How My UN Experience Shapes My Life Coaching Journey

For many years, I worked in the fast-paced world of the UN and INGOs. My days were filled with meetings, endless email threads, and looming deadlines. The rhythm was relentless: rushing, responding, and firefighting one crisis after another. I became highly skilled at reactivity, always on alert, always ready to respond.

In that environment, this wasn’t a weakness. It was survival. My brain adapted beautifully to the constant urgency, learning to prioritize in seconds, solve problems under pressure, and keep moving despite exhaustion. These skills became second nature, and they served me well.

But this way of living came at a cost. By the time I got home at night, I had nothing left to give. My evenings were for unwinding, my weekends for recovery. Rest wasn’t restorative, it was survival, just enough to prepare for the next cycle. At the time, it felt normal. That was the life, and I adapted to it.

The real shift came when I left. Suddenly, the urgency was gone. The emails slowed. The meetings stopped. I had time, time to think, time to create, time to be proactive. And yet, I couldn’t. My brain, conditioned for years to wait for the next message or the next deadline, struggled in the silence. Without external triggers, I felt lost, restless, even bored. I checked emails, scrolled through feeds, waited for something to respond to. The art of starting from scratch felt foreign.

It was a disorienting moment, but also an awakening. I realized that while my years of reactivity had shaped me, they didn’t have to define me. Proactivity, like reactivity, is a skill. And skills can be learned.

This is where my new chapter began. I stepped into life coaching, as a way to rebuild my relationship with time, work, and purpose. Coaching gave me the space to practice patience, to embrace the slower rhythm of creation, and to see meaning in small, steady steps forward. Building my own business has been nothing like responding to urgent deadlines; it feels more like pushing a heavy stone up a mountain. But with every step, I feel stronger and more grounded.

My years in the UN taught me resilience, adaptability, and the art of response. Now, as a life coach, I’m learning the art of intention, how to build something meaningful from scratch. And perhaps the most powerful lesson of all is this: if I could master urgency, I can also master patience.