Forging a new path for yourself
This week, another chapter from my upcoming book. This time it’s the story of my longtime friend Darcy Luoma, who upended her expected life path by becoming a student again. I hope you enjoy it.
Darcy Luoma didn’t like politics.
“I was never passionate about politics. It was the only class in college I hated,” she said. “The only class I got a B in was Political Science.”
Despite that lack of passion, Darcy found herself in a series of political jobs after graduating from college with a degree in education, culminating in more than a decade running the office of Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl.
Working at the state teachers’ union, Darcy met Kohl by chance at a fundraiser a week into her new job. When he asked for her card, she didn’t have one, being a new employee – so she wrote her contact info on a napkin and gave it to him.
That napkin started a new chapter in her life.
Two years into her job with the senator, Darcy knew she wanted to go back to grad school. So she told her boss that she was going to resign and change course.
“He said, ‘Go back to grad school, but you can’t resign,’” she remembered. “‘Figure it out.’”
She found a program at Pepperdine University, a Masters of Science in Organization Development, where students work full time, but go to class for two weeks every quarter for two years. Kohl approved the plan, even though it would take her out of his office for significant chunks of time.
Since Darcy had taken a leave of absence to work on the transition team of Democratic Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle, at first she thought her master’s thesis would be on “ethical considerations of a gubernatorial transition team.”
Remember how she felt about about politics? Yeah.
“My thesis advisor said, ‘Darcy, how passionate are you about this?’ And I said, ‘What does passion have to do with my thesis?’”
That was a major turning point. Unlike with politics, Darcy had a fascination with life coaching, quite a new field in the early 2000s.
“I love helping people,” she said. “And I’m really super curious by nature.”
So she designed a new sociological experiment for her master’s thesis. She took 100 former U.S. Senate interns, and randomly selected 10. She gave all of them pretests to set a baseline of their experience, then coached the 10 experimental subjects weekly for three months.
After the three month experiment, she gave the whole group post tests, and hired a professor at UW-Madison to do the stats and analysis on how her coaching affected the experimental group compared to the control group.
The results showed that those who received coaching increased their life satisfaction and improved their personal growth.
During her thesis research, she was just “about a half step ahead” of the people she was coaching.
“I’m looking at every book I can, every study. And I’m trying to figure out, how do you coach somebody?” she said.
In those initial coaching sessions, Darcy would be glancing at her notes while asking questions like, “What would it look like in three months if you felt happier?”
“I had a natural knack for being curious and asking questions,” she said. “And that’s what is underneath coaching - helping someone create their own awareness, and then have some accountability in their actions.”
So Darcy started to do life coaching on the side, while still working for Senator Kohl. She accumulated accreditations and clients slowly over nearly a decade.
“I always thought it would be a hobby. It would be a side gig,” she said.
In 2013, Darcy was there to shut down Kohl’s office as he retired from the Senate. Her family and friends assumed she would stay in politics.
Unsurprisingly, she hired a coach to help her figure out her next move. Her coach said, if in 10 years you looked back at this time and had no regrets, what would you do?
“And I said, are you kidding? I would start my own business. I would be a speaker, and a coach, and a consultant,” she remembered. “And I just lit up.”
That was another turning point.
Darcy said she was “naive” about the obstacles that lay ahead. Perhaps that actually helped her move forward, instead of feeling stuck.
Today, Darcy is the CEO of her own coaching practice with a team of coaches working with her. In 2012, she designed the UW-Madison’s Certified Professional Coach program, and served variously as the program’s director, lead instructor, and director of training and quality assurance.
There was a long road between that initial spark of inspiration and where she is today. It was a lot of small moves building on each other.
Darcy said one of the biggest lessons of her story is the willingness to take a leap, and not just follow the easy path or the one that’s expected of you.
“Figure out what’s in your heart. Your passion. Not what you think you should do, or what other people think you should do,” she said. “Give yourself permission to dream.”
“If you have the passion and the why, the what and how will come.”
Another lesson of Darcy’s story is don’t be afraid to be just a half step ahead. That’s what “becoming a student again” is all about. Education isn’t something that you do and then you’re done. Every bit of expertise gets you one step closer to your goal.
Darcy taught herself to follow her passion, and it paid off handsomely.
Kind of makes that B in Political Science worth it.
See you next week.
What a great story! Thanks for sharing.