Testimonials
Let me take you on a tour of what brought my clients to coaching, the transformations they achieved, and what they thought of the process that got them there.
You'll also see my client's advice to you. They were nervous about investing in coaching too! Let them tell you how those worries played out, and who they'd recommend me to.
Here is a snapshot of what's possible.
Hear from real clients
Hear from real clients
"I was in a place of frustration and self doubt, wanting to leave my job, but my brain was signaling, like, 'Hey, if you don't figure this stuff out within yourself, even if you change your job, a lot of these things might come up again.'
So I was looking for a way to change the patterns in my brain and the way they were affecting my well being."
Client | CEO, PE-backed company
"It felt like I was facing an insurmountable number of challenges in life, personal and work. I didn't know where to start, and I didn't even know how to articulate or tease apart the challenges I was facing."
Client | Head of Business Development at MedTech Company
"My head felt very busy with things, and I wanted to think about things more clearly. And I had a couple recurring, nagging issues I just felt like I couldn't really solve. I was just stuck."
Jenny Xia Spradling | Founder & Co-CEO, FreeWill
"Before I started working with Pooja, I felt like I was getting in my own way a lot. I would apply stop signs to my life. I felt like I would have the same thoughts and same roadblocks coming up, and I didn’t want to be dwelling on the same thoughts and obstacles for long periods of time."
Client | Solutions Engineer at Fintech Company
"The pandemic made me change my career direction and get into a job which was suboptimal. And I had lost all sense of direction and clarity on where I wanted to go. I felt like I hit a dead end and I wasn't going to be able to get out.
Not only that, but I felt that my confidence was not good. I was just struggling to get motivated about doing things.
Basically, I was in a real rut, and I had so many things to think through and I didn't really know how to do it by myself."
Alexander | Communications Consultant turned Lawyer
"I was feeling stuck in my job, and I didn't know if I should be doubling down and working on my behavior patterns at that company, or if I should move and switch roles. And if the answer was to switch roles, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. I was sort of overwhelmed by that."
Client | Early-Stage Tech Startup Director turned Design Consultant
"I was at a low point career wise – I was just really unhappy day-to-day with the job that I was in. I was feeling trapped in it and not quite sure whether to quit, try something else, or what the next move could be."
IL | VP - Global Product, Visa
" I was dealing with bouts of imposter syndrome, and I was kind of progressing in my career but feeling awkward about it.
My company was also going through some major transitions, and there was a lot of uncertainty about my role, so I wanted to think through how to deal with that and to understand what was important to me, and how do I try to get that in my new role, or think about alternatives."
Client | Head of Business Intelligence, Biopharma Company
"When I first started considering coaching, I was in a really negative headspace. I'd gone through some big changes at work, and it had gone to the point where they didn't just feel like work problems anymore. They felt like they were starting to bleed into how I thought about myself, my self esteem, my confidence."
Ashley | VP at Major Financial Institution
"I think the biggest transformation is not hating my brain. Now, I work with it and am like, 'Oh, right, it's doing this to protect me. Thanks, brain!' I love that I have this relationship with my brain that's like a partnership."
Client | CEO, PE-backed company
"I have a healthier internal monologue, I still have an internal monologue, but it's a positive one.
And there are moments where I slip back into some of the negative thought cycles I used to be in, and it's almost like I can hear –
‘Pooja would tell me to stop assuming that everyone thinks I'm annoying. And Pooja would tell me to advocate for myself, because what's the worst that could happen? And Pooja would tell me to take a break and acknowledge that thought, but not get sucked into it and move on with my day.’
There's a second layer now of my internal monologue that is the healthy helper, which I developed from coaching, that just stops me from ever regressing too far into those negative thoughts."
Client | Head of Business Development at MedTech Company
"My general happiness levels are higher. I have coping mechanisms during stress. My husband is seeing the results of it – I have a better married life with him.
Coaching has given me more inner peace and focus as to what are the things that I want and how to go after them without setting ceilings. And it’s allowed me to get to the root of what it is that I want, and not just chase the next big thing."
Client | CEO, PE-backed company
"I realized that you can always create a space of abundance, even when there's scarcity. This process has allowed me to go so deep into myself and realize: Just be more yourself. You don’t have to change. And that abundance helps me to make better, less fear-based decisions."
Client | CEO, PE-backed company
"My husband started noticing the progress I was making and commenting on how different my behavior was and how different my mental state and level of wellness was. And that was super. That was the validation for me that this was absolutely worth it, if even he can see that his partner is doing better."
Client | Head of Business Development at MedTech Company
"I have more confidence. I advocate for myself a lot more at work. I second guess myself a lot less. I have healthier relationships with my family, because we talked about how to advocate for boundaries, and how to have a healthy spin on some of the complicated family dynamics that naturally arise."
