Today we’d like to introduce you to Melanie Paez.
Hi Melanie, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
Laying in a hammock in Nicaragua in 2015, living the life that I thought everyone wanted, I felt like there was still so much missing. I had no income. I’d left social work behind for a teaching job in China which concluded after the year I planned to stay. I had no intimacy. I was bopping around the planet, meeting all kinds of people but not knowing them for more than a few weeks. And I had no impact. I wasn’t making much of a difference in the world. There were many days when no one even knew where I was.
I’m passionate about people’s passions. It’s all I could ever really get myself to care about all my life. I’d get caught passing notes in class talking to people about the things that mattered to them. No subject, even my favorites, would outweigh hearing about the things that were in people’s hearts.
As I got old enough to consider a career, I tried to fit into many places that seemed almost right- social work, teaching, daycare, nanny, and personal assistant work. I flirted with the idea of going into the military as an officer or back to school to become a therapist, but none of that seemed quite like me. In my time as a social worker for child abuse and neglect cases, someone mentioned that they could see me as a life coach. “What’s that?”
The more I looked into the world of coaching, the more it felt like I had finally found something that would allow me to be who I really am in my work. I had almost settled into “good enough” with other jobs, and when I learned of it, I raced toward it with everything I had. I was teaching in China and then traveling nomadically at the time that I decided to return to the US and move across the country to San Diego to be trained as a life coach with Accomplishment Coaching.
Over the last 6 years, I have learned from the most amazing mentors in the industry, really focusing on redesigning my whole life with my own coaches and propelling me forward from a broke backpacker with little direction to a business owner. Full circle, I am nomadic again- sitting in Kauai as I type this, but now with an income that allows me to work only two days a week with clients and sustain my travel lifestyle, much intimacy in my relationships- most importantly my relationship with myself, and an impact that supports people in designing a life of their fullest expression.
For some of my clients, that’s travel life, like me, but for most of them, it looks very different from my life. For me, success looks like being mentioned in acknowledgements in a few books that were a big dream for them before writing and publishing, seeing the smile of a baby who wouldn’t have existed without the work we did, watching videos of entrepreneurial value for clients from someone who was previously tucked in a corporate cubicle, having deep life-giving conversations with someone who chose herself over traditional success that was draining her. I help people who have killed a part of themselves speak to the dead. They work with me to bring dulled or forgotten dreams back to life and then start creating them in their realities. It’s intimate work that leaves me feeling so fulfilled.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
Has anyone’s been smooth? I had no interest in being a businesswoman. I just wanted to coach. To be a coach, I had to learn to be my own bookkeeper, PR agent, marketer, salesperson, and personal assistant. Beyond the incredible skills needed for those roles, I also had to peel off layers and years of beliefs that I couldn’t be those things. I had to look my limitations in the eye and tell them to leave. It was spiritual warfare (still is sometimes).
There was little in my history that told me that I’d ever relate to myself as capable and strong. I built it. There was little in my relationship with myself that told me I’d respect myself as my own boss or like myself as my own co-worker. I had to develop that. And with everything I built, the hardest thing was the deconstruction. To unlearn all the ways that I wasn’t good enough in order to let who I’ve always been really shine was, and is, the most painful, most confronting, and most worthy process I can imagine is possible in this life.
I watched other coaches excel in ways I thought I’d never be able to excel. I watched other coaches quit when I really wanted to give up. I forged my own path through it all, and there was no blueprint. All of the experts who have the magic formula for success in this industry have different things to say about how to make it. None fit me just right. I learned and took pieces from all the people who came before me, but none of it replaced my need to get raw with myself and find my own genius. I finally feel in more of a flow with it, but as long as I’m standing with my clients in breaking through their own comfort zones, I will always be on the edge of my own.
We’ve been impressed with Chief Executive Angel, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Chief Executive Angel is my executive and leadership coaching business. Professionally speaking, besides my own practice, I work in tandem with a few different prestigious coaching companies who work inside organizations and corporations to support leaders in their next levels of growth and success, one of the most notable being Los Angeles based, The C-Suite Collective, where I serve as the Director of Coaching. I love going into rooms of suits and pleasantries to shake it up and have people leaving the space as more integrated and more expressed versions of the people they once were at work.
