Hi, I'm Lena, an artist, coach, and SoulCollage® Facilitator, who helps people re-imagine who they want to be in their next phase of life. In other words, I work with adults who want to change who they want to be when they grow up.

It's never too late to change your story…

I've been coaching people since I was a 15 year old lifeguard/marching band drum major. I was always a leader, but my training in guiding people through difficult life transitions started in graduate school as a teaching assistant. People assume starting college is always an amazing experience—You're independent! You can do what you want! You can sleep till noon!—but in truth, a lot of new college students feel overwhelmed, disconnected, and abandoned by their sudden change in life structure and status.

Going from being a kid to being an adult, being responsible for your life without the structure of high school, and knowing what you’re going to do with the rest of your life at 18–that’s a lot of pressure! And it’s the kind of pressure that people feel again in transitions later in life, and once again tell themselves “This is supposed to be great! Why can’t I handle this like everybody else?”

Unfortunately, the impulse to beat yourself up with “why can’t I do it like everyone else” just makes it harder to make a life that makes you happy.

I definitely fell into this trap, over and over—I was the poster child for imposter syndrome until halfway through my 30s! So when students came to me, overwhelmed by the prospect of making decisions that would determine their whole lives, I totally got it. I became an academic advisor in addition to my teaching, and loved empowering students to figure out what they wanted, and supporting them in making their own decisions about their classes, majors, and potential future jobs. (While also making sure they knew how the government worked, which is also important to survival, tbh. The British people may have voted for Brexit without knowing what it meant, but every single person in my class damn well knew what it would mean, for the UK and the world.)

I loved what I did, I was empowering others, but my body was shutting down.

My work was rewarding and I loved seeing students thrive in their classes, figure out who they wanted to be as young adults, and then launch off into the world. But then my life changed: I got three autoimmune disorder diagnoses in the space of two years, and, unmanaged, my body was attacking itself from the inside out. 

Academia is not particularly friendly when you’re sick. You are expected to work all the time—no such thing as business hours—on your three simultaneous jobs—research, teaching, and service—and there's really no such thing as substitutes when you get sick during the semester unless things are dire. Yeah, there are summers off, but they’re unpaid, and the pay is barely enough to survive. It's not at all surprising I got sick.

But academia, being a teacher-scholar of political philosophy and law…it was my entire identity. And I had no choice but to leave it to survive. And lose all of the professional connections and almost all of my academic friends.

So, who was I going to be next?

The answer surprised me. It turned out, I’m not just a political philosopher. I'm also an artist.

Most of my friends and family were about as enthusiastic as you'd expect—what do you mean you're done with academia after ten years in school and now you're choosing another career where you don't make money? Could you not just get a real job?

But to make this transition from my once-dream job in academia to a new life, I knew I needed to find work just as meaningful, especially since I now had a lot less energy to spend on bureaucratic bullshit than before I got sick.

And then I took a course on fairy tales and started making art inspired by them.

Not the sanitized, made-for-children Disney versions, but the folktales and fairy tales that helped people make sense of their lives. (Did you know the original fairy tales, or contes de fées, were written for adults by salons of women dissatisfied with the rules governing their lives?) I started making art depicting parts of these stories, mostly of the plucky young heroine wandering in the woods to fend for herself, and reading stories and novels of women who remade their lives amid great struggle. 

In short, I tore myself apart and put myself back together from the ground up. And I did it with the power of stories. I totally revised my life plan, my goals, and what I wanted my life story to be.  

By 40, I can confidently say I have survived my trial by fire, my decade-long quest through the fairytale dark forest, and not only lived to tell the tale, but to thrive. It's my job now to help you get through. I am here to help you refind you, and redefine who you want to be when you grow up. I believe that’s not just a choice you make at 18, but also at 25, 35, 45, and beyond.

You might ask yourself: but could I do that? Maybe she did, but what if I don’t have what it takes.

I have a simple answer to that: absolutely everyone who commits to examining their lives and imagining a new direction for their life can change their life. One hundred percent.

It's okay to not be who you thought you wanted to be. It’s your destiny to decide you who will be, to shake off all the voices of self-doubt and criticism from the outside world. You gotta choose you.

It will be hard. How do you even go about rewriting your story? The past is what happened, after all. You can’t change the past.

Maybe you can’t change the past. But you can change how you see the past. You can change what past patterns you bring into your present life. And rewriting your stories is the way to do it.

You can always change your story, if you look at your life with an open and creative mind, and are willing to do the work.

And that's where I come in. I'm your coach, your cheerleader, your accountability partner, and your ally in exploring who you are and who you want to be. 

I bring a vast but eclectic toolkit to working with clients, because knowing you want to transform yourself doesn’t mean knowing exactly how to do it. Helping you through your transitions is my job–putting in the work of introspection and creative problem-solving is yours. 

I’d love to explore working together–click here to book a consultation to see if we’re a good fit.

I believe

that people have endless capacity for reinvention

that creativity is what lets you reinvent (and there’s no such thing as a person who isn’t creative!)

that we often know deep down where we want to go,

we don't get quiet enough to listen

and that awakening your deep-down intuition,

reexamining the stories you tell yourself about your life,

and remaking them to serve who you are—and who you want to be—is real-life magic

that no computer can do what your mind and your intuition and your creativity can do

and that no decision on “who you want to be when you grow up” is final