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The Story of
Danielle
Hi there! I am Danielle Dittberner, founder of Reach 4 More. I view coaching as a co-created partnership where I support you in achieving your full potential in life. As with any new relationship, it’s important that you have a clear understanding of who I am before we dive in.
While I have not always been a professional coach, the qualities of a coach are woven throughout my story. My professional career started as a social worker. It appeared to be a good fit according to my interest in psychology and humanities. Being fresh out of college and in my early 20’s, I still had a lot to learn about the world. It was very challenging for me to leave serious, heart-breaking issues at work due to my empathetic and compassionate nature. I realized I either needed to adapt some thicker skin or change courses. I chose the later as changing who I was to fit the needs of a career path was inauthentic to me.
I traded in tending to individuals’ psychosocial well-being for improving peoples’ financial well-being by becoming a small business banker at a Fortune 500 Corporate bank. I loved making a positive impact by educating clients on how to manage and grow their wealth. I coached new business owners and entrepreneurs through the start-up process and provided personalized financial solutions to entrepreneurs to help scale their businesses.
When the company began restructuring its operational procedures, it limited my ability to maintain great working relationships with my clients. I no longer had the freedom to discover or provide custom solutions for local businesses. Just as this gap emerged between my values and the integrity of the company, I was sought out for my next career.
This time I was presented the opportunity to manage programs at Kelley Executive Partners (KEP); the Executive Education department at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. My ability to identify and proactively address problems anchored my position. I was a leader in creating customized solutions, outstanding client experiences, and nurturing great relationships. I earned the nickname “Tenacious D” from colleagues and had a reputation for creating ease and flow with resilience.
My extensive focus on my career left my personal life neglected and out of balance. I exhausted my time and energy on everyone around me, becoming the “yes-woman.” I was constantly traveling and worked an average of 60-70 hours a week. Physically, my nutrition was poor, my immune system declined, and I developed insomnia. Mentally and emotionally, I began experiencing internal self-doubt, limiting beliefs, fears, and discovered past emotional wounds that needed healing. Spiritually, I was attempting to navigate through a world that was filled with a lot of unknowns with a loss of connection to myself. I was overwhelmed, stressed to the max, and I felt miserable.
I knew something had to change, so I created personal space to reconnect and provide myself with self-care and love. I expanded my knowledge by reading. I tapped into my creativity through painting, drawing, and discovering new music. I nurtured peace and tranquility by spending more time in nature. I expressed love by spending more quality time with myself, dog, and loved ones.
Exercising self-care allowed me to begin feeling joy from within and realized I was on to something. What if there was a way I could help others experience this too, but before they reached the stage of burnout? Taking a 6 month sabbatical from life may have allowed me to get some clarity, but it wasn’t a sustainable solution. I needed to enrich my knowledge with more substance than what I had discovered and implemented on my own. Something that could teach me how to break through obstacles and cycles for good, and share my knowledge and internal gift with the world.
As I followed this intuition, I discovered coaching was exactly what I had been searching for. I finally found a profession that was in alignment with my values. I could ask powerful questions that ignited others to think deeply about themselves. I discovered tools and secrets for overcoming challenges- with results in 1/4 of the time of what I had personally experienced on my own. It sparked a fire inside me to be a catalyst to inner connection, growth, and transformation. I knew then that coaching was my calling, purpose in life, and immediately started on my new journey to become certified through the ICF and explore the path of Entrepreneurship.
To maintain my edge as a coach, I need to be a leader in my own transformation of mind, body, and soul. I model this by making self-care a priority and continue to have my own coaches. This is even more important to maintain now that I am an Lifepreneur doing what I love. I hold space for my inner work, use the tools I have learned and developed, as well as keep myself current with new techniques and current research. This allows me to maintain my integrity and live an authentic life. For this reason, I do not provide toolkits, exercises, or programs to clients that I have not done myself.
Being a certified coach does not mean I am free from challenges. We are all faced with hard and great times in our lives; how we handle them is dependent on our choice to mindlessly react or consciously respond. I have the courage to lean in and face my fears instead of running or hiding from them. I have the tools to overcome struggles with less resistance now. I know how to restore my own balance, remain positive, and embrace my authenticity when I am faced with hardships. I would love to support you in discovering how you can too.