Client | Head of Business Development at MedTech Company
"I realized that you can learn just as much from your wins as from your losses. When you have aspirations and big ambitions, it's really easy to be harsh on yourself. What changed the game for me was realizing that being mean to yourself and making progress are not related to each other at all.
Actually, you can have a completely normal, healthy relationship with yourself and encourage yourself AND make progress. I enjoy the process so much more now."
Client | Solutions Engineer at Fintech Company
"Coaching helped me get up and feel empowered and feel like I could actually change my outcome based on how I thought about things.
Having been a real academic overachiever, I get into this situation where if things are not perfect, I get stuck in a rut. Unless it's all perfect, I don't move forward.
But Pooja taught me the concept of 'quantity creates quality' and gave me practical goals every week, and that really helped me move forward in my professional life (and even in my dating life!).
I moved from just sitting around in my room overthinking everything and not really taking any action, to having weekly appointments to move things forward, and having someone holding me accountable to getting stuff done. And that just gave me a lot more self-belief and structure."
Alexander | Communications Consultant turned Lawyer
"I'm a much better partner to my co-CEO. And I feel more present when I'm with my son because I'm able to solve the challenges instead of bringing them into a new space."
Jenny Xia Spradling | Founder & Co-CEO, FreeWill
"I feel less helplessness. There's so much more that's in my control, in terms of taking the next step or making a decision. And that makes me feel more optimistic and confident in my decision making. I just feel more at ease."
IL | VP - Global Product, Visa
"The benefits didn't just impact me – they impacted my teams at work and my family at home. And that's pretty much all you can ask for."
Client | Head of Business Development at MedTech Company
"It's not like a light switch, and all of a sudden I feel confident all the time, but I'm able to break the spiral more quickly and more often. And over time, that leads to more confidence."
Client | Head of Business Intelligence, Biopharma Company
"Pretty immediately, I was able to break through the decision of whether or not to leave my job. I was able to see: Staying at my job is hard. Looking for a job is also hard. Which hard do I want to sign up for? Because being here in limbo is not productive.
I was also able to rewrite the story of what had happened at my current job in a way that gave me more confidence and started to untangle some of the emotional turmoil I had with that.
And then I recruited for and got my next job and got comfortable moving forward with that as my next step."
Client | Early-Stage Tech Startup Director turned Design Consultant
"I’ve gained the ability to notice when I'm in the more negative thought patterns and to recognize that no amount of bullying myself is going to result in the change I want.
I’ve been able to build a more positive, affirming, confidence-building narrative about myself and spend just as much time looking for evidence that I spend time exactly how I should and that I'm already fully capable, rather than just looking at the negative."
Client | Early-Stage Tech Startup Director turned Design Consultant
"I realized that I wasn't alone in a lot of my situations. In fact, what I was going through was very common.
And that there were tools and I could use to get out of this, and that I wasn't the first person in the world to go through and I'm not going to be the last.
And that Pooja has seen this before and that she is very well equipped and familiar with how to troubleshoot these things. That helped so much."
Ashley | VP at Major Financial Institution
"Everything in the world is about feelings. At the end of the day, that's the reality of the human condition. And so to get to this level of analytical rigor around my feelings is just so helpful."
Client | CEO, PE-backed company
"Overall, through our coaching, I've learned to change my perspective on the way that I see things.
Before, I felt very stuck in my head, and I had a hard time seeing things a different way. That previous headspace was very much like, “I'm the problem, there's something wrong with me.”
And the framework Pooja taught me helped me see things in a more positive or at least neutral light and then troubleshoot from there."
Ashley | VP at Major Financial Institution
"The impacts have been huge. I started feeling more confident and self-assured at work. And that gave me the emotional bandwidth to start building better habits too.
Now I’m doing a lot better with my work and it's taking up less energy at the same time. I'm not working as hard but I'm getting better results. I feel like this is a more sustainable way that I can conduct myself in my career."
Ashley | VP at Major Financial Institution
"The framework Pooja taught me is so powerful. I still use it to this day. I'll just open up a Google Doc and I'll go through: old thought, new thought, how it makes me feel. And it's just such a logical way of looking at things."
Client | Solutions Engineer at Fintech Company
"I'm a better leader and a better coach because I'm borrowing from some of the stuff that we worked on.
For example, I’m constantly pushing myself to be more of a leader and less of an individual contributor. And I was able to borrow some of the tips, tricks, and ideas we worked on for myself and use them to coach a member of my team to also step out of the individual contributor role and into more of a leader role. I thought that was really cool."
