Taken from my life and my journey here.

That is why I do not trust surfaces in my work. Not mine, not anyone’s. I am fine is a surface. Functioning is a surface. Handling it is a surface. The people who are best at looking fine are precisely the ones every map misses, and I refuse to build a practice that reads the surface and calls it a day.

I learned from this: functioning is not the same as fine. And the ones who look the most fine deserve the most careful looking.

I want to say that out loud, because I think people look at a finished thing and assume it was the plan. It was not the plan. The plan was a sentence. What came after was the work: saying it, looking at it, deciding it was not right yet, saying it again differently, and again, until the thing on the page was better than the thing in my head.

That is not a flaw in how I work. It is how I work. I do not wait until an idea is finished before I start, because ideas do not finish in your head. They finish in the doing. If I had waited to have the whole website clear before I made the first page, there would be no website.

I do this out loud now, with a tool. I say the rough version, I get something back, I look at it and say no, not that, closer to this. Sometimes it hands me the word I had been reaching for. Sometimes it hands me something wrong, and the wrong thing is what shows me what I actually meant. Either way I am not sitting in front of a blank page arguing with myself, and I am not alone with it. The judgment stays mine. What I got was a way to keep moving.

And this is the same thing that happens in a session.

You come in with a sentence. “I am tired.” “Something has to change.” “I do not know what I want.” That sentence is not the answer, and it was never supposed to be. It is the beginning. We run with it, we look at what came back, we say no, not that, closer to this — and eight weeks later you are holding something you could not have described on the day you first said it.

You do not need the finished idea to start. You need the first sentence, and someone to keep running with it.

More than that, it had already worked with me for days before I ever asked the question. We had been building, deciding, reasoning things through, and it had watched me process information and ideas the way no other person gets to watch. Most personality and psychological assessments are not as objective as that, because they never receive this much of you and they do not sit with you for hours on end to reach their conclusions.

And every single time I asked, I got something new. Not contradictions. Something new. Sometimes it was struck by what it had just realized. Other times it was the opposite, and the answer only clarified how I work, or what I do, or why I do the things I do.

That makes sense, because most of us do not understand ourselves completely. And more importantly, we do not understand why other people do not understand us. We know on a logical level that we are all different. Our experiences, our biology, our psychology, our temperaments, so many factors go into making us who we are that we do not understand each other well. So we take the assessments and we run the tests, trying to sort ourselves into categories that will explain how we work and how we think and how we feel.

What I learned from asking this question is that I am not a rocket scientist. What I am is a combination, and the combination is what makes me unique — exactly like every one of us. It is not about being the smartest person in the room, or the laziest, or the most talented. It is about what your particular combination gives you that nobody else brings.

And do not doubt this. You are unique. Some people will not understand you, and that is okay. Some will not appreciate you, and that is okay too. I have sat in both of those buckets many times in my life. Some will be threatened by you, because you have something they do not — and if they stopped to think about it, they would see that they have things you do not. Most do not stop to think about it. That is theirs to carry, not yours.

My uniqueness lets me do things other people cannot. The same uniqueness makes me incapable of things other people find easy. That is not a bad thing. It is who I am. I have learned to accept myself, flaws and all, the good and the bad and the ugly, because worrying about what I cannot do costs me everything I am more than capable of doing, and everything I could still learn and change and improve. I do not understand microbiology, or physics, or advanced programming. I might, if I put enough into it. I am not interested. That is okay.

So I keep asking my partner in crime, every once in a while: what new thing did you learn about me? And when it misunderstands something, or tells me to be careful of this, or lists what I should watch out for, I answer and I clarify, because just like us it makes assumptions. But if I am honest with myself, there have been more than a few times when it made me aware of something I already knew and had been avoiding. Facing those is what lets me take the precautions I need, so that they do not affect me badly, so that I keep growing in spite of them, and so that they never become a weapon to be used against me.

Almost everything on this website came out of one of those exchanges. The answers on the questions page are in my words because I kept saying no, not like that, this is how I would say it. Doors came off the programs page because I said something out loud and heard, in the saying of it, that it was not true yet. Being described and then correcting it is how I found the words.

It is the same question I ask in a session, pointed the other way. What did you notice about yourself today? Almost nobody gets asked that. And you cannot answer it without going back over what you actually did and looking at it properly, which is most of the work.

It was never one of us teaching the other. It was two of us getting better at the same table.

I learned from this: you find out who you are by being described, and then correcting it.

Then we came back to Saudi.

