The beginning of a new year is when we typically focus on goals and goal setting. But, I’m inviting you to think even bigger:

Who do you want to be this year?

i believe a lot of who we are is rooted in our purpose. Once we get really clear on what our purpose is, then the goals, the dreams, the vision all comes more easily to us.

Today, I’m interviewing a rather amazing person who shares her experience of aligning with her purpose and how it truly transformed and saved her life.

Amina AlTai is a holistic business and career coach, proud immigrant, and chronic illness advocate. A leading coach to notable leaders, executives, and founders, Amina's mastery is in connecting us to our brilliance and teaching us to live and lead from it each day.

As a woman of color of Iraqi descent, she often works with marginalized communities to help them realize possibilities in a way that honors their particular lived experiences. She is the author of the forthcoming book, The Ambition Trap, with Penguin, The Open Field.

Amina, I think the world of you and I’m so excited for the Wholehearted Community to get to know you.

Tell us more about you. What is really important for us to know?

I always like to say that I’m half Iraqi, half Welsh. I am a big sister, a Manifesting Generator (for those that love Human Design). For my astrology friends, I am a Scorpio Sun, Capricorn Rising, and Aquarius Moon. So, I’m very intense, love hard work, but also definitely beat to my own drum.

I’m also a chronic illness advocate as someone who navigates life with chronic illness.

I love how you show up. That you really bring the intersections of who you are to your work. There is a light that emanates from you and to know all these human parts is just so beautiful.

Tell us about the incredible work that you do and what led you to this?

I am a master coach and I work with folks that have gotten to the “top of the ladder” in their career. They look around and realize “This isn't it at all.” There's no joy or freedom there because they haven't really made those choices consciously.

I got to this work because that was pretty much my story. When you were on my podcast, we were talking about the idea that some of us choose coaching because it saved our life and then some of us choose coaching because it feels like a beautiful opportunity.

I definitely fall into that first camp of coaching saved my life and that's why I became a coach.

I was in my 20s working in marketing and brand management. I sort of carried all of my familial programming into the workplace. The “I come from an immigrant family, the consummate hard worker, boundary-less and deeply codependent, put everybody before myself,” and I was just trying to achieve and get to the top at lightning fast speed.

Then, I got sick.

I'd been to about seven different doctors and nobody could figure out what was wrong with me and there was a lot of gaslighting too, where people were like, “You're fine. Everybody's tired, just keep going!”

Then the seventh doctor called me one Friday while I was going to work and said, “If you don't go to the hospital now instead of going to work, you’re days away from multiple organ failure.”

That was my stop moment. It was the moment that I had to choose:

Do I keep going the way that I'm going and probably leave the planet a little early or do I choose to do something differently?

My roommate at the time knew someone who had gone to a life coaching program and I thought, I think I need that.

So I went to this life coaching school and it legitimately changed my life.

As a result of that, I've been a student of coaching for the last 12 years.

I kind of fought the call at first. My coach at the time was like, “Oh, I think you're called to coach, as well.”

And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm still doing this marketing thing and I need to get this big shiny title. Maybe once I do that, I can go the coaching route. I fought it until I couldn't fight it anymore.

Then it was like, this is the way that I'm supposed to go.

I think the whole point of me having this sort of a near near-death experience was to really reorient and realign me.

Wow, I didn't know all of these details of your story.

Sometimes when folks see others do these big courageous things like change their careers, they don't see behind the scenes where there is so much doubt and worry. For you making those changes as well as becoming a coach, what was your journey like?

So, with my family, it’s pretty funny. To this day, my family still doesn’t know what I do and they worry if it pays the bills. It’s pretty hilarious.

Even when I started working in marketing and brand management before, choosing the business route, my dad’s family was very disappointed. In our culture, there’s being a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer. Then nothing else matters.

And my dad is from Baghdad and they actually have a ranking system. The smartest people go to engineering school, then medical school, then teachers. At the bottom of the list is business.

So, even when I got into a really good business school, my dad called his family and they were like “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. We thought she was smart.” It was pretty hilarious.

So, I went to business school, had that career in marketing and brand management, had that moment with my doctor, and knew I really had to change my life. But, it actually took some time to get the message.

While I was in this life coaching school, they had us look at all the different areas of our lives and decide what felt true for us. We had to write the dream we had for each of these areas and also be honest about where we were lying to ourselves. I realized I was doing A LOT of lying to myself.

At first, i wanted to see if I could keep my current job and just make it work for me. To a certain degree, it did feel different and better. But, it wasn’t 100% aligned.

Then, I had a moment where I realized I wanted to give people what I had just received. That gave me the idea to create a corporate wellness company. I wanted to go into companies and really teach them to live well in whole so people didn’t have a crash and burn like I did.

But, it still didn’t feel aligned.

One day, I gave a talk at a top consulting firm. This was something that had been on my vision board. After I got off the stage, I went to the bathroom and burst into tears.

Why am I crying? This was the thing I wanted.

As I deepened into that moment, I realized this was just a small part of what I really wanted. What would it be like if I brought all the pieces of Amina together?

That was the invitation to really ask myself “If I was going to design a body of work and bring in all the parts of myself, what would that look like?”

When we have all of those pieces in the conversation, can we really thrive? This was 10 years ago and for the last decade, it’s felt really good for me to teach this.

Tune into the podcast to hear the full podcast episode — 180 | From Burnout to Purpose with Amina AlTai.

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About your host, Shirin Eskandani