Client | Head of Business Intelligence, Biopharma Company
"Even in our first consultation, Pooja will hear me go on and on about various topics and then she’ll be able to, in one sentence, say something that gets me unstuck or feels like it is the crux of the whole cobweb of stuff that's in my head. I think that's very rare and very special."
Jenny Xia Spradling | Founder & Co-CEO, FreeWill
"It's honestly fun. You're working on the most important thing in your life – your goals and your aspirations. And you're doing it in a manner that is not harsh or strict. In fact, it's quite fun. It's like a video game, and you get to gently make progress towards the things that matter."
Client | Solutions Engineer at Fintech Company
"I felt like every Monday, regardless of what happened that week, I had someone who had my back and would help me gently course correct. Pooja would always help me push off my week to a great start so that I wouldn't lose out on the progress I had made or forget about all the good things I was doing. To kick start my week like that felt like a superpower."
Client | Solutions Engineer at Fintech Company
"Pooja has a really good balance of validating your emotions but also giving feedback and being upfront like, 'Hey, I've seen this pattern in you.' That made me trust her and her frameworks – she is really looking out long term for the client’s best interest."
Client | CEO, PE-backed company
"Pooja always has suggestions and ideas, which is fantastic. But she doesn’t tell you, 'You should go do this.' And that’s a good thing because she teaches you how to make these decisions for yourself and feel confident about it."
IL | VP - Global Product, Visa
"I love when Pooja drops wisdom. It's always, like, a five word sentence that I'll write down in my journal and refer back to. It's like sometimes you'll read a whole book just to get that one sentence. And it's kind of like having this encyclopedic friend who's just like, 'You said all this stuff. Don't read that book. Let me just tell you the five words.' And it's really incredible."
Jenny Xia Spradling | Founder & Co-CEO, FreeWill
"I liked Pooja’s easy going style. It felt like I was talking to a friend and that she was really listening to what I had to say, rather than just sort of waiting for her chance to give the standard textbook advice."
Alexander | Communications Consultant turned Lawyer
"I love our laughs. I love that it can be so efficient and professional, and yet I also feel like these sessions are pretty fun, and I really enjoy that."
Jenny Xia Spradling | Founder & Co-CEO, FreeWill
"I was never pushed to do things in a certain way. I really felt like I was being coached."
Jenny Xia Spradling | Founder & Co-CEO, FreeWill
"Some weeks, I have a very specific thing that is troubling me, and I'm excited to talk about it.
And there are other times where I came in and I didn't quite know what I wanted to talk about, and those were the sessions where Pooja was able to help me unpack something that I didn't even know was there.
It surprised me that I didn't have to do all the work in advance to come in with the agenda of what I needed to talk about, and that there are nuggets and insights to get, no matter how clearly I even see the problem coming in."
Client | Early-Stage Tech Startup Director turned Design Consultant
"What I liked about Pooja’s approach was that she tackled everything at the same time, and she provided practical goals, which were really instrumental in changing my thinking.
I had always been a very intellectual person struggling with the practical stuff. And what I liked about her approach was that she gave me practical goals on a weekly basis."
Alexander | Communications Consultant turned Lawyer
"Everyone needs someone to talk to. But Pooja’s advice specifically has been so high quality and unique compared to what else I've been able to find. Nothing has resonated like her advice has."
Ashley | VP at Major Financial Institution
"Pooja strikes a really strong balance between troubleshooting immediate problems but at the same time, really tying in that there are tools I need to solve all my problems. And that even though a problem I run into this week is different from a problem I run into next week, you can use the same frameworks to work your way out of it.
Now, I feel like I have a nice tool chest of frameworks and habits that I can rely on that not just change my work life, but also my personal life too."
Ashley | VP at Major Financial Institution
"I was worried the advice I’d be getting would be very general or something that I could just have Googled or seen on Twitter. But that quickly fell away. The advice, the connection, the unique frameworks and analogies Pooja has were like nothing I've ever seen before, outside of her social media."
Ashley | VP at Major Financial Institution
"I didn't know what coaching was, and the only time I had ever heard of a life coach is when people are having a midlife crisis. I was afraid coaching was going to be weird or fluffy.
That concern went away completely after our very first conversation, because in our very first conversation, I felt more validated and heard and understood than I ever had with any other professionally trained therapist. And I felt like I had a better understanding of how we were going to work through everything I was facing, than I ever had gotten from any other type of professional support. So that concern went away literally from session number one."
Client | Head of Business Development at MedTech Company
“Coaching is fluffy or generic.”
"The difference within a few months was really amazing."
