Who is Lama Shaath?
Lama Shaath, ACC-ICF, COC-UBC, CCDP®, is a certified global coach, organizational consultant, facilitator, speaker, and the founder of Mine Your Inner Power Coaching, based in West Vancouver, British Columbia. She holds an International Coaching Federation Associate Certified Coach credential, is a University of British Columbia Certified Organizational Coach, and earned her Career Development Practitioner Certificate from Simon Fraser University.
You step off the plane in a city you have never seen. It is August. You know no one.
The airport is full of people who all seem to know where they are going, and you are not one of them. Your apartment is booked for two weeks. You are carrying years of professional experience, but none of it guarantees a place in this new country. The life you built, the one you loved, the city you thought you might stay in forever, now sits thousands of kilometres behind you.
This is the moment people often describe later with gentle words. The turning point. The fresh start.
But standing in the baggage claim, watching suitcases circle endlessly on the conveyor belt, knowing you have to rebuild everything from understanding unfamiliar systems to creating a new professional identity, it does not feel like a beginning.
It feels like standing at the edge of a cliff and choosing to step forward anyway.
The question that arises in that moment is simple and unsettling.
What do you do when the only path forward is the one you have to create yourself?
For more than two decades, Lama Shaath has been answering that question. First for herself. Then for thousands of others navigating transition, uncertainty, and change.
Meet Lama Shaath
Lama Shaath, ACC-ICF, COC-UBC, CCDP®, is a certified global coach, organizational consultant, facilitator, speaker, and the founder of Mine Your Inner Power Coaching, based in West Vancouver, British Columbia. She holds an International Coaching Federation Associate Certified Coach credential, is a University of British Columbia Certified Organizational Coach, and earned her Career Development Practitioner Certificate from Simon Fraser University.
But credentials tell only a small part of her story.
The work that defines Lama today did not begin with a coaching certification or a carefully planned business idea. It began with a deeply personal search for meaning.
Mine Your Inner Power was born during one of the most transformative periods of her life. Personal loss, immigration, rebuilding careers in countries where she did not speak the language, and navigating profound life transitions became catalysts for something far greater than professional change. They became an invitation to understand who she was beyond expectations, conditioning, and the identities life had gradually placed upon her.
She was not looking for a coaching career.
She was searching for herself, for meaning and purpose.
That search led her to a belief that has remained at the centre of everything she does today: every person already possesses extraordinary gifts, talents, strengths, and lived experiences. Those qualities are not waiting to be created. They are waiting to be uncovered.
That is the meaning behind Mine Your Inner Power.
It is an invitation to reconnect with the wisdom, resilience, and potential that already exist within us, especially during life’s most uncertain moments.
Lama does not teach reinvention as a theory.
She teaches it as something she has lived repeatedly across continents, cultures, and careers.
The Architecture of Becoming
Lama’s story is not defined by a single reinvention. It is shaped by many.
The first began long before coaching became part of her life.
As a teenager, she experienced the challenge of adapting to an entirely new social environment after moving with her family. During those years, she also struggled with her weight. Rather than accepting the limitations she felt others placed upon her, she committed herself to understanding health, discipline, and personal transformation.
Through determination and self-directed learning, she transformed her own health, an experience that would later inspired her to persue personal training and dedicate herself to helping others discover their own strength.
Years later came another beginning.
She immigrated to Toronto, Canada.
Like many newcomers, she found herself rebuilding from the ground up. A new culture, unfamiliar systems, and the challenge of establishing herself professionally demanded resilience, adaptability, and patience. It became another lesson in what it means to begin again.
Her next chapter unfolded in the South of France.
Settling in Nice, near Monaco, she built a life over nearly twelve years that many would consider complete. When she arrived, she did not speak French. While integrating into French culture and learning the language, she built a successful coaching and wellness practice in France and trained as a yoga teacher in London, further deepening her holistic approach to coaching, personal growth, and well-being. Her work expanded to include transformational coaching, yoga, retreats,
workshops, personal training, and holistic wellbeing, always centred on helping people
reconnect with themselves.
It was there, in the South of France, that Mine Your Inner Power truly came to life.
It was never simply the name of a business.
It became the expression of everything she had learned through decades of navigating change.
Looking back, Lama often says her career was never built through a predefined plan. It emerged through curiosity, courage, continuous learning, and a willingness to move toward uncertainty instead of away from it.