My heart is in my one on one work with my clients who come to me for a variety of reasons from wanting to start their own business to wanting to get a promotion, and what they often end up getting is a greater sense of their purpose on the planet and what an expression of that would look like in, not only their careers, but in their relationships, their leisure activities, their service, and their relationships with themselves.
My style can be structured enough to run a corporate retreat and flexible enough to bring in spiritual channeling for an intimate one on one. It all starts with a conversation with a potential client- a series of questions that has me get to the root of why they are hiring a coach, what really matters to them, what their learning style is, what creates an ideal coaching partnership for them, and what they want to see in their life in the duration that we work together. My work is never cookie-cutter, always fully tailored by a co-creation between my client and me.
Those things set me apart, but I’ll go further to say that I bring an integrated approach to my coaching and believe that how we do one thing is how we do everything. I challenge my clients to look at how their beliefs, choices, and thought processes impact everything from company team dynamics to their sex lives. I also am always taking on this level of work for myself and share it openly with the people in my life. I celebrate my growth and don’t shy away from my struggles.
In that, I’m proud that my “brand” could hardly be called a brand. Chief Executive Angel is just who I am, a person who helps people who have killed a part of themselves speak to the dead, constantly bringing all of my lost light back to life for myself as well. I chose that name, because a team of leaders and coaches were reflecting my impact on the group in a meeting years ago, and someone I admire dearly said that’s who I was for the team. I bring the connecting, spiritual, potent additions to the visions of people who focus on leading or executing on operations. My role is to bolster those things with embodied challenges and support.
I want you all to know that my offerings require an initial complimentary conversation where we see if what you’re looking for is actually a fit for what I bring. I make sure that I walk away from the conversation clear on what is important to you and ensure that you walk away clear on what a coaching relationship with me would look like in your actual life. I do not dole out pre-processed programs that I want you to fit into; rather I create a relationship with you from the start.
My practice is currently full at the moment, but I do encourage people to reach out for that initial conversation. If we are a great fit, I create an agreement for a start date in the future when room opens up, and I also have a huge network of other coaches who I refer out too often. I am great with matching people with the perfect coach for them in the event that it’s not me. I also have a community full of other relevant practitioners from bodywork to psychics to herbalism. I love connecting people with their own curated support system.
Come to me for intimate one on one coaching about your whole life with initial focus on career success, for team coaching on organizational dynamics including transitions, DEIB work, and the impact of current events on your position, plant medicine and spiritual integration work for the courageous journey within, and to be paired with other practitioners who optimize and support a life worth living.
What does success mean to you?
I would only dare to define it for myself. Otherwise, I simply ask questions to get a full picture of success for someone else. I appreciate that we all have different experiences of true success, and I find it essential for each of us to spend the time unlearning what we’re taught success has to be in order to reach the end of our lives having truly found it.
I spent a week with a group of people who were nearing the end of their lives, all with prestige and traditional American success behind them. Listening and learning from them, I realized that many of them still felt unfulfilled after a lifetime of accolades, awards, positions of power, endless financial goals achieved, and even social and family success as told by the American Dream. From there, I sought out to learn what success really meant to each person, and that’s why I tailor my offerings in the way that I do.
For me, success looks like deeply knowing how much I matter, healing all of the spaces where I forget. It looks like spending my time and resources reminding other people that they matter. Alongside them, I practice, challenge myself, and play around with what full expression looks like for me. I make sure that I start with my inner experience of myself before I make any goals about the external world and continuously guide myself and clients back to that when the temptation of external validation and comparison threaten to steal our personal joy.
That has brought me to living nomadically with friends around the world who know my spirit and love me deeply, making more money than I ever thought I could, having deep and intentional conversations about aliveness with people in so many different fields of work, arranging my schedule so that every day feels like a Friday, Saturday or Sunday always, and cultivating a rich and unique spiritual experience within myself.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.chiefexecutiveangel.com
- Instagram: @chiefexecutiveangel
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/chiefexecutiveangel
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/melpaez/
Image Credits
Erica Robinson
