meet kiera
Certified Professional Life & Wellness Coach (ICF-accredited training)
Certified Professional Motivational Coach
Hi everyone. I’m so happy you’ve landed here; I think you’ve come to the right place.
My name is Kiera.
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re tired. Maybe you’re caring for someone you love and you’ve no time left to care for yourself. Maybe you’re recovering from an illness, a loss, a divorce, or a career that ended before you were ready.
Or maybe nothing dramatic happened at all. You just know, quietly, that you’re not who you were, and not yet who you’re becoming.
Wherever you are on that journey, I’m glad you’re here.
From the outside, my life looked like I was thriving...
I had a family and friends I loved and an amazing community around me. I’d built multiple careers and never missed an opportunity to grow. I’d traveled to many parts of the world, and my passport was full of stamps with more to add.
People commented on my resilience, confidence, and positive energy. I was the person you could call. I said yes. I showed up… Life had not always been easy, but I always pushed through and found the positive on the other side. I was living my own personal happily ever after…
What nobody saw was what it was costing me to keep all that together.
Since childhood, I had lived with epilepsy and an autoimmune illness that regularly landed me in the hospital. An eating disorder I’d recovered from years earlier had left my body weaker. Anxiety and panic kept me in “fight or flight,” with a nervous system that never quite relaxed. On top of it all was the pressure I put on myself to be everything to everyone, be perfect at it, and make it look easy.
My own body has been a long education in patience, in advocating for myself, and in the loneliness of an illness and grief that other people can’t see.
Then came the blow that ripped my world apart and changed everything… My husband was diagnosed with a rare cancer at 44. Overnight, I became his caregiver and advocate, the researcher, the record-keeper, the one who asked the second question when the first answer didn’t sit right. I was managing my way around the complex medical and hospital systems, and then, months later, I was his widow…
Underneath all of it, life simply kept going, and so did I.
I know that particular form of exhaustion, the kind that goes past tired. But I also know the wider version of it: the disorientation of an identity shift, whatever brought you to it. The daunting question of what comes next. The anger that lives in fear while you ask yourself: Who am I now? How will I get through this?
What I’ll tell you plainly is this: I did not give up. I got up, sometimes slowly, sometimes badly, sometimes wanting to scream at the world, but I got up.
On the days when getting up is the whole task,
I say this to myself:
I didn't come this far to get this far.
All those moments taught me that if you don’t have your health, you’ve got nothing. Life had happened, and I needed to figure out what came next.
I had to find balance, which is much easier said than done. And let me tell you, it isn’t found through meditation, cold plunges, and gratitude alone.
We all make mistakes, and I made plenty I wouldn’t normally have made. I said “F*** it” and got a matching tattoo I later had removed. I pushed the people I loved away, embraced every possible distraction, and pretended I was “OK” to make others more comfortable, just to name a few.
Eventually, I took a hard, honest look at how I’d been living, what I’d done wrong, what I’d done right, and what truly mattered. That reckoning sent me in a completely different direction.
I had gone from wife to widow at 38, and my stepson and I had to learn what life looked like for us now. I had to accept that I wasn’t the same person anymore, and to let myself be happy without guilt. Let’s be honest: these are ongoing lessons. I call them life lessons, and we all have our own.
Then came one of the harder ones… I had to stop being everything to everyone and put myself first.
It was literally the work of rewiring my brain. I started writing a book on caregiving strategies, joined the UHN Hospitals in Ontario as an advisor on patient and caregiver experiences, and stopped justifying my decisions. Some people were going to judge me anyway, so I let them.
Then I took the scary step of leaving my established real estate career to become a coach, helping caregivers and others navigating challenging identity shifts.
All of this taught me that you really do have your answers already; you often just don’t know it yet.
What you’re missing is almost never insight. It’s time, space, and enough compassion to hear yourself think. So, my question to you is this: What becomes possible if you already have your own answers?
Here’s what I’ve come to believe. You don’t forget the heavy parts; you honour them and make space alongside them for the good. Moving forward doesn’t require you to erase what happened. You integrate it into your life.
You don’t have to close one chapter to open the next; they can overlap. You can be grieving and beginning at the same time. You can be furious, heartbroken, curious, genuinely delighted, or anything else, sometimes all in the same afternoon. There’s no right way to do this.
Here's a question I keep coming back to:
What if we stopped chasing joy and considered that perhaps we already have it? Not waiting for joy on the other side of this hard season, but realizing it’s already here, underneath the noise, waiting to be noticed rather than pursued.
Life is a roller coaster, and sometimes it can feel like a grenade dropped into your world. But it’s beautiful in its own messy way, and full of joy if you stay open to it. I feel deeply fortunate to have mine, and I’d love to help you feel that way about yours.
So, come in, sit down. Let’s talk.