About Christina Carey, Executive Coach in Sarasota

It started with a decision in December 2010. I became a Christian that month. It reorganized how I saw a lot of things, but the one that mattered for this story is that I started seeing people differently: less as their résumé and more as who they actually were underneath it. Not long after, I couldn't shake the sense that I was supposed to be doing something with that.

I didn't know the word for it yet. I started researching, found that what I was describing was coaching, and went looking for real training rather than a weekend certificate.

That search led me to the Professional Christian Coaching Institute. PCCI has been an ICF-accredited coach education provider since 2014, and I went through the entire program. Not a weekend certificate, the full curriculum.

Then I did the unglamorous part: I coached. Small business owners. A physician. An author. Real clients with real stakes and no program structure to hide behind, which is where you find out whether you can actually do this or only talk about it.

Then came Her Big Leap. I became the mindset and accountability coach for the program, working with high-performing corporate women preparing to leave and build something of their own. That's where the two hundred came from, and that's where the pattern became impossible to ignore.

I watched brilliant, accomplished women talk themselves out of things they were manifestly capable of. Not once, but systematically, with a whole catalog of reasons that sounded like analysis and functioned as self-sabotage. Once you have seen it two hundred times, you stop mistaking it for humility or realism. You start recognizing it in about ten minutes.

I can see the belief underneath the behavior.

Someone tells me they're not ready to have the conversation, or they need one more certification, or the timing is wrong this quarter. Those are almost never the real reason.

The real reason is a sentence they've been carrying for twenty years, usually some version of I'm not enough, I don't have what they have, or if I try and fail, I'll know something about myself I don't want to know.

My job is to find that sentence, say it out loud, and then help you look straight at it until it loses its grip. And then, in the part most mindset work skips, to hold you to what you decide to do about it. Insight without accountability is a good conversation you'll forget by Thursday.

That was where the pattern showed itself most clearly, not where it stops.

Right now I'm working with Jane Efua Asamoah, an author. She's published before. Her books do well. And she still spends real energy every week on whether she can do it, whether she has the skill set, whether this is the one where everyone finds out. Successful, capable, proven, and still fighting the same voice.

Jane and I have known each other a long time. She dedicated one of her books this way:

“To Christina DiBattista, whose words in 2018 inspired me to persevere.”

I keep that on my shelf. It's the clearest description of the job I have: most people don't need new information. They need someone to help them keep going when the voice in their head says stop.

I coach executives, business owners, and leaders through the same work: the imposter voice that got louder with the bigger title, the perfectionism that presents as diligence, the decision that's been pending for six months because making it would make something true.

I'm based in Sarasota, Florida. I meet local clients in person and work with everyone else across the country over Zoom. Engagements run six months, with sessions every other week and check-ins by text or email in between.

My faith is the lens I see people through. It's why I believe nobody is only their worst season, and why I think almost everyone is carrying a story about themselves that isn't true.

It is not a requirement for working with me, and I don't bring it into sessions uninvited. Most of my clients don't share it, and it has never once been a problem. The work is the same either way, because limiting beliefs don't check anyone's background first.

I'll say one more thing, because it's honest. Some of the most stuck people I've worked with are believers who would tell you, sincerely, that they can do all things through Christ, and who are living about forty percent of what they're capable of. I know that gap from the inside. It's part of why I do this.

My husband and I raised four sons in Massachusetts, which is its own advanced course in patience, negotiation, and knowing when to stop talking. Most of what I know about people I learned twice: once in training, and once at my own kitchen table. We're in Sarasota now, which after enough New England winters requires no explanation at all.