Sabrina Sourjah is a certified authenticity coach based in Toronto. She began coaching because of her unshakable belief that we all deserve better jobs, better relationships, and better lives. She gets a genuine high every time her clients progress towards their most authentic life by outdoing their former selves. In her past life, she has worked in various corporate and technology roles. She was mostly stressed at work, no matter how well things were going. Now, Mondays are Fridays for her. This is why she’s on a mission to get you to your most authentic life. Because she knows how wonderful life can be on the other side. When she's free, she loves to read, sing karaoke, go on long walks, and watch the sunset.
Sabrina Sourjah, Authenticity & Career Change Coach
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
I’m a certified authenticity coach, team coach, and freelance writer. In my previous life, I was in the corporate world for a decade in various roles in finance, technology, project management, and automation. I grew up in Sri Lanka and moved to Oregon, USA in my late 20s for my MBA. I currently live in Toronto, Canada.
Authenticity is a major tenet of my life and I try my best to show up as I am as much as possible. I always believed that life can be better and that we deserve fulfilling work, relationships, and communities. This is why I became a professional coach.
I spend my free time reading, watching standup comedy, going on trail walks, trying new cuisine, and appreciating art exhibits. What kind of audience do you target your business towards?
I work with anyone who feels like they want to be more authentic in life. Authenticity is hard in a world that’s constantly asking us to comply and please others – a consistent ask from us since childhood. I love the quiet rebels, the misfits, and those who feel like they don’t belong because I have been there, and I know how the conflict between being yourself and belonging to society works.
Most of my past clients are corporate professionals and leaders, career changers leaving bureaucracy for creativity, and immigrants. What would you like to achieve for yourself and your business in the future?
I feel like my coaching practice has been put on this earth to birth the message of authenticity – one of the many conduits of this message. I want to spread this message and enable people to access their most authentic lives without giving into fear, shame, and guilt. For myself, I want to live my life to the fullest, warts and all, and leave the earth with zero regrets. Who inspires you to be the best that you can be?
My clients inspire me to be the best I can be. Even though I may be a bit tired after a day full of client sessions, I feel fulfilled that I could hold a safe space for my clients when they really needed that space. When they start looking at life differently and show up in their highest authenticity, and thereby, full potential, I’m inspired to keep going and to become a better coach every day. What is your work inspired by?
That is such an interesting question. My work is inspired by my beliefs as I mentioned before. And just a few weeks back, a friend asked me where I got my growth mindset from. A growth mindset is the core belief that anyone can change and grow if they choose to do so.
While reflecting on my friend’s question, I realized that my growth mindset came from my childhood. I come from a bookish family: my late grandfather was a poet, and my father is a nonfiction writer. So, I grew up with books and libraries, and I learned that we could challenge our beliefs and acquire new ones through books. Tell us about your greatest career achievement so far.
When wrapping up a coaching engagement with a client, I asked her what she was going to take into her life. She said that she was able to identify inner critical voices of her children and co-workers and that she was going to help them manage these voices based on the work we had done on managing her inner critic. I love it when there is a snowball effect of coaching like this. This is why I do what I do.
p.s. The inner critic is that inner voice we all have to varying degrees, that voice that constantly says that we’re not good enough or that we don’t deserve the good life. If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?
I would like the coaching industry to be more strictly regulated as coaches work with people’s mindsets and behaviors. I don’t mean to throw coaches without certifications under the bus; I know many such coaches who are abundantly gifted in the coaching craft. But there needs to be stricter guidelines to uphold our service levels and ethical compliance. This may even lead to coaching becoming an insurance-covered service one day to make it more accessible like therapy. Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
Listen, life has blessed with many pivotal moments to get me to where I am today. I think life blesses everyone this way if we take a closer look at our lives. To mention a few of these life events, immigrating to North America has given me so many opportunities that I would not have had otherwise. My inter-racial marriage and divorce also taught me so much the human condition. Leaving the corporate world and opening my coaching practice and freelance writing business as a single household was one of the biggest risks I have ever taken. Entrepreneurship surfaced so many of my fears and inhibitions. I had no choice but to work on my healing. I continue to do so to this day.
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