The greatest lesson those years taught her is one she now shares with every client she coaches.
The challenges that ask the most of us often reveal the gifts we are meant to share with the world.
The Leadership That Starts Inside
By the time Lama arrived in Vancouver in August 2017, she had already reinvented herself several times.
She had lived and worked across three continents. She had rebuilt careers in countries where she did not speak the language. She had coached individuals and leaders through profound personal transformations and spent years helping people reconnect with themselves through health, wellbeing, and transformational coaching.
She was not planning to change the direction of her work.
That realization came later.
As she immersed herself in Canadian workplaces and professional environments, she began to notice something that had previously been outside her field of vision.
The greatest opportunities for transformation were not confined to individuals. They existed inside organizations.
People spend much of their lives at work. Leaders influence not only performance but also confidence, wellbeing, relationships, and the emotional climate of entire teams. She began to see how leadership shaped far more than the culture in which people experienced their daily lives. It shaped how people experienced their daily lives.
That insight inspired another reinvention.
During the pandemic, Lama intentionally returned to learning. She completed Simon Fraser University’s Career Development Practitioner program. Between 2023 and 2025, she earned her Organizational Coaching certification through the University of British Columbia and became a Certified Career Development Practitioner (CCDP®) through the Western Canada Career Development Association.
These qualifications were never about collecting credentials.
They were about expanding the reach of MYIP into organizations, allowing her to integrate decades of transformational coaching, facilitation, leadership development, and holistic wellbeing with evidence-based organizational coaching and career development practices.
She was not leaving behind the work she had built.
She was allowing it to evolve.
Through Mine Your Inner Power Coaching, Lama partners with individuals, leaders, teams, and organizations across diverse sectors and cultures. She supports people navigating leadership development, career transitions, organizational transformation, and life-work integration. Throughout her career, she has guided professionals through periods of uncertainty and reinvention, supported people navigating significant career and life transitions, and partnered with leaders to create more human-centred, psychologically safe workplaces
Today, Lama’s work is grounded in a belief that many organizations are only beginning to understand.
How we show up shapes how others think, feel, and perform.
It is a sentence she returns to often, not because it sounds inspiring, but because she has witnessed it repeatedly throughout her career.
Leadership is not simply about achieving targets or managing performance.
It is about understanding that every interaction, every conversation, every decision, and every behaviour influences the people around us.
For Lama, effective leadership begins with something much deeper than authority.
It begins with being human.
In today’s rapidly changing world, technical expertise alone is no longer enough. Organizations need leaders who are self-aware, emotionally intelligent, adaptable, and capable of creating psychological safety. They need leaders who can hold both strategy and humanity at the same time.
This is where one of the defining ideas of Mine Your Inner Power emerges.
Lama believes effective leadership is rooted in coherence.
Coherence is the alignment between what leaders think, feel, say, and do.
When leaders operate from awareness rather than ego, and from intention rather than reactivity, they create environments where people feel valued, supported, and able to contribute at their best.
Trust is not created through occasional acts of encouragement.
It is built through consistency.
People should never have to wonder which version of their leader will arrive each morning depending on stress, pressure, or circumstance.
Consistency creates safety.
Safety creates trust.
Trust creates engagement.
And engagement creates sustainable performance.
That perspective challenges many traditional leadership models.
Organizations frequently invest heavily in strategy, technology, and performance systems while overlooking the human conditions that allow those systems to succeed.
Lama believes strategy alone cannot build a healthy culture.
Culture grows from the daily choices leaders make.
It grows through presence.
Through listening.
Through transparency.
Through genuine care.
She often reminds leaders that psychological safety is not created through policies or mission statements.
It is created through repeated experiences.
People notice whether their ideas are welcomed.
They notice whether mistakes become opportunities for learning or reasons for blame.
They notice whether vulnerability is respected or quietly punished.
Those seemingly ordinary moments become organizational culture.
This philosophy also shapes the way Lama approaches career development.
She often says, “Career development is never just about finding work. It is about finding ourselves. It is about reconnecting with our values, our purpose, and the parts of us that give meaning to what we do.”
That belief distinguishes her work from conventional career coaching.
Many approaches focus primarily on résumés, interviews, promotions, or career progression.
Lama begins somewhere else.
She begins with identity.
Who are you becoming?
What matters most to you?
What strengths have life experiences already given you?
What values do you want your work to reflect?
For her, career and life cannot be separated.
