As January nears its end, some of us are already struggling with our New Year’s resolutions. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, by this time last year, 13 percent of respondents who had at least one resolution fessed up to not keeping any. The same survey revealed that 70 percent of respondents didn’t make resolutions at all, with one in 10 of those confirming that it’s because they know they won’t follow through. What’s getting in the way of people setting and achieving their goals?
When it comes to realizing our aspirations, many feel they need to go it alone. However, having the experience and insight of a trained professional can make the difference between success and self-sabotage. If you aspire to make a change or add something new to your life, chances are, there’s a coach for that.
Habit forming
“Who is the person you want to be?” asks Jasmine Braxton, a performance mindset coach for eldest daughters. It’s a question she poses to her clients. “What type of decisions does that person make?”
Braxton has been coaching others in one form or another for 13 years, starting out in the health and fitness world as a personal trainer. Getting at a client’s aspirational identity takes precedence over the talk of sets and reps, because helping clients succeed means they need to make behavioral changes they can sustain.
“It was all mindset. If you identify as something, the habits come with it without having to force it,” she explains. “When you’re just doing something to hit this goal, once you achieve the goal, there’s nothing to work for. It’s very easy to slip back into [old] habits.”
The focus of Braxton’s current coaching practice, working with eldest daughters, comes from a eureka moment she had one day in a bookstore. She picked up The Eldest Daughter Effect, by Lisette Schuitemaker and Wies Enthoven, and read the book in two hours—right in the store. The content resonated with Braxton (an eldest daughter herself), and it moved away from common narratives about eldest daughters’ struggles (the idea that they’re “bossy,” the perception that they’re perfectionists to a fault or they’re highly responsible, anxious, or stressed). The book highlights the traits and behaviors that enable eldest daughters to make things happen, and Braxton realized those were the hardworking, thoughtful, efficient people who she wanted to coach. At first she worried the focus might be too niche, but the results tell a different story.
Photo by Eze Amos.
As Braxton publicized her work, other eldest daughters responded to her in kinship. Braxton’s clients tend to be women who have founded their own businesses or reached leadership roles. They come seeking guidance on how to maintain their success as well as how to remedy, or avoid, burnout.
“I will teach you to prioritize fun in this work, because if you’re not enjoying it, it’s killing you, whether you recognize it or not,” she says.
In addition to her one-on-one coaching, Braxton offers the Run Your Own Race performance accelerator program, which provides participants with a weekly email containing a mindset resource, reflection questions, and personalized feedback. She’s also added event speaker to her repertoire and is proactively seeking more speaking opportunities.
“I’m talking about mental toughness,” she says, “and how it’s the prerequisite for any and every endeavor.”
Hands on
“Clients come to me because they feel chronic stress or pain patterns in their bodies,” explains Gina Kelley, a Somatic Experiencing, therapeutic movement, and touch work practitioner.
Early in Kelley’s career, she worked in nonprofits, serving at-risk youth. Though she loved the work, she often felt overwhelmed. She and her colleagues were under-resourced as they serviced a population with urgent needs. Her clients frequently showed signs of stress and trauma, as did her co-workers.
“You know,” says Kelley, “that’s kind of the origin of my interest.”
Kelley underwent rigorous training in several methodologies in reducing stress and releasing trauma, including the Alexander Technique and Somatic Experiencing, which comes from the work of psychotherapist Peter Levine. She’s incorporated new tools over her 20 years in practice, and many clients now come to her for trauma resolution. Somatic Experiencing helps clients release trauma stored in their bodies, getting out of the body’s fight, flight, or freeze responses.
“If you have a reason that your body is doing something like bracing habitually, or reacting in some sort of pattern,” she says, “willing it to free itself or to relax isn’t going to work until you resolve the traumatic response that’s embedded in [the body].”
Photo by Eze Amos.
Kelley describes trauma as anything that’s “too much, too soon, without adequate support” for a person. As part of the Somatic Experiencing, she guides clients to identify bodily sensations that correlate to thoughts and feelings. Her trained gaze also gathers information about clients as they move, noting things such as movement patterns (like bracing or shifting away from touch), posture, and facial expression. Also, with permission, she uses touch or physical proximity to reinforce messages of support and safety to clients’ bodies in a tangible way.
“What I love is when clients report that they have more capacity or nervous system regulation,” Kelley says. “They’ll say, ‘I faced this situation yesterday that normally would’ve sent me into a tailspin, and I noticed, just like, without even having to think about it, that I remained calm and was able to set a boundary and handle the situation.’”
In practice
“I have a lot of passions,” says Transformative Nurse Coach Nancy Zamil. “And one of the passions is empowering people to be able to help themselves.”
Zamil has invested a wealth of time in exploring those passions and serving others. After getting her undergraduate degree, she joined the Peace Corps in the health and nutrition program. While abroad, she learned about herbal medicine firsthand from practitioners, and when she returned to the states, she earned her master’s in public health and spent time in that sphere before deciding to go back to school to pursue a medical course of study. She considered becoming a doctor but instead chose nursing, because she values its holistic nature.
“A part of nursing is self-care,” says Zamil. “I started [out] having the herbal background, and then I went into yoga and meditation. When I moved to Charlottesville, I found out about reiki, and I found out that energy work was really amazing for the body, mind, and spirit.”
Zamil became a reiki master in 2014, after seeing the positive benefits of reiki for her patients, and helping to implement a program at the hospice where she was working. Her time in hospice care also gave her a keen understanding of end-of-life planning and a comfort talking about the difficult subject that yields fruit for her clients today.
The topic of end-of-life wishes—at any stage of life—can be the elephant in the room that no one wants to initiate conversations around. Doctors wait for patients to ask questions, and patients look to physicians to bring it up. Zamil helps clients feel more comfortable talking through things and getting their documents in order before they find themselves in a dire situation, covering everything from what the client wants their care to look like, to do not resuscitate orders, what they are and how they work.
“One of the tenets of nurse coaching is [that] you’re not attached to the outcome,” says Zamil. “It’s what the client sees and how they see it, which is why sometimes the process is slow and deliberate, and the goals are co-created. It’s a partnership, and there’s a lot of co-creation because everyone has the answers to the health and wellness issues inside of them. What the coach does is they bring it out in the open for the client to make the decision that is best for him or her.”
