Root & thrive
Coaching for Creatives
Support and guidance through a season of change, growth, and transformation. For founders, creative leaders, coaches, and entrepreneurs. From a fellow creative and recovering overachiever who gets it.
Shift from burnout to full bloom with holistic coaching for creatives
Does this sound like you?
✓ You’re stuck in a cycle of overachieving. It’s gotten you this far, but it’s never enough. There’s got to be another way.
✓ You’re often the “only” in the room—only woman, only person of color, only one who looks or thinks or speaks a certain way, only one who has your unique life experience. It’s hard to feel safe and at-ease, like you truly belong.
✓ You struggle to confidently motivate and lead your team. You worry that sooner or later, everyone will realize you’re not cut out for this.
✓ You have thoughts about leaving it all behind and doing something completely different. But you have no idea where to start, how to decide what’s next, or whether it’s even the right move.
Find Renewed Confidence and Fulfillment
By trusting your gut and defining success on your own terms
Coaching for creatives is specifically tailored for recovering overachievers. Pushing yourself and people pleasing can only get you so far.
Through our work together, you’ll begin to trust your intuition and grow your confidence. I’ll partner with you to design iterative experiments that fit seamlessly into your life and work. You’ll find your own unique balance and create a life that’s aligned with your values. You’ll forge a new path from just surviving to truly thriving.
How We’ll Work Together
Start where you are
This coaching relationship is completely individualized, so we get to focus on what you really need in each moment. We’ll create the space for you to deepen your understanding of your strengths, inner obstacles, and blind spots. You’ll learn tools for expanding your perspective and moving forward with integrity.
Befriend your inner critic
Many coaching programs attempt to shut the inner critic down, but it just keeps rising up again in new forms. Instead, we’ll befriend your inner critic by practicing compassion, curiosity, acceptance, and self-love. Your inner critic is there for a reason, and we are going to work with it, not against it.
Connect with your intuition
You are already equipped with an inner compass that can offer you a treasure trove of information. Connecting with your intuition allows you to gain clarity and direction in your decision-making process, better understand your desires, and tap into your most powerful tool for navigating life's challenges.
Create your vision for the future
By imagining what you want for your future, you can carve your own path toward a life that is meaningful and fulfilling. Without a clear vision, it can be easy to lose sight of what really matters to you; you need to know the destination before starting the journey.
Design your future through simple experiments
You don’t have to follow your intuition blindly or take leaps that feel too scary. We’ll take big dreams and challenges and break them down into smaller, time-boxed experiments. Rather than guessing, you can test your hypotheses, mitigate risks, and learn from your results.
Reflect and iterate
Design thinking allows you to approach your life as a creative process, and you can continuously refine your vision and your roadmap over time. This dynamic approach keeps you agile in the face of change. It’s one of many tools you’ll take with you and apply long after our coaching journey ends.
“Working with Lisa has allowed me to step away from the narratives I repeat to myself when dealing with struggles in work and personal life.
After listening to my thoughts, she has an incredible ability to pull out kernels of insights that help me reframe how I view a problem, often broadening the solution set in an unexpected way. She also provides actionable tips on how to break the habits and thought patterns that have blocked me from making progress. And she does it all with such warmth, grace, and kindness.”
-Deanna
TESTIMONIALS
"Coaching gave me permission to do the things I wanted to do—to realize that I often got caught up in doing things because I felt like I should, and to unpack how in the past, the things I did out of interest or desire were always more important than the things I did because other people thought they were important.”
“Lisa was the obvious choice for me out of other coaching candidates. What stood out was our first intro call where she immediately suggested that we used the little time we had to do a trial session. It was so proactive and helpful in both of us getting to know each other and giving me a clear sneak peek of what to expect working with her. That proactive way of coaching is what I still appreciate from Lisa today, she is a terrific listener, is quick to understand context and works effectively at getting to the crux of the problem.”
— Annie Zhang
“I started off my coaching journey with Lisa as a frustrated data scientist. With Lisa's coaching, I've been able to redefine my job into something that suits me better. Now, I would define my job as 50% agile coaching, 50% data science—something I never would have thought was possible a year ago!”
