I know what the org chart leaves out.
By every measure the company kept, I was successful. I became a Wells Fargo Vice President, led nearly 100 people across five locations and three states, and carried work that could not fail.
The measures did not include what it took to keep that career operating alongside single motherhood, sole responsibility for my elderly mother, and a body that eventually required three months away.
I’m Amanda L. Christian, an Executive Master Life Coach, founder of SoulFIRE Leadership, and author of SoulFIRE Leadership: The Leadership Model Women Were Never Taught. I work with high-achieving women in Finance and Technology who carry substantial responsibility at work and outside it.
Both belong in the same conversation.
My first job after college taught me to look beneath what was visible.
After college, I worked as a counselor in a group home for girls ages 11 to 18. Behavior that looked defiant or self-defeating made more sense once you understood what had happened before, what the girl was trying to protect, and what she had learned to do to survive.
You could correct the behavior all day and never touch the reason it existed.
That lesson followed me into every organization I entered. The visible problem matters. So do the history, incentives, relationships, and unwritten rules beneath it.
Thirty-three years inside Finance and Technology taught me how institutions really work.
I began in banking as an executive assistant responsible for the bank’s courier operation while also working with operations and marketing on business promotions. From there, I moved into mortgage closing and, within three years, became an assistant manager and then manager of the data center.
Over the next three decades, I led data center operations, Storage and Print Operations, major programs, business continuity, and merger work. I became a Wells Fargo Vice President and, at one point, managed nearly 100 people across five locations and three states.
During Hurricane Floyd and September 11, I led disaster recovery without losing a single byte of data.
The titles changed. The operating lesson did not. When you prove you can handle the difficult assignment, another difficult assignment usually follows. A merger can remove sponsorship without changing the work. Responsibility can continue expanding long after the authority, staffing, or access needed to carry it has narrowed.
After retiring from Wells Fargo, I served as Executive Director of the Rangeley Lakes Region Chamber of Commerce. I led tourism, member service, regional marketing and advertising, public-private partnerships, economic development, and 31 events a year. That job was a long way from a Fortune 500 bank, but the dynamics were familiar anyway. Different groups wanted different outcomes, responsibility crossed organizational lines, and the person holding the work could have more accountability than authority or resources.
At work, I built contingency plans.At home, I was the contingency plan.
Outside work, I was a single mother by choice and the sole caregiver for my elderly mother. I coached soccer, chaired the Cub Scouts committee, and took over my son’s patrol when its leader resigned and no other parent stepped forward.
My son has learning disabilities. Supporting him meant regular meetings with teachers, counselors, and principals, because getting him what he needed often required me to keep pressing.
I attended every school event and every soccer, baseball, basketball, cross-country, and swimming event he participated in, with one exception.
Work delayed me on the day of a cross-country meet. I left late, got caught in a massive traffic jam, missed the meet, and then went home to deal with the fallout.
That was the tightrope. I could manage critical technology operations, lead disaster recovery, and make sure nothing essential was lost. I could also be the mother, daughter, advocate, coach, committee chair, and parent who filled the empty role.
What I could not do was clone myself when two parts of my life needed me at the same time.
My body scheduled the review I had postponed.
In October 2019, I went on medical leave. I had spent decades answering one question: Was I successful?
The answer was yes. Verifiably.
The question I began asking on leave was different: What had that success cost?
I went back through every manager and leader I had worked for. I considered where I had felt valued, whose teams respected them, what their leadership produced, and what I never wanted to carry into my own work.
Then I audited the career itself. Compensation and progression belonged on the ledger. So did the doctor’s appointment I canceled after rearranging my day off because an emergency project call made absence feel too risky. So did my health, evenings, relationships, voice, identity, and the work I never had enough uncommitted capacity to consider.
I returned to Wells Fargo and continued working for almost three more years while I ran that post-mortem. When I retired in 2022, the decision did not begin with one bad meeting.
The ledgers were already full.
Retirement was my answer. I do not use my ending as a prescription for yours.
The job comes into the room. So does the rest of your life.
You may arrive talking about a manager, a promotion, a reorganization, or a role that keeps expanding while your authority does not. You may be carrying that job alongside children, aging parents, financial responsibility, health concerns, or a life that keeps getting whatever capacity work leaves behind.
We look at what the company is doing. We look at what you learned to do in response. Then we go further back, because some of the rules that keep a woman over-functioning at work were familiar long before the first promotion.
Corporate life can reinforce those rules. Sometimes it rewards patterns that were already familiar from childhood, family roles, or earlier experiences: perfectionism, people-pleasing, over-responsibility, noticing what everyone else needs before they ask.
A workplace can turn an old adaptation into a professional asset. The cost can travel with it for years.
My coaching is informed by trauma-informed practice, family systems, parts work, inner-child work, NLP, and nervous-system regulation. I use those approaches to understand where a pattern came from and why it keeps getting reinforced. When something belongs with a qualified mental-health professional, I say so.
You may still want the role, more responsibility, and more influence. The work is to separate that ambition from the automatic availability, constant self-editing, and gap-covering that may have traveled with it for years.
We are working toward something more specific: making a decision and not spending the evening replaying it.
Holding significant responsibility without automatically becoming the missing resource.
Staying ambitious while keeping something of yourself for the people and parts of your life you care about.
SoulFIRE grew from the questions my career left behind.
After I left corporate, I kept returning to the same questions. How had competence become an obligation? Why did being reliable make more work keep finding me? Which parts of my success were truly mine, and which had been shaped by organizations, expectations, and ways of leading I had learned to accept?
Those questions became SoulFIRE Leadership: The Leadership Model Women Were Never Taught. The book examines what happens when accomplished women spend years succeeding through models of leadership that ask them to translate, suppress, or fragment parts of themselves.
It looks at the cost of performed leadership, the difference between inherited expectations and authentic values, and what can change when a woman begins leading with more of her own judgment, strengths, energy, and life in the equation.
That thinking still shapes my work now.
Explore the book
Training that supports the work.
Certified Trauma-Informed Master Life Coach, Elementum Coaching Institute
Certified NLP Master Practitioner, accredited by the International Guild of NLP
Certified Impostor Syndrome-Informed Coach™
Licensed Associate of the Impostor Syndrome Institute
You do not have to reduce your life to a career problem before we talk.
You may want the next role. You may want to stay and change how you are living and leading. You may need to recover the part of your capacity that work, family responsibility, and years of being the dependable one have consumed.
You may not know what you want yet. You only know the current arrangement cannot keep receiving first claim on your life.
A five-year plan can wait. Start with an honest accounting of what the current arrangement is asking of you, what it is costing, and what you want to change.
See how we work