Where she started

Debbie came to coaching after nearly two decades out of the traditional workforce. She had spent those years as a military spouse, moving across countries, raising and homeschooling her children, and, as she put it, "filling needs." What she didn't have was any belief that the work had added up to something an employer would want.

In her own words: "I didn't have any marketable skills. Those were the lies I had told myself. I had been out of the workforce for almost 18 years." The story she told herself underneath it was simpler and harder: "You're just a mom."

She was, in her words, "lost, and I knew I needed help."

What the work looked like

The coaching didn't start with a plan or a resume. It started with getting her own history out where she could see it. Over several sessions, Debbie talked through twenty years of what she'd dismissed as "just volunteering", starting an English club, coordinating programs overseas, running a library, managing people and budgets, building things from nothing.

Molly's role was to reflect it back. As Debbie described the moment it turned, "You had me talk through all my experiences and I couldn't see how it was applicable to what I wanted to do, and you said 'this is what I hear.'"  Hearing her own experience named as skills changed what she believed was possible: "I thought, I really could make a resume. I do have skills. I don't have a huge gap like I thought."

The other half of the work was harder and more personal: facing what had kept her stuck. "Facing insecurities and fears. That's what you really helped me do. You get comfortable with your insecurities and fears. They felt like a blanket, but they're holding you back." 

She also credits being made to say her goal out loud. "You encouraged me to share my vision with other people, and by telling other people what I wanted to do, it forced me to be accountable. It is not just a dream, it becomes tangible."

What changed

Debbie enrolled in a graduate program, a classical liberal arts degree built for teachers, something she'd wanted and hadn't let herself pursue. Telling her husband was part of it: "I was able to tell my husband, this is what I really want. It's coming at a bad time financially. He supported that. [Before coaching] I didn't give him a chance to support or not. I'd just assumed he wouldn't."

Since then she has been tutoring, teaching, and running retreats for adults. She's planning to write and publish. Asked how she'd describe what shifted, she reframed the whole starting point: "I would've felt I was stuck because I was answering my calling to be a mom. Now I would say I was hiding behind my fear."

In her words

" 'I am lost, and I knew I needed help.' That's the first step. Someone has to be willing to meet you there. That was what I needed at a time I couldn't see it. It has set me up for a much more well-rounded experience in my life."

- Debbie Sonnenfeld