Kristin LeeAnn spent a year deciding what people’s accounts of their own lives actually established. She does not build the plan that sentence asks for.
For a year at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Kristin LeeAnn decided what a veteran’s account of their own life actually established, against service records, medical evidence and case law. Nothing in that seat let an opening statement stand as a finding. She did not drop the standard in coaching. “If a woman says, ‘I just need to be more disciplined,’ I do not automatically build a productivity plan. I look for evidence of exhaustion, anxiety, competing responsibilities, fear, or an environment that may be working against her.”
Kristin LeeAnn is a Chicago-based Certified Life Coach and HypnoBreathwork® practitioner who runs Kristin LeeAnn Coaching, founded in 2019.
What an Adjudicator Hears in a First Session
What a client says she needs is a claim. It arrives already phrased as an instruction, and it usually names the deliverable it wants. Kristin takes it the way she took a claimant’s statement, as one input to be weighed against the others. “I listen for the difference between what a client believes, what has actually happened, and the pattern connecting the two.”
In her reading, the diagnosis a high achiever brings is almost always about output. “High-achieving women often assume their success is no longer holding because they are not working hard enough, managing their time well enough, or being disciplined enough. Usually, effort is not the problem.” What she looks for instead is a version of success built around survival and responsibility, “but they may not have stopped to ask whether that version of success still fits who they are or what they need.” That the search runs outward as well as inward is the part she traces to her doctoral training, which she credits for “the importance of considering people within the context of their relationships, communities, and environments.” The charge accumulates either way. “They may continue accepting opportunities they do not have the capacity for, staying in unhealthy environments because they appear stable, or reaching goals that still leave them feeling anxious and disconnected from themselves.”
She had the design problem herself, and she was slow to run her own test on it. Kristin founded Kristin LeeAnn Coaching in September 2019, two months after starting as a caseworker at the Illinois Department of Human Services, and the practice and the paycheck then ran alongside each other for five years. “I needed the stability of employment, but I also needed the flexibility to care for my mental health and my children.” The practice was never consistently full time in that stretch. She moved between building it, prioritizing employment, burning out, and pulling back. “I had the education, credentials, and desire to help people, but I lacked business knowledge, financial resources, a strong network, and the internal confidence to remain visible and consistent.”
The federal job was the load-bearing wall in that arrangement. She joined the Department of Veterans Affairs as a claims analyst in November 2023 and planned to stay put. “I had expected to remain at the VA until the business became financially stable.” It ended in November 2024. As a single mother of three the loss was financially destabilizing, and it removed the structure that had allowed the decision to keep being deferred. “When my job ended, I had to decide whether I would abandon the business again or fully confront what had kept me from consistently building it. That disruption forced me to apply the same work to myself that I was helping other women do.”
Six Months, Twelve Sessions, and a Career Change the Client Had Not Pictured
A single mother of two arrived as an executive assistant in a hospital environment she experienced as toxic, needing to leave and unwilling to leave without the next job secured. The obvious brief was an exit. Kristin worked the tension instead, separating what the client wanted from what she was trying to escape, and used HypnoBreathwork®, the modality she has practiced since 2022, on the anxiety and on the possibilities survival mode had priced out. In one session an image surfaced of the client as a CEO. Kristin did not treat it as a forecast. “We treated it as information about the leadership and professional future she wanted.” From there the work moved to SMART goals and a standing review of progress against them.
Over approximately six months and 12 sessions the client took an executive assistant role in a corporate setting, a sector she had not previously counted as hers. Her annual income rose by approximately $10,000 and her remote schedule went from one day a week to two or three, both on the client’s own report of her salary and hours, alongside the confirmed job change. The evidence Kristin points to is the shape of the search itself: the client neither walked out into nothing nor stayed indefinitely, and the industry she landed in was not the one she had assumed she belonged to. “What surprised me was how important the CEO insight became, not as a literal promise, but because it expanded the way she saw herself.”
A Second Client, a Different Complaint, the Same Opening Test
The second engagement started nowhere near a resignation. A married woman who directed music at her church while starting a business came in tired of setting goals and not reaching them, and named the thing under it in session: she needed accountability from someone outside her marriage. She was carrying obligations to a congregation, a household and a customer base, all of them legitimate, none of them hers. “She was responsible to so many people in different areas of her life, yet she did not have a space devoted to the goals that belonged specifically to her.”
Over approximately six months and 12 sessions she began completing goals more consistently, grew the business, and started declining opportunities she did not have the energy or the reason to take. The basis is her own reports across the engagement and the observable pattern in what she finished and what she turned down. No dollar figure attaches to this one, and Kristin does not attach one.
