Rachel Connor spent years as a university professor, lecturing to hundreds of students and publishing books with her name on the spine. She told us, on this first episode of In Full Light, that she was hiding the entire time.
Even with all that visibility, the real her wasn’t on show.
The moment that broke it open was a conversation with the dean of her faculty. She proposed bringing a coaching approach into how the school cared for its students and staff. The answer came back as a flat no. She fully walked away from her traditional career not long after, before she had the financial safety net to make it comfortable, because she couldn’t stay in a place that didn’t believe in possibility.
Four years into the business she’s built, we asked her what the work actually looks like in practice.
She told us about a client of hers, a very accomplished writer who was three drafts into a novel that wasn’t quite landing. Rachel never read a word of the manuscript. They worked on something else entirely. And the book that came out the other side was completely different, with a soulful quality the writer didn’t know she had in her.
That’s the kind of work Rachel does.
There’s a moment in the conversation where Carolina asks her what her body feels like when she’s speaking from performance versus speaking from essence. Rachel describes one as head and eyes only, disconnected from the rest of her. The other has weight in the feet, gravity in the lower body, a kind of dimensionality that opens up around her.
We’ve sat with enough practitioners doing this kind of work to know how rare it is to hear someone name it with that much precision.
A few other threads you’ll catch in the full conversation:
Why she holds the word “coach” loosely now, even though it’s still in her bio.
The seven-minute writing practice she gives every client, and why messy is the point.
Why she calls the first stretch of her work closer to healing than coaching.
What Carolina noticed when Rachel’s writing shifted, and the Zoom call where Phil watched a lightbulb go on in real time.
The 25-year vision she reads most weeks, and what’s actually in it.
Thank you Josh Woll, Claire Machado, Michele Gill, and many others for tuning into episode 001 of In Full Light with Rachel Connor and Carolina Wilke!