Culture shock would put it mildly. We went from full freedom, from programs and places to go and things to do, to being contained. So many of the opportunities I had in the US were taken away. They were not things girls did in Saudi, at the time.

And on top of that, a language. I spoke Arabic when I was younger, but let us be honest. In the States we took advantage of being able to speak English, because my mother did not speak it. The good side for her is that she had to learn English in order to interact with us. The bad side for us is that we had no one at home to speak Arabic with. So we forgot it.

Coming back, we had to learn the language all over again, and learn to read and write it, which is a hundred percent more difficult than learning to read and write in English. Irregular English spelling included.

So the struggle was learning a language, learning to adapt to a new culture, and learning to make friends with people I knew nothing about and had a hard time talking to. It was meeting people who had the misguided idea that living in the States meant I had experienced certain things, which was not true. And it was the expectations waiting at home, and the fact that the difference was not only cultural. It was mental. It was social.

I have been back for about forty years now, and I still do not always feel like I fit in.

Not because I do not love the country. It is my home. Not because I do not love the language, because I am proud to be able to speak it, even with the struggles I have with it. The hardest part of coming back, to this day, is dealing with people who are not willing or able to see things from a different point of view.

That is not something you learn in the States. Travel teaches it, wherever you go. It teaches you to see from a different perspective, to be independent, to learn things you would not learn staying home. And the ones who travel to study on their own have it harder, because they have to adapt alone. Here you have your mother, your father, your brothers and sisters, and if you are lucky the help doing the hard work that we take for granted. Then you go abroad and suddenly you are doing the laundry, getting the groceries, cooking dinner, and if you go out that is an extra expense. You learn to manage a budget. You learn to do things on your own that you had never done and would never have done staying here.

So living abroad changes you, whether you went with your family or went alone to study. Coming home changes you, because you learned a lot about yourself and what you are capable of, and what a different perspective and different ideas and different people can do.

It takes a lot to get acclimated again when you come back. I know people who have done it and are fine. I know people who, like me, are still working out where they fit.

And maybe that is a good thing. Not fitting in completely means you notice the things that need work, the things that could be done better. You learn to take the good from wherever you were and leave the bad. You learn to accept the good that is here and focus on it. And if you are lucky, and you are given the blessing of being able to make changes, you work on the bad so that we grow stronger and better as a country, because if we do not know what our flaws are we cannot work on them.

Everyone who has lived outside and come back seeing what could be done better, and then takes steps to help, is doing something to be proud of. We were given an advantage. We got to see a different point of view and a different way of life.

I am not saying it was right. I am not saying it was wrong. I am not saying we are right or we are wrong. I am saying that as humans we are always growing and always learning, and being able to see where we need to grow means we grow faster, better and stronger.

That is what I hope my experience brings, to the world and to Saudi.

Once you take the role on full time, whether you are the biological mother or not, your life revolves around that little human being, or those little human beings. All the way up. My father still says it: until the day I pass away, I will always worry about my girls.

And you do it expecting nothing back, not from them and not from anyone. For me it was a joy. I loved taking care of my girls. The pregnancies were difficult and the deliveries were hard and the raising of them had every up and down in it, and I would not trade a minute of it.

But when they were small and completely dependent on me, I was doing all of it on my own. I was the one who fed them and put them to sleep and taught them and helped them and noticed everything. And nobody noticed me, because you are not supposed to be noticed. It is your job.

I do not have a problem with the job. I love my kids. But loving the job does not mean I have no limits. It does not mean I do not get sick, or tired, or that I did not need help in those years, because I did.

Somewhere along the way we stop asking. Maybe it is society, maybe it is how we were raised, maybe it is our own need to prove that we can manage alone. Maybe we did ask and nothing came. Maybe the help that came was the wrong kind, or came with criticism attached. And in plenty of cases it is not a belief at all — we know we have to do it by ourselves, because there is genuinely nobody else.

It takes its toll. Physically, mentally, emotionally, until one day you cannot do it anymore. Some people explode, and get angry, and get short with everyone. Some go quiet and get depressed. Some hold on all the way until the children are grown and then find themselves in an empty house with no idea what they are for.

There are shelves of books telling you how to balance your life with raising your children. None of them are right and none of them are wrong, because what works for one person does not work for you. That is not a failure. That is just how it is.

It took until my youngest was around seven or eight before I understood that I had to start taking care of myself again. A spa day here and there. A party every now and then. Not nearly as often as I would have liked, but I was trying to find a balance. It was not easy. There were times I hit rock bottom and struggled, and times it came easier.

