolation.
It is self-contact in relationship.
The presence of another regulated human matters here. Not because the coach has answers, but because the safe presence of the other creates a space where vigilance is no longer required. In this space, you do not need to defend, impress, explain, or justify yourself. You do not need to arrive clear or ready. You can arrive exactly as you are.
What emerges in this space is often quiet at first. It does not shout. It does not optimize. It does not argue. It speaks in sensations, images, half-sentences, hesitations. This is why it so often goes unheard in everyday life.
A coaching session is not about extracting this voice or translating it into action too quickly. It is about allowing it to exist long enough to be felt.
The coach’s role here is not to lead the conversation, but to protect it. To lend compassion at times when you do not yet have self-compassion. To lend safety and trust when you do not feel safe with yourself yet.
The relational container: safety without agenda
For this kind of contact to happen, safety is not optional — it is foundational.
Safety does not mean comfort.
It does not mean agreement.
And it does not mean the absence of challenge.
Safety means that nothing needs to be defended against.
Safety provides the space to soften the fear of not being (worthy) enough. The fear of being judged — by others, or by yourself. It creates the conditions to lower your defenses and move toward a place where you can begin to feel what self-compassion might actually feel like.
It is a place where you can show vulnerability.
A place where you can begin to get to know yourself — to yourself — without being afraid of what that might mean about you, or without immediately judging yourself for it.
A coaching session becomes a relational container when it offers:
_ consistency without intrusion
_ presence without pressure
_ curiosity without judgment
Within such a container, defenses are not dismantled — they are allowed to rest. And when defenses rest, the system no longer has to organize itself around protection. Energy becomes available for reflection, integration, and truth.
This is why a session is not outcome-driven in the narrow sense. Predetermined goals, when imposed too early, often reintroduce the very pressure the work is trying to relieve. They ask the system to perform before it has had a chance to settle.
Ethical restraint is part of the container.
So is patience.
So is the willingness not to know yet.
A good coaching space does not demand clarity.
It allows clarity to arrive when it is ready.
Borrowed regulation and earned attachment
Human nervous systems do not regulate in isolation. They learn regulation in relationship.
When a client sits with a coach who is grounded, emotionally present, and non-reactive, something subtle but significant happens: the client’s nervous system begins to synchronize with that steadiness. This is not metaphor. It is physiology.
Over time, repeated experiences of being met without judgment, rushed interpretation, or control create what attachment research calls earned secure attachment. Not by redoing childhood, but by offering a present-day experience that is different enough to be integrated.
This is not dependency.
It is rehearsal.
The client is not becoming attached to the coach. The client is not becoming attached to the coach. She is learning what it feels like to be attached to herself without fear, with re-earned trust and growing self-compassion.
Eventually, what was once borrowed can be carried alone.
Women, socialization, and the hidden cost of belonging
For many women, the deepest struggle is not lack of insight, but the cost of authenticity.
Girls learn early — often without words — what is rewarded and what is risky. They learn to read the room, manage emotion, soften impact, stay agreeable, stay connected. They learn that belonging may depend on being easy, helpful, or strong.
These lessons do not disappear just because a woman grows older, more educated, or more self-aware. They live in the nervous system, in relational reflexes, in what feels possible or dangerous to express.
What looks like hesitation is often discernment.
What looks like self-doubt is often relational intelligence.
What looks like a lack of desire is often a desire that learned to stay quiet.
Depth work does not ask women to simply “be more confident” or “choose differently.” It recognizes that many of the patterns women want to change once kept them safe, loved, or included.
Authenticity becomes possible only when the system no longer expects punishment for it.
Agency, resistance, and sovereignty
In this work, resistance is not an obstacle.
It is information.
A client’s hesitation, ambivalence, or slowness is not something to overcome — it is something to listen to. Timing matters. Pace matters. Choice matters.
You set the rhythm.
Coaching that respects agency does not pull. It does not convince. It does not push through discomfort in the name of growth. It trusts that when the conditions are right, movement will happen — and when they are not, waiting is intelligent.
The goal is not compliance.
The goal is authorship.
Rupture, repair, and real relationship
No relationship is perfectly attuned. Misunderstandings happen. Missteps happen. What matters is not their absence, but how they are handled.
Repair is one of the most powerful experiences a coaching relationship can offer. When impact is acknowledged without defensiveness, when responsibility is taken without collapse, the client experiences something many never had: accountability without abandonment.
This is how trust deepens.
This is how relational safety becomes real.
The body as a holder of truth
The authentic self does not live only in words. It lives in sensation, impulse, breath, tension, and ease.
The body often knows long before the mind understands. Depth work makes room for this knowing — without forcing it into interpretation too quickly.
Insight that is not embodied rarely lasts.
Safety that is not felt does not integrate.
Listening includes the body.
Separation, endings, and internalization
A truly reparative relationship does not aim to last forever.
The goal of this work is not ongoing holding, but internalization. Over time, the client no longer needs the external container in the same way. She carries the capacity to pause, to listen, to stay present with herself.
Separation, when it comes, is not loss.
It is completion.
The relationship has done its work when the client trusts herself enough to walk on her own.