For most of my adult life, I lived with clinical anxiety: racing thoughts, constant worry, dread, restless energy, insomnia, and a sense of always being “on.” I managed it the best way I knew how—by moving. I poured all my anxious energy into long hours at work and on my bike.

 

Movement was my medicine. It regulated me when nothing else would. Biking, hiking, snowboarding, skiing. Exercise was my coping mechanism, and it kind of worked. Until it didn’t.

 

A few years ago, a mountain bike crash changed everything. What seemed like an ordinary ride ended in a serious injury that took away my only form of stress relief. No more biking. No more running it off. No more managing my anxiety through motion. 

 

What followed was a kind of reckoning. I had to sit still with everything I’d spent years outrunning. My body was broken, but it was my way of relating to pressure, productivity, and suffering that truly needed healing.

 

I leaned on the support of a therapist and coach who encouraged me to enrol in a professional coaching certification program, not to become a coach but to heal myself. I wanted to understand the roots of my anxiety. I wanted to sleep again. I wanted to feel joy, not just achievement.

 

During that slow season, I started writing. Slowly, steadily, I began crafting what would eventually become a book that captured the tools, reflections, and practices that helped me reclaim myself from chronic stress, anxiety, insomnia, and over-responsibility.

 

That time also marked a bigger shift: a decision to step away from my legal career after more than 15 years in intellectual property law. Due to the extent of my injuries—recovery from which is still ongoing—I’m no longer able to do the job I once did. That reality opened the door to something new. What began as necessity turned into choice—a choice to build a life that supports not just success, but well-being. I have chosen a new path rooted in meaning, heart, and helping others who are struggling silently under the weight of success. I have chosen to pursue work that is healing and nurturing, supports my recovery, and feels aligned with the life I want to live.

 

Today, I’m a certified Professional Integral Coach® working with professionals, entrepreneurs, lone wolves, high-achievers and performers who are exhausted from trying to hold it all together alone. People who are great at performing under pressure but have lost their joy. People who are praised for being strong, but who are secretly drowning under the weight of that strength.

 

And that book I started during my recovery? It’s finally come to fruition! It’s called Free to Flourish: Cultivate Work-Life Harmony for Success and Happiness, and it’s filled with the exact strategies and reflections that helped me appreciate that there was a more sustainable and fulfilling way to live and work. If you’re looking for a way to slow down, reconnect, and start feeling like yourself again, I wrote it for you.

 

If you’d like to read an excerpt from Free to Flourish, click here to email me for your free download. 

 

If you'd like to read the whole thing, you can purchase your very own copy at the FriesenPress online bookstore or Apple Books by clicking the buttons below. It will be another few weeks before it's available on other retailer websites.