My Journey with Dawn

I originally reached out to Dawn for business coaching. At the time, I was running a business with my then-husband, and I knew something needed to change. I knew the business wasn't working for me anymore, but the truth was that the problems went much deeper than that. Behind closed doors, I was being broken down little by little. Everything was my fault. I needed to do better, be better, try harder. I knew the way I was being treated wasn't right, but after years of living in it, I had also become numb to so much of it.

I used to say, "Being divorced to him would be worse than being married to him." And I genuinely believed that. I could see that my marriage was unhealthy, but knowing something is wrong and believing you are capable of changing it are two very different things.

I booked my first session with Dawn thinking we were going to talk about business. Less than 24 hours later, I called her in tears and asked if there was any way she could see me sooner. The next day, I sat in her office and completely melted. Everything came out.

Dawn told me that if I wanted to leave right then, she would help me. We could figure it out together. But I wasn't ready.

She didn't push me. She didn't tell me what I should do or make me feel like I was failing because I couldn't do it yet. Instead, we started working on me.

Before I could leave, I needed to rebuild myself.

Year after year, I had been broken down. Every agonizing or demeaning moment had taken another chip out of who I was. I didn't trust myself anymore. I didn't have the confidence to make the decisions I knew I would eventually need to make. So instead of making leaving the immediate goal, we started building the person who would eventually be strong enough to do it.

We worked on who I was, who I wanted to be and what I wanted my life to look like. I started understanding my habits, my blocks and the narratives I had accepted about myself. I learned how to have hard conversations, how to trust my own judgement and how to recognize when fear was making decisions for me.

At the same time, I started taking practical steps toward the life I wanted. I went back to school. I got a job. I slowly began letting go of pieces of the business I shared with my husband. I made changes in our personal lives that gave me more independence and helped set me up to eventually leave with as little interference as possible.

None of these decisions on their own looked particularly dramatic. There wasn't one big moment where suddenly everything changed. It happened slowly. Each decision gave me a little more confidence, a little more independence and a little more proof that I was capable of creating something different for myself and my son.I wasn't waiting for someone to rescue me. I was becoming capable of rescuing myself.

The biggest difference was the tools. There was absolutely space in my sessions with Dawn to talk about what had happened to me and what I was experiencing. I needed that. But we didn't only talk about it. We did something with it. Dawn gave me tools to get through what was happening in the present, work through what had happened in the past and start intentionally building my future. I wasn't leaving every session having simply talked about another terrible week. I was leaving with something I could use, practice or change.

That is still one of the biggest differences I see in The Taylor Way. It isn't just talk. There is action attached to it. I had to take what we were working on and actually use it in my life. I had to have the hard conversations. I had to catch myself falling into old patterns. I had to question the things I had come to believe about myself. I had to make decisions that scared me and then learn from them.

Dawn couldn't do any of that for me. She could give me the tools, help me understand what was happening and support me as I worked through it, but ultimately, I had to do the work. And slowly, it worked. Within a year, I left my marriage. By then, I wasn't the same person who had first walked into Dawn's office. I had gone back to school. I had a job. I had begun separating myself from the business. I had changed the way I communicated and learned how to stand up for myself. I understood myself better, and most importantly, I had started trusting myself again.

Leaving wasn't the end of the work either. There was still a past to process and an entirely new life to build. The difference was that now I had the tools to do it. I could recognize the habits and beliefs that were holding me back instead of automatically accepting them as truth. I could look at the narratives I had carried for years and decide whether they still belonged in my life. I could have conversations I once would have avoided. I could make decisions based on where I wanted my life to go instead of what I was afraid might happen.

When I think back to why I originally called Dawn, it almost makes me laugh that it was for business coaching. I thought I needed help figuring out what to do with a business. What I actually needed was help figuring out what to do with my life.

The Taylor Way didn't give me an answer or tell me exactly what my life should look like. It gave me tools, awareness, support and a place to do the work until I could trust myself enough to make those decisions on my own.

If you had told the woman who called Dawn in tears what her life would look like a year later, I don't know that she would have believed you.

But she did the work anyway. And step by step, she built it.

If you are looking for someone who does it differently - you need Dawn. If you genuinely want to change your life, she will help you get there. Book a damn call!