Set the two engagements side by side and every variable moves except one. Different women, different sectors, different opening complaints. One wanted out of a job, the other was not going anywhere. One outcome carries a salary number, the other carries a change in what its owner agreed to. What held constant was the refusal to build the plan the first sentence asked for, and the test applied at the end. “A shift is not simply that she says she feels inspired after a session. We look for changes in her decisions and behavior: the boundaries she sets, the opportunities she declines or pursues, the goals she completes, and the way she responds when an old pattern appears.”
What a High Achiever Can Take From an Adjudicator’s Standard
Kristin LeeAnn does not sell a framework and does not claim one. What she runs is a sequence, borrowed in part from a claims file and in part from an inpatient unit, and the parts of it that travel do not require her in the room. Six months is the horizon on which she has seen it produce a change in behavior.
One boundary sits around all of it. “My current work is coaching and personal development, not psychotherapy or psychological treatment.” HypnoBreathwork®, in her practice, is a self-exploration and relaxation practice rather than a substitute for clinical care, and the referral is built into the method rather than added to the end of it. “When a client’s needs fall outside the scope of coaching, including significant or persistent mental-health symptoms, I encourage her to seek support from an appropriately licensed mental-health or medical professional.”
Five moves come out of the work.
- One. Demote the opening sentence. Whatever the presenting complaint names is a claim, and the first task is to establish what else is in the room before anything gets designed against it: exhaustion, anxiety, competing responsibilities, fear, or an environment that is working against the person holding the complaint.
- Two. Test whether the design still fits. The question is not whether the effort is sufficient but whether the structure the effort is feeding was built for the person now living in it. “They have built success around survival, responsibility, and being the person everyone can depend on.”
- Three. Goal against the real issue, inside what is controllable. The convenient explanation is the one that produces a plan fastest, which is exactly why it gets adopted. “Then we identify what is within her control and create goals around the real issue rather than the most convenient explanation.”
- Four. Put the goals on a schedule and review them out loud. SMART goals with a standing review are the instrument Kristin uses, and an unreviewed goal cannot show a pattern.
- Five. Set the baseline before the work starts. “If I approached the engagement now, I would establish more formal baseline measures at the beginning, including anxiety ratings, job-satisfaction scores, and goal-completion rates.”
Her case to the woman running all of it correctly and recognizing none of it is one sentence long. “A life can look successful and still feel unfamiliar when it was built around what everyone needed from you rather than what brings you peace, wholeness, and a sense of belonging in your own life.”
Who Is Kristin LeeAnn?
Kristin LeeAnn is a Certified Life Coach and HypnoBreathwork® practitioner in Chicago, Illinois, and the founder of Kristin LeeAnn Coaching, the practice she has run since September 2019 for high-achieving women. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and a Master of Science in public service management, both from DePaul University, and earned her Certified Life Coach credential through the Life Purpose Institute in 2020. She has practiced HypnoBreathwork® since 2022.
The record underneath the coaching runs through inpatient care and public systems. From October 2015 to August 2017 she worked at Hartgrove Behavioral Health System as a behavioral health specialist, a non-licensed direct care role on an inpatient psychiatric unit, primarily with adolescents, where she independently facilitated therapeutic groups using cognitive behavioral concepts inside the hospital’s supervised milieu, maintained patient documentation and responded to psychiatric emergencies. “I was contributing to patients’ care within my assigned role and the hospital’s treatment environment, but I was not diagnosing patients, independently creating treatment plans, or practicing as a licensed mental-health professional.” She was a human services caseworker at the Illinois Department of Human Services from July 2019 to March 2020, and a veterans claims analyst at the Department of Veterans Affairs from November 2023 to November 2024, adjudicating benefits and disability claims against VA law, precedent rulings and state statute.
She is a doctoral student in Adler University’s Doctor of Psychology in Clinical Psychology program, with an expected completion date of May 2031, and she is exact about what that does and does not confer. “I maintain a clear distinction between education and licensure.” Her work is faith-centered without being conditional on a client sharing it. “My faith is central to who I am and influences how I understand purpose, alignment, resilience, and redirection.”
Kristin is a single mother of three, and she is deliberate about why the personal record sits inside the professional one, “not as a hardship story for sympathy, but because it gives me firsthand understanding of women who appear capable while privately carrying exhaustion, fear, responsibility, and uncertainty.” The standard she carried out of the claims file is the one she now turns on the sentence a woman walks in saying. It is a claim until the record says otherwise.
Kristin LeeAnn is a Certified Life Coach and HypnoBreathwork® practitioner in Chicago, Illinois, and the founder of Kristin LeeAnn Coaching, the practice she has run since September 2019 for high-achieving women. To connect with Kristin or learn more, visit Kristin LeeAnn, MS, CLC | LinkedIn.
