ABOUT ME
Hello, I'm Madeline Walsh.
Before becoming a mindset and performance coach, I was an investor at Anthos Capital, a multi-billion dollar growth equity fund. While there I sourced investments, including two emerging consumer brands that have each since surpassed $100m in sales, and became the firm’s first biz ops and strategy leader.
Phew! Glad that part is over. Those are things I’ve done and I’m proud of that experience…but I don’t think that bio reflects who I am as a person. I want to tell my real story. The story of how I left the partner track and became a mindset and performance coach for ambitious individuals on a quest to live creative, unconventional lives.
Part I: Sad in Paradise
It was sometime in late 2018/early 2019 when I walked to the edge of the Malibu Pier on an early Sunday morning. The weather was a perfect 70 degrees and sunny in LA. I sat on top of the roof of the Malibu Farms cafe and looked out on the glistening Pacific Ocean and the surfers bopping in the waves. It was beautiful and I could not have been more lonely and lost in my life. In some ways, I think it’s the rite of passage of being in your early twenties. That time in your life when you are thrust into the adult world, suddenly and all at once, with bills to pay and not a lot of money and less time to see your friends, all while existing at the bottom of the professional hierarchy. It was not the glistening years of youth and freedom and fun that I’d been sold on. I’d moved to LA for a job at a small investment firm, unexpectedly leaving my friends and New York behind in the span of a few weeks, to move to a city where I didn’t know anyone. It had worked out professionally - I’d been given a lot of responsibility that was uncommon for such a young person. I got promoted twice in my first year and sourced investments that were doing well. My bosses loved me. But inside I was drowning in loneliness.
So I sat on the Malibu pier and called my best friend. She’d barely said hello when I started sobbing incoherently. “When is it going to get easier? I don’t know what I’m doing out here!” I don’t remember what else I said but that was the gist of it. I think I knew then that I was on a path that wasn’t truly aligned with me…but I wasn’t ready to admit it yet.
(Side note: It’s been enough time that I can laugh at the image of a young twenty-something having an existential crisis and losing it amidst one of the world’s most stunning landscapes).
Part II: Getting closer, but definitely not there yet
A lot of big, important life changes occurred in my life over the next few years. I moved back to New York and rediscovered a sense of home and community. I went to therapy for the first time and experienced a lot of healing within myself and in family relationships. Finally, I met and fell in love with my boyfriend (he dm’d me on Instagram. Stay tuned for the millennial rom-com feature film. Only half joking).
And despite all of that, I still couldn’t ignore the nagging feeling in the back of my mind that my prestigious job wasn’t the right thing for me. Plus, the signs of chronic stress were becoming hard to ignore. I had frequent trouble sleeping, brain fog, difficulty concentrating, and severe pain throughout my body. Finally, I was on a walk with my boyfriend when it all came to a head and he asked me point blank: are you sure you still love your job?
Tears immediately entered my eyes and I knew I couldn’t lie. I paused, took a breath, and said “no” in a shaky breath. I left my job about six weeks after that with a very loose plan of what was next.
Part III: Taking the Leap
Around that time I started getting coaching myself and met two amazing coaching mentors (shout out to Lauren Ivision and Steve Schlafman). I didn’t know exactly why or what it meant, but I had an unshakeable feeling from these interactions that coaching was the direction I was supposed to be headed. I’d spend the next year undergoing training in ontological coaching to see where it would lead. When I signed up I thought I’d watch some PowerPoint slides on coaching, earn a certification, and then call it a day. Boy was I wrong! I also could not have needed what actually happened more.
Ontological coaching is a methodology that looks at mindsets, beliefs, and behaviors that get in the way of where it is that we want to go. We did not look at a single PowerPoint the whole year. The training was focused on taking an in-depth look at yourself and seeing the mindsets, beliefs, and behaviors that were getting in your way. It was undoubtedly some of the hardest, most vulnerable work I have done in life…by a landslide. Imagine talking about and getting coached on your fears, doubts, and limiting beliefs in front of a group of adults, who are all incredibly impressive and who you want to like you! If your heart doesn’t start racing at the thought of it, consider me jealous of you and unable to relate.
As the year progressed, I gave myself more and more room to be creative and experiment. I coached lots of different types of people. I allowed myself to lean into things that I love doing, like writing and interacting with creative people. I started my own blog. I began interviewing people who are leading unconventional, creative lives and doing work that they are deeply passionate about. Slowly but surely I found my way to the type of coach I wanted to be and the type of practice I wanted to build.
I promise that it wasn’t all yoga and good vibes. I also ate a lot of cake during that year (shoutout to Martha’s Country Bakery), laid on my floor and contemplated my life’s choices, and had plenty of existential crises like any self-respecting millennial.
Part IV: Present Day
The life I live today is one that I’ve been building towards for years. It is uniquely mine. My boyfriend and I both run our own businesses. We recently moved from New York City to a small beach town in Florida called Rosemary Beach. My identity is no longer tied to a job but to doing work that is vital for my soul - writing and holding the space for my coaching clients to be able to pursue and further their dreams. I am a writer-coach-sometimes investor.
I imagine a lot of you reading this have already built lives that are uniquely yours or are taking the brave step towards doing so. To create something that is uniquely yours is by definition unconventional, no one has built the life that will light you on fire before. As Jeffrey Campbell once said, “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”
What I have learned is that building an unconventional life is equal parts terrifying and exhilarating. If you’re already on the path yourself or have thought about taking it, you’ve probably already had to tackle or confront the following:
Gaining comfort with discomfort
Letting go of control
The fear of failure
The fear of what others will think about you
Trust in yourself
Disappointment after setbacks
Creating structure and accountability
Your relationship to money
Figuring out what is aligned with you and what isn’t
Unlocking barriers to creativity
Through my coaching practice, I aim to share as much as possible about my own experiences and learnings from navigating the space of the unconventional, and to share the lessons I’m learning from interviewing and coaching people all over the world who are doing the same.
When I began this journey, I wondered if anyone out there was really doing work that they were passionate about. I wondered if “okay” or “good enough” were as good as it gets for any of us. And then I looked around and I met people that showed me that it is absolutely possible to do work you’re passionate about and to create a life that is uniquely yours. I don’t care if your dream is to build a small business in your home-town, grow a business to a billion dollars, move to Alaska, take a two-year sabbatical, write a book, or anything else.
I just want to support you in actually doing it.