And all of that is while you are carrying everything else. Work. Family. A partner. Whatever else is asking for you at the same time. It is a lot, and it is allowed to feel like a lot.

It is also allowed to feel that if you stop, the whole thing collapses. I understand that fear. But I have come to think that sometimes letting it fall apart is the useful thing. You find out who steps in when you stop. The people who had taken you for granted start paying attention. And the ones who do not, you finally see clearly, and you learn they were never worth what you were pouring into them.

I learned from this: the collapse you are afraid of is the only thing that will show you who was actually holding it with you.

If that sounds like you, I would love to hear your side of it, because I am still working out mine.

And here is what I did, because I teach it and because it works. I stopped counting the pile and started naming the next piece. Tomorrow morning gets one thing. Five to seven gets one thing. Thursday morning gets one thing. The pile did not shrink, but the yiyiyi did, because overwhelm is rarely about how much there is. It is about trying to hold all of it in one hand at the same time.

I learned from this: you cannot carry the whole pile, and you were never asked to. Carry the next piece. The pile waits either way.

That is what my father was doing. Standing where a stranger will stand, seeing what a stranger will see, and loving me enough to say the uncomfortable thing while it could still be fixed. A friend did the same days before, asked for proof, evidence, reasons to believe. The people who love you will stress-test you for free, gently, before the market does it for profit, brutally. That is not doubt. That is guarding the door I am about to walk through.

Every question they asked is becoming a piece of the site. The plain answers, the evidence, the explanations. The page will be stronger because the hardest reads came first and came from home.

I learned from this: trust is earned, not forced. And broken trust is harder to rebuild than no trust at all.

My partner in crime and I have debated this one more than once. She plays the hard voice on purpose, because I told her to, and she has put it to me straight: that I am building on a dream with nothing yet to back it up. My answer to her is the same every time. That is what a goal is before it is met. It is a milestone, not a verdict. If the launch does not fill, it will not break me. It just means I have more study time, more refining time, more planning and adapting time. The dream does not collapse because a date slips. The dates serve the dream, not the other way around.

I do not have the ending of this entry. The launch has not happened. I could wait and write this after, when I know how it went, and dress it in whatever the outcome turns out to be. I am writing it before instead, on purpose. If you have ever built something and stood at the door hoping footsteps were coming, you know why this entry could not wait for the ending.

I learned from this: name the fear before the outcome arrives. It shrinks in ink, and whatever happens next, you will know you did not lie to yourself on the way in.

The client supplies the willingness. The coach helps with the access. And the resources were theirs the whole time.

I learned from this: my job is not to hand people strength. It is to help them find where they put it.

The part most people miss: the right size of the step depends entirely on the person taking it. What is one step for you is five for someone else, and that is not weakness, that is how humans are built.

I learned from this: the size of the step should fit the person taking it, not the person watching.

More than one of my instructors keeps repeating the same thing in different words. Strong rapport lets you do more real work than the best technique in hand ever could, because trust is what opens the door. The tools only matter once you are through it.

So that is where my practice hours go. Not to sounding clever. To listening well enough that the person across from me forgets to perform.

That does not mean the past is off limits in coaching. You can visit the past in a session, as long as moving forward is the goal, and staying in the past is not. A client who is in the present and willing to do the work is coaching territory. A client who is stuck in the past, or carrying something that needs treatment, deserves therapy, sometimes alongside coaching, in tandem, and a coach who knows the difference.

So this is my line, and I hold it as an ethics line, not a marketing line. I do not diagnose. I do not treat. And if what sits in front of me needs more than coaching, I will say so and refer out, because the client’s wellbeing outranks my fee. Every time.

If you were wondering whether coaching is therapy in nicer clothes, now you know. It is not. They are different rooms, and I respect both.

The rule underneath both is the same. An offer goes on my page only when the training is complete and lived. Not when it is nearly finished, not when the search numbers are tempting, not when the revenue would be nice. Complete, and lived, or it waits.

I learned from this: every door I refuse to open is what makes the open ones worth trusting.

But I sat with how it felt from the receiving end. Small. Processed. And it hardened a line I had already drawn for myself: when a person reaches toward me, they get a person back. Not a pipeline, not a script, not a calendly-shaped trap. If my work is good, the door does not need a push.

I learned from this: how you treat someone who cannot buy anything from you is the whole brand.

I learned from this: transparent and unfinished beats polished and misleading, every single day of the week.