I Lied to Myself for Two Years. Here's My Confession.

Let me tell you about 4 am.

Not the romantic kind. Not the kind where you wake up with some beautiful epiphany and journal by candlelight. The 4am where something takes over your body like a scene from The Conjuring and suddenly you are wide awake, heart going, no choice but to deal with it. 

That was me, last week of April.

And what pulled me out of sleep? The word coach.

Specifically, the fact that I had been calling myself one.

Here is the thing about me. I have loved the word coaching since I read Discover Your Dharma by Sahara Rose. Something about it lit me up. And I come from a family with coaches I genuinely admire, the athletic kind, people who shaped who I am. So when I started building Slight Look into something real, coach felt like the right word. It felt like me.

Except it wasn't what I was doing.

Not even close.

Let me show you what I actually built over the last two years. I built websites, then stayed on to run the backends of those same businesses because the people I built them for wanted me to keep going. I did copywriting. I created strategic roadmaps so thorough that clients signed me to keep working with them after delivery. I took over content management across social media, blogs, podcasts, all three at once for the same client. I stepped in as director for a nonprofit going through a full leadership crisis, rebuilt their financials, recovered their intellectual property, and ran their live event from vision to execution. I professionally edited a book with a multiple five figure contract. I spoke about business fundamentals at a major event in Austin. I hosted virtual events. I co-host a podcast and have my own that is about to get some very serious attention because some big, scary business moves are happening. I moved across the country for this work.

Now read that back.

Not once in any of that did I say someone paid me to coach them.

Because they didn't.

They hired me to build things. Their website. Their systems. Their strategy. Their whole operation. I wasn't standing on the sideline calling plays. I was on the field. I was the one building the field.

And I kept calling myself a coach.

Out of vanity. That is genuinely what it was. I liked the title. I liked what it meant to me. I liked the identity of it. But identity and reality are two different things, and at 4am, your brain does not let you keep pretending they are the same.

Here is the part that makes me want to close my laptop and not post this.

I put serious time into being a business coach. Serious training. Serious money. Serious strategy. Serious marketing. I thought about it, planned around it, showed up for it. And the people who know me, friends, people I met in programs, someone I did yoga with one time, strangers on the internet, they come to me with business questions constantly. Pricing. Pivots. Backend systems. Work-life balance. Mindset. Strategic roadmaps. All of it. And I love those conversations. Truly.

But love is not the same as identity.

Nobody coaches their way into a portfolio. They build it.

And I built one. A real one. A full one. One that has quietly been doing the work I was too attached to a title to name correctly.

So here it is. My confession.

I am not a business coach.

I am a builder. A strategist. 

The person you call when you need someone to come in, see the whole picture, and actually construct something. The backend queen, yes, still, always. But not a coach. That is not what I do, even if it is the energy I bring to every single conversation.

And saying that out loud means a website revamp. An Instagram overhaul. A Facebook refresh. New cards. New materials. A whole lot of work that, by the way, is exactly the kind of work people hire me to do for them after we talk through what is not working. So yes. I had to do it for myself. Loudly. Vulnerably. While sweating through writing this post.

Slight Look has existed for eight years. It became an LLC in 2024. I have spent two years doing work that was never captured by the title I was giving it. That stops now.

And the timing of that stopping? It is not an accident.

This pivot scared me. It still does a little. Not because I am unsure. But because admitting you held onto something for the wrong reasons, even when you were genuinely good at it and genuinely loved it, takes something out of you. And then you have to do all the unglamorous work of building the thing that was actually true the whole time.

But I am doing that work right now because something bigger is coming. A new era I am walking into that I refuse to enter as anything other than my most authentic, most clearly defined, most well branded self. I am not showing up to what is next carrying a title that was never mine to begin with.

And the timing of all of this is not an accident. But that is a story for another post.

Now here is my question for you.

What are you holding onto because you love the name of it, even though the name stopped fitting a long time ago?

Want to follow along as all of this unfolds?

I will be talking through all of it, the business stuff, the big life stuff, and everything in between, on my podcast. And if you have been around long enough to remember when Slight Look lived on YouTube, well. Welcome back. She has been through some things and she has a lot to say.

My journey will be coming to both very soon!!!