Alexander | Communications Consultant turned Lawyer
"After a few sessions, I saw that, 'Wow, I'm not in my own way anymore.'"
Client | Solutions Engineer at Fintech Company
“It’s going to take a long time to see results.”
"Trust the process and within a few sessions, you'll see results, This is not something where you have to wait six months or a year before you expect to start feeling better. It happens pretty quickly."
Client | Head of Business Development at MedTech Company
"I started seeing the results in a couple of months and it was huge."
Client | CEO, PE-backed company
"Everything we talked about was actionable. It never felt like there was something fuzzy where I walked away and had to sort of wonder how this is ever going to impact my life. At the end of each session, it was very clear what I was going to go away and do differently the next day."
Client | Head of Business Development at MedTech Company
“It’s hard to translate coaching into concrete actions.”
"I was surprised by the diverse range of issues I could talk about with Pooja.
There's such a wide range of things that I struggled with over the course of our coaching, from tough pregnancy symptoms to complicated family dynamics to complicated work dynamics.
There were moments where I brought things up to her thinking 'Pooja's probably going to tell me to go call a family therapist or whatever.'
But her process worked for all of these different situations and totally applied every single time. There was never something I brought to her where I felt like the guidance she was giving me didn't apply or wasn't effective."
Client | Head of Business Development at MedTech Company
“We can only talk about my career in coaching sessions.”
"I was not used to spending so much money on my well being and my personal success. I wasn't used to investing in myself. It's funny, we spend so much money on trips and even little subscriptions that add up, but you're never really taught to prioritize your own well being. But after just a few sessions, I was like, 'I've already got my money's worth.'
Don't skimp where it matters the most, which is investing in yourself. If you read or listen to her content, you already have a pretty good idea of how she thinks about things. If you resonate with that, working with her is ten times the value."
Client | Solutions Engineer at Fintech Company
"I was worried about the cost. But every single session was well worth it. Coaching with Pooja is the best investment I made last year, by far. And I made a lot of investments last year – we spend a lot of money on a lot of different things to try to improve our life. And if I had to go back and redo last year, I would have invested in coaching sooner."
Client | Head of Business Development at MedTech Company
“Coaching is too expensive.”
"Call me the eternal skeptic, but sometimes I wonder with coaches and therapists: Do they want you to be able to do this for yourself eventually, or do they want to keep you there forever? And with Pooja, I really felt like I progressed with this skill set. I can coach myself and get through challenges in my head because I have this skill set from what we worked on together."
Jenny Xia Spradling | Founder & Co-CEO, FreeWill
"I was worried it would just be a patch on things. As soon as I’m not talking to Pooja and working through some of these things, does it all go back to square one?
But as we worked together, if we didn’t have a session for one week, it was evident that I didn’t immediately go to zero. The tools and training Pooja gives people stick."
IL | VP - Global Product, Visa
“The results won’t last beyond the coaching package.”
"I had a bit of a conflict where I was like: 'No one can relate to me. My problems are so unique. My work situation is so unique. No one will ever be able to understand what I'm going through and what I'm feeling.'
And I was so surprised because Pooja got things immediately, she was seeing things that I hadn't seen. She was making these connections. I felt that she could relate and could see things so clearly."
Ashley | VP at Major Financial Institution
“My problems are too unique for coaching.”
Who my clients would recommend me to
Jenny Xia Spradling | Founder & Co-CEO, FreeWill
Client | CEO, PE-backed company
People in high pressure situations
Client | Head of Business Development at MedTech Company
Client | CEO, PE-backed company
Ashley | VP at Major Financial Institution
Anyone who is feeling stuck
Client| Solutions Engineer at Fintech company
People who want to learn the coaching toolkit
Client | Head of Business Development at MedTech Company
Client | Solutions Engineer at Fintech Company
High achievers
Ashley | VP at Major Financial Institution
Everyone
Alexander | Communications Consultant turned Lawyer
Overthinkers
Jenny Xia Spradling | Founder & Co-CEO, FreeWill
IL | VP - Global Product, Visa
A Note on Testimonials
(And so that you know it’s not just me saying all this stuff! Real people have gotten real results through this work :)
AND…I never want you to use someone else’s experience to override your own discernment and inner knowing.
What matters most is not someone else’s experience but rather your own judgment and critical thinking.
You’ve read about other people’s experiences with my coaching.
Now book a free consult call with me, and let’s talk about what YOUR experience might look like. We’ll talk through exactly how we would work together. I’ll explain my process in full depth. I’ll answer all your questions.
And then you can decide for yourself: “Is coaching – right now, with Pooja – right for me?”
You’re going to get there either way.
I would love to be a part of your journey.
But above all: I want you to trust yourself.
