Growth can be scary, even for the most confident among us. But with the expertise of a coach, it suddenly transforms from intimidating and overwhelming to exciting, intentional and, best of all, totally doable.
A coach can help you unlock your best self—by identifying hidden challenges, amplifying your unique strengths and building habits that actually stick. With the right guidance, your career can stop feeling like a treadmill and start feeling like your own personal adventure.
Curious how it works in real life? Here are three coaching success stories for inspiration.
Courtesy of Brittani Clancey
Brittani Clancey
Clancey knew from a young age that she wanted to be an entrepreneur. She’s also an avid thrifter who loves shopping for second-hand treasures. So, while she was raising her four kids as a stay-at-home mom, she often found herself brainstorming ways to transform that passion into a business.
In July 2021, she opened FashionPact, an independent thrift shop in Anchorage, Alaska, with a unique charitable model. Many thrift shops support one specific charity. But with FashionPact, Clancey wanted to let patrons choose which nonprofit they contribute to whenever they buy or donate items.
She opened a second location in March 2023. But a few years in, FashionPact still wasn’t profitable. “I just financially was not hitting the goals that I had planned to be hitting after being in business for a few years,” she says.
One day, she was listening to a podcast when she heard an interview with Jennifer Kok, a coach who helps women entrepreneurs build profitable, sustainable businesses. Kok’s motto? Earn more, stress less. Clancey realized Kok might be the right person to help her get FashionPact running smoothly and profitably. She wanted to start paying herself and, long term, she hoped to expand FashionPact all over America to help as many charities as possible.
When the two started working together, they set a clear, focused goal: to achieve consistent profitability, so that FashionPact could keep its doors open and its mission alive. To reach that target, they refined the company’s pricing and payout structure, developed an organic marketing strategy that would increase revenue without being expensive to execute and developed a roadmap to help Clancey make confident financial decisions without sacrificing her core values.
After Clancey began working with Kok, FashionPact’s revenue increased 55%, and net profit rose 193%. The business also saw an 86% increase in customer transactions and achieved an email open rate of 58%. It’s fully staffed, and Clancey has also been able to stash away some savings to create an emergency fund.
Additionally, working with Kok has given Clancey more confidence and clarity. With Kok’s expertise, Clancey has learned to make her business work for her, not the other way around.
“It’s so easy to think, ‘Oh, if I could just do more,' but instead she flips it the other way and says, ‘This is what you’ve got, this is what you can dedicate. How can we be most efficient with this time and these resources?'” says Clancey.
Kok also encouraged Clancey to do less, to slow down and to say no so that she could focus on what was most important to her. “I felt like, ‘I just have to do everything,'” says Clancey. “And I was just running crazy, and it was really hard being in startup mode for so many years, so it was really great.”
Courtesy of Chantelle Kincy
Chantelle Kincy
From the outside, Kincy’s life looked great. She was making good money as a dental hygienist and successfully raising three boys on her own. But inside, Kincy was miserable. She hated her job and felt trapped.
Then, while attending a conference in October 2022, she met Jess Smith, a coach who specializes in emotional freedom technique (EFT) tapping, a method that combines gentle tapping on specific acupressure points with focused attention on emotions or thoughts.
Kincy had already tried EFT tapping on her own, using an app she had downloaded on her phone, and she’d found it to be a calming and helpful tool for managing her anxiety. But she was intrigued by the idea of working with a coach and decided that some professional insight might be exactly what she needed.
And she was right. With Smith’s guidance, Kincy was able to uncover and work through deep insecurities and issues, which helped her be more confident, more productive and kinder to herself overall.
Eventually, their work together inspired Kincy to quit her dental hygienist job. She’s now debt-free, she travels nearly full-time and she’s doing something she loves professionally by writing and hosting women’s trips. She says she’s never been happier.
“[Smith] taught me to stop living for the image that I thought other people expected of me,” Kincy says. “She showed me that I was going to work every day, unhappy and unfulfilled, and that wasn’t good for anyone— not for my patients, my kids, my relationships or myself. She helped me see that I actually deserved to be happy and to live a life I wanted, not just go through the motions for everyone else.”
Courtesy of Sharika Kellogg
Sharika Kellogg
Kellogg wasn’t drowning. But she says the water “was definitely rising.” As a mother of four adopted boys, a provider, a leader and an entrepreneur, she was quietly trying to hold her own world together while also being the person everyone else turned to for help.
Kellogg knew she needed help—ideally, from someone who wasn’t enmeshed in her day-to-day chaos, someone who could see the big picture of her life. Then, in September 2024, she met business coach Dora Rankin, and it was as if “the right door cracked open exactly when I needed it,” she says.
With Rankin’s support, Kellogg gained clarity, confidence and systems that worked for her as a business owner and a mother. She learned how to slow down without losing momentum and untangled emotional knots she didn’t even realize were limiting her. She strengthened her identity, set clearer boundaries and shifted from people-pleasing to positioning.
Against that backdrop, Kellogg found the courage to leave her longtime home in West Palm Beach, Florida, and relocate her “little tribe of men” to Tulsa, Oklahoma, so everyone could have more balance and room to breathe, she says.
“[Rankin] helped me realize that my identity was not tied to a zip code,” she says. “She opened my eyes to the possibility that I could make an impact anywhere. The move wasn’t running from anything. It was choosing a better life, more space and more possibility for me and my boys.”
The move has been life-changing for Kellogg, personally and professionally. She now runs several ventures: 25/8 MOM, her umbrella brand focused on client experience, systems clarity and operational strategy; 25/8 MOMents Events, an event architecture and planning business; and the re-WHY-Her [Rewire] Foundation, a nonprofit to support single mothers and women with what she describes as “neuro-spicy children.”
Rankin helped her see that all of her projects were rooted in the same calling: helping women rebuild their lives and their confidence through structure, safety and intentional experiences.
“This led me to refine all my offers so they actually matched my zone of genius,” she says. “She helped me finally claim work that uses my story, my skills and my heart at the same time.”
Featured image courtesy of Studio Romantic/Shutterstock
This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of SUCCESS® digital edition. Get your copy here.
