A life transitions coach on the ordinary crossroads no one prepares you for — and the small, almost invisible practice that leads you home.
Recently on the Life is Beauty Full podcast, we had a conversation with life transitions coach Kerry Hanna on the quiet, unglamorous work of finding your way back to yourself.
There is a particular kind of lost that doesn’t look like being lost at all.
From the outside, your life may be full to the brim. A family. A career. A calendar with no white space left in it. Decades spent doing what needed to be done — caring for people, solving problems, becoming the person everyone else could lean on.
And then, somewhere beneath all that competence, a much quieter question starts to surface: What do I actually want?
For Kerry Hanna, that single question sits at the center of her work with women standing at a crossroads. Sometimes the crossroads announces itself — a divorce, a loss, a career upended, children grown and gone, a relationship that quietly stopped fitting. And sometimes nothing dramatic happens at all. Life simply stops feeling the way it used to. The enthusiasm drains out of it. Something is off, and you can’t quite say what.
Kerry knows this terrain because she has walked it herself.
Growing up the youngest of four, she was the good girl — the people pleaser, the strong student, the one who wanted to do right by everyone around her and, in the process, earn her place in the family. She carried that instinct straight into adulthood, building a life around all the things she’d been taught to want.
Then, in her early forties, with a one-year-old son on her hip, her marriage ended.
“This was not the life I expected. I did everything right. How did I end up here?”
It was the beginning of something much bigger than a rebuild of circumstances. It was the beginning of a rebuild of her relationship with herself.
When a full life starts to feel empty
Women are exceptionally well trained in looking outward.
What do the kids need? What does the job demand? What does he need from me, right now, before I’ve even had coffee? What would make everyone else’s day a little easier?
There is nothing wrong with caring deeply for other people. But Kerry has watched, again and again, what happens when we become so relentlessly “other-directed” that we lose the thread on the person doing all the giving.
“We’re so busy out here doing all the right things, hitting the little checklist,” she says, “but no one ever really taught us to look inward.”
For a lot of women, looking inward doesn’t just feel unfamiliar. It feels selfish.
Kerry still remembers the weight that word carried in her own childhood — how choosing herself, even in small ways, could be shut down the moment someone called it selfish. Be generous. Be helpful. Be accommodating. Don’t make it about you. It’s a message most women absorb early, in one form or another, and carry for decades without questioning it.
The cost shows up quietly, years later. We can tell you exactly what everyone else wants for dinner. We are not entirely sure what we want from the next ten years of our lives.
Which may be exactly why a crossroads feels so disorienting. The familiar structure falls away, and suddenly we’re asked to consult a voice we haven’t listened to in a very long time.
The First Step Isn't the Answer
Our instinct, faced with uncertainty, is to solve it immediately. Kerry does the opposite.
Before the five-year plan. Before quitting the job. Before deciding whether to stay or go, whether to reinvent your whole life on a Tuesday — she asks women to do something smaller, and harder.
Pause.
“Simply notice,” she says.
How does this actually feel? What is draining me? What gives me energy? What happens in my body when I imagine saying yes — and what happens when I imagine saying no?
It can sound almost too small to matter, especially to women who’ve built their whole identity around action. But the pause creates something most of us have quietly lost: enough space to hear ourselves think.
Kerry remembers coming home when her son was young, the noise and the needs converging all at once, and slipping into the bathroom for exactly one minute. Not a ritual. Not a candle-lit reset. One minute, to breathe, to notice she felt frazzled, to let herself settle — and then to go back out and rejoin her life.
This is where her idea of self-care starts to diverge from the version most of us have been sold.
“I think we’ve been sold a bill of goods on the self-care thing,” she says.
Take the bath. Do the meditation. Book the facial. Journal every morning without fail. For an already-overwhelmed woman, self-care can quietly become one more item on an impossible list.
What Kerry is actually suggesting is smaller, and far more useful: make enough room to notice yourself. Because awareness, on its own, begins to change things.
Your Body May Know Before Your Brain Does
Most of us were taught to make decisions with our minds alone. Make the list. Weigh the options. Ask everyone we trust. Research it to death. Reconsider. Reconsider the reconsideration. And somewhere in there, get stuck.
Kerry asks women to pay attention to another source of information entirely: the body.
It tends to respond before the mind has built its case. A tightening. A heaviness. A sudden drop in energy. Or, on the other side, an openness — curiosity, relief, a subtle sense of expansion, as if something in the chest has room to breathe again.
The signal looks different for everyone. For some women, intuition is a physical sensation. For others, it’s a knowing they can’t fully explain, arriving as words, or an image, or simply the unmistakable sense that something is right or wrong for them. The work isn’t learning someone else’s language for it. It’s learning your own.