— Alicia
Meet your coach
Lisa Sanchez, MTS, CPCC
After years of overachievement and people pleasing, coaching set me on a bold and beautiful path of freedom, healing, and fulfillment. And since 2017, I’ve coached creative leaders around the world to live more intuitively and design their careers with purpose.
Before becoming a coach, I served on design leadership teams at Dropbox, NIO, and All Turtles. There I designed language for all sorts of experiences, from a self-driving car interface to enterprise software.
My education at Harvard College, Harvard Divinity School, and the Coaches Training Institute informs my practice. Previously, I’ve lived in Boston, Atlanta, Berlin, and San Francisco. Now I’m nestled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with my partner, toddler, and rescue dog.
This coaching is a good fit for you if…
✓ You’re longing to cultivate a creative practice or see a creative project through, but it’s tough to create the space for it in your life.
✓ You’re feeling a lack of fulfillment or purpose, but you’re not sure what you want next.
✓ You want to heal your overachieving tendencies so you can work less, but better.
✓ You feel overwhelmed and overcommitted, and you can’t seem to find a way out of it.
✓ You’re ready to overcome your fears and self-doubts so you can dream bigger—and bring those dreams to life.
✓ You wish to be more fulfilled and present in your work and life.
FAQs
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Nope. I love working with individual contributors and solopreneurs, as well as those who lead teams. I also work with people who are taking time off from work (on parental leave, on a sabbatical, or after a layoff, for example) and thoughtfully considering their next steps.
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Many of my clients have worked at startups and technology companies, of all sizes and stages. I’ve worked with founders, VPs, directors, leads, and senior individual contributors. Many are creatives at heart and have expertise in design, marketing, or product.
I’ve also worked with coaches, artists, and entrepreneurs.
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Nope. The heart of this work lies with you—the courage and openness you bring to our sessions and the learning and experimentation you practice in between. I’ve witnessed my clients get promoted, take sabbaticals, change industries, recover from burnout, move across the world, and bring their own visions to life. The outcome of your coaching journey is entirely up to you!
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There’s no set curriculum, since this coaching relationship is entirely individualized. At the end of each session, you’ll have the opportunity to set your intentions and next steps for the two weeks until our next session. I’ll offer suggestions that are intended to fit into your work and life, but it’s totally up to you to decide what you’d like to commit to. There won’t be worksheets, but I do love to share book recommendations if you’re interested.
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You’re welcome to bring any topic you’re grappling with to each session. Here are some of the topics that come up frequently: overcoming burnout, accessing intuition and creativity, giving and receiving feedback, unhooking from praise and people-pleasing, setting boundaries and saying no, managing up, self-care, preparing for interviews and presentations, hiring, managing a team, creating a healthy culture, going for a promotion, stepping down from a leadership role, taking time off, and balancing work and parenthood.
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This is a common question, since coaching and therapy both use conversation as a primary medium. Therapy often looks to the past or the unconscious to uncover the why behind our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, then works to shift unhealthy patterns to healthy ones. Therapy treats trauma, grief, addiction, depression, anxiety, and many other mental health concerns. And even more broadly, it helps improve self-awareness, relationships, and overall wellbeing.
Coaching isn’t therapy. It doesn’t diagnose or treat mental health concerns. It can be a great complement to therapy, but it doesn’t replace it. Coaching starts with the present and looks toward the future, expanding one’s sense of possibility, then providing accountability to create meaningful change.
“Back in July 2020, I found myself seeking guidance on my career path and was fortunate enough to come across Lisa’s services. From our first conversation, I was struck by her warmth and genuine interest in helping me. Working with Lisa has truly been a joy as I navigate the challenges and pressure of working in tech. Lisa has been instrumental in my growth, offering invaluable advice and empowering me to climb the ladder confidently. I can't thank her enough for her impact on my career and personal development.
What brings me back over and over is her authenticity and compassion.”
— Nabaht Peters
Create space for your growth with holistic coaching for creatives
Discover your values and strengths, clarify your goals, and create personalized experiments to learn what helps you thrive. Through this process, you will gain lasting rituals, frameworks, and perspectives to design a meaningful life and fulfilling work.