Neither can leadership and personal growth.
Everything begins with the relationship we have with ourselves.
The clearer we become internally, the more authentic our leadership becomes externally.
Over the years, she has seen remarkable examples of this transformation.
She recalls coaching a highly accomplished lawyer who had spent years feeling overlooked despite exceptional ability and dedication. Through coaching, they explored not only professional challenges but also the beliefs and patterns shaping how the client viewed themselves.
As those internal beliefs shifted, external change followed naturally.
Confidence grew.
Relationships improved.
Recognition increased.
New opportunities emerged.
The transformation was not simply professional.
It was deeply personal.
Moments like these continue to reinforce what Lama has learned throughout her own life.
Meaningful transformation rarely begins by changing circumstances.
It begins by changing awareness.
When people reconnect with their inner strengths, values, and purpose, they naturally begin communicating differently, leading differently, and living differently.
That is the essence of Mine Your Inner Power.
It is not about becoming someone else.
It is about uncovering the person you have always had the potential to become.
The Shaath Playbook: 5 Lessons
Lesson 1: Reinvention is not something that happens to you. It is something you choose, even when circumstances seem to choose for you.
Lesson 2: Presence is the ground. Before strategy, before systems, ask whether people feel seen and valued.
Lesson 3: What you withhold does not disappear. It shapes the emotional and cultural world around you quietly, in ways you may never fully see.
Lesson 4: Care is not separate from excellence. In fact, it is the condition that makes real excellence possible.
Lesson 5: Your inner work is not selfish. The clarity and coherence you build inside yourself becomes the clarity and coherence you bring to every room you enter.
The Restart as Home
That August day in Vancouver, standing in the airport with no network and no certainty, Lama was living the same question many of her coaching clients face today.
How do you build a life when everything is unfamiliar?
How do you remain open when fear seems louder than confidence?
How do you trust that the restart you are making will eventually make sense?
Nearly nine years later, she knows the answer not as theory but as lived experience.
The restart was never simply about arriving in another city.
It was about becoming the kind of person who could move forward regardless of the landscape.
Every country she lived in.
Every language she learned.
Every career she rebuilt.
Every uncertainty she embraced.
Each became another opportunity to discover the strengths, resilience, and wisdom already living within her.
That discovery became Mine Your Inner Power.
Today, that philosophy continues to guide every coaching conversation, every workshop, every leadership program, and every organization she supports.
She believes the future of leadership belongs to people who are willing to cultivate greater awareness, coherence, presence, and humanity.
Not because these qualities are fashionable.
Because they are foundational.
She has twice been nominated as an Outstanding Career Leader by Career Professionals of Canada and was named one of Vancouver’s Top 15 Career Coaches for 2025. These recognitions reflect years of dedication to helping people navigate change with courage and purpose.
Yet the recognition she treasures most came in a far quieter moment.
Before one of her conference presentations, colleagues offered a simple message.
“I’m here for you. You will be great.”
Those words captured everything she believes leadership should be.
Presence.
Encouragement.
Trust.
The willingness to stand beside another person before the outcome is known.
That is the spirit of Mine Your Inner Power.
It is not about becoming someone extraordinary.
It is about uncovering the extraordinary qualities that already exist within each of us.
Because the courage to restart has never been about beginning again.
It has always been about remembering who you are.
Looking ahead, Lama is committed to expanding the impact and reach of Mine Your Inner Power Coaching through coaching, facilitation, speaking, and leadership development. She is passionate about advancing conversations around human-centred leadership, psychological safety, leadership presence, and the ethical responsibility of leaders to cultivate the awareness, coherence, and capacity needed to navigate an increasingly complex world.
As artificial intelligence, rapid change, and uncertainty continue to reshape how we live and work, she believes the future belongs to leaders who can balance innovation with humanity, performance with well-being, and results with meaningful human connection. Through her work, she hopes to contribute to workplaces and communities where people can thrive, lead with purpose, and create lasting positive impact.
Lama Shaath, ACC-ICF, COC-UBC, CCDP®, is a Global Coach, Organizational Consultant, Facilitator, Speaker, and Founder of Mine Your Inner Power Coaching, based in West Vancouver, British Columbia. Through Mine Your Inner Power Coaching, she supports individuals, leaders, teams, and organizations in cultivating human-centred leadership, career development, psychological safety, and organizational transformation by helping people create meaningful change from the inside out.