There is also a crucial distinction Kerry draws — between intuition and the inner critic.
Intuition, she says, is subtle. Gentle. Kind. The voice that tells you you’ve failed, that you’re behind, that you should have known better, that everyone else has already figured this out — that is a different voice altogether. Many of us have spent years mistaking our harshest inner voice for our wisest one.
And Back To You
There’s a phrase Kerry found herself repeating so often in sessions that it eventually became the foundation of her entire practice.
“And back to you.”
A client might spend ten minutes describing what her partner did, what her boss said, what her mother wants, how her kids are responding to all of it. Kerry would listen fully — and then, gently, bring the conversation home.
And back to you. How are you feeling? What do you need? What do you want?
One client later admitted she’d started saying the phrase to herself, unprompted, in the middle of her own days. Kerry realized then she’d built something bigger than a coaching prompt. She’d built a way back.
It became the foundation of her “Back to You” framework: pause, notice, reconnect with the body, name what you actually want, build a boundary, and let self-trust accumulate from there — because self-trust isn’t something you can simply decide to have. It has to be earned, one small piece of evidence at a time.
You notice something doesn’t feel right. You honor that information. You set one small boundary. You survive it. You make a choice based on what you actually want, instead of what’s expected. And the world, against every fear you had, doesn’t fall apart.
Little by little, you learn your own voice is safe to follow.
Maybe you don't need a leap
Our culture is obsessed with transformation stories that have a dramatic middle. Quit the job. Leave the city. Start the company. Leap, and trust the net will appear.
Kerry isn’t particularly interested in telling women to leap — especially the ones standing at the edge with children, a mortgage, aging parents, and a nervous system quietly screaming that a giant leap feels like a threat, not a triumph.
Instead, she talks about finding the place where can and want overlap.
You may want an entirely different career, but you can’t walk away from this one today. Fine. What can you do, that you also genuinely want to do? Take the course. Make the call. Spend one hour actually exploring the thing that interests you. Have coffee with someone already doing it. Write the first page. Apply for the one opportunity in front of you.
A step doesn’t need to be dramatic to change your direction. Kerry believes paralysis is often a sign we’re asking ourselves to move too far, too fast — and the fix isn’t more discipline. It’s a smaller step.
Small enough to feel possible. Small enough to feel safe. Small enough that you actually take it.
And then something interesting happens: movement generates information. The next step becomes visible only because you took the first one. For anyone who craves a clear, linear plan — who wants to see the whole staircase before they’ll put a foot on it — this can be deeply uncomfortable. Life rarely offers that kind of certainty. Some days, you only get the next few inches.
Finding Your Way Back to Joy
Joy can be its own kind of intimidating, especially when you haven’t felt much of it lately. If life feels numb or heavy, “find your joy” can land like one more assignment you’re already failing.
So Kerry starts somewhere far more accessible: notice what gives you a lift.
Years ago, in an assertiveness course, she was asked to carry a small notebook and jot down the ordinary moments that felt good. Walking barefoot in the ocean at Kitsilano Beach. A double scoop of ice cream on a hot afternoon. Coffee with a friend who makes her laugh. Decades later, much of that list hasn’t changed.
The exercise was never really about ice cream, or beaches. It was about learning the specific shape of her own pleasure. What energizes me? What makes me feel a little more alive? What do I move toward naturally, when no one is telling me what I’m supposed to enjoy?
These small observations become clues. And a beautiful life, it turns out, is often built from more of these clues than we ever give ourselves credit for.
You Don't Have to Become Someone New
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Kerry what she’d tell her younger self. Her answer was almost identical to what she now tells the women she coaches.
Trust yourself. There is no single right way to do this. And above all, be kind to yourself along the way.
“Beating yourself up does not create change,” she says.
For women who’ve built their entire lives on achievement, discipline, and high expectations, that can feel almost radical. We assume the critical voice is what keeps us moving — that without it, we’d go soft, get lazy, fall behind. Kerry has found the opposite to be true. Self-compassion has moved her forward faster, simply because she’s no longer burning so much energy fighting herself.
And maybe that’s the real invitation hidden inside any crossroads.
We don’t have to know what comes next right away. We don’t have to turn uncertainty into another project to master. We can pause, long enough to notice what’s true today — what feels good, what doesn’t, what we need, what we miss, what gives us energy, what we might want if we finally let ourselves want it.
Then we take one small step. And another.
Until the voice we thought we’d lost starts to sound familiar again. And back to you.
To hear the full conversation with Kerry Hanna, listen to the Life is Beauty Full podcast on Spotify. And to contact Kerry visit https://kerryhanna.com/ or follow her on Instagram at @kerryhanna.