From Living a Role to Living Your Soul’s Desire: “Role to Soul”

Introduction

In a society where meeting expectations, performing roles perfectly, and accumulating achievements feel like success, striving through endless competition was my default.
On paper, I had achievements, and financially and socially, I looked successful.

Yet, did you ever feel a lingering fatigue deep in your chest, or a sense of unfulfillment?

What is true success, abundance, and happiness for you?
What kind of state, what kind of life is it?

When you set aside the outer “Roles” you have managed so far and awaken to the “Soul” of your true presence, you can reclaim genuine freedom and passion.

I myself have travelled such a journey in the first half of my life.

My Origin: The “Inquiry” Awakened at Age 17

The beginning of my inquiry dates back to my high school years, in the middle of my youth at age 17.

In my high school Brassband club, a dear friend developed an adjustment disorder and depression due to family circumstances and pressure, giving up the club he loved and leaving school.

Furthermore, our club advisor subsequently took leave due to burnout. Taking on the role of connecting the team as club president, I received a deep shock while holding a single question:

“How can people live a life where they can enjoy what they love in their own way, without overexerting and breaking themselves?”

Looking back later, this question became my life mission.

Regrets Witnessed in Clinical Settings

Holding this thought and deliberating on my career path, I began my journey as a registered nurse and public health nurse. During my student days, I engaged in mental health and lifestyle disease prevention in corporate occupational health, experiencing the importance and power of preventive care.

After graduating from university, wanting to experience nursing at least once before entering occupational health (since I knew I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t start then), I took a job at a university hospital.

In the wards, I interacted with many patients diagnosed with and treated for cancer or autoimmune diseases, as well as those facing terminal care at the end of life. Among them, I witnessed patients saying “someday” while postponing what they truly wanted to do and what was important, ultimately expressing regrets.

Moreover, I myself reached a state just one step away from an autoimmune condition. Facing a world where there was no cure but only symptomatic treatment, I felt my life turning dark.

Fortunately, through integrative medicine and bioresonance medicine introduced by a friend, I experienced a complete recovery of my symptoms. The doctor I met taught me that unless I changed my lifestyle and thought patterns, I would repeat similar symptoms and illnesses.

From this experience, identifying the root cause and addressing it, along with recognising the importance of preventive involvement and the connection between mind/spirituality and disease, became a major turning point in my life.

“First of all, I must live a life without regrets.”

It was the moment I realised that I had to practice the question I had held since age 17 within myself first.

What I Truly Wanted to Try

What I truly wanted to try was “living abroad.”

Reaching my late 20s while people around me were getting married, I decided to go to Australia on a Working Holiday visa.
Life in Australia became a time of living with a blank canvas, constantly shattering the fixed ideas and “shoulds” I had held, expanding my freedom.

For example, back then I thought a wife couldn’t go on a working holiday alone after getting married, so I had to do it now before getting married. But when I actually arrived abroad, I noticed that couples on working holidays or wives on working holidays alone were completely normal, vividly remembering thinking how small a world I used to live in.

After the working holiday, one of my way to make a choice: Which choice would make life more interesting?

When deciding whether to return to Japan or stay with my partner, I asked myself which path would be more interesting, choosing to live with my current partner.

Thanks to the working holiday, I was able to think that if it didn’t work out, I could just return to Japan.

Moving forward by making choices without regret for each thing in front of me, simply repeating that.

Since there are many things you won’t know until you try, I came to live by trying things out and making the next choice based on the outcome.

The Heroine’s Journey and Coaching

Since moving to Australia in 2014, I have worked as a therapist, learning remedial massage and aromatherapy. From there, I encountered coaching, learned coaching in Japanese, and started a business.

After that, I encountered a new mission, what could be called my life’s calling: “The Heroine’s Journey.” The Heroine’s Journey outlines the process for women to understand their innate femininity and masculinity and creatively live life as their <Wholeness>.

Not limited to Japanese people, in a world where innate femininity is suppressed across various cultural, social, and religious backgrounds, and both masculinity and femininity are distorted and wounded, I feel it is my mission to walk this process of healing and integration together.

Because writing about this here would make it too long, I share it through columns and Substack. If you are interested, please deepen your understanding there.

The Pandemic and Postpartum Depression

At the time when the world faced COVID-19, I experienced pregnancy and childbirth.

Giving birth overseas, without my Japanese family, my partner’s parents getting older, and direct connections being difficult due to COVID, there was no one close by to rely on.

Even with knowledge from my nursing experience, everything I experienced firsthand was new. With the postpartum hormonal roller coaster and a son who only slept when held, before I knew it, I was in a state of postpartum depression.

To be honest, I was desperately trying to survive each day, but while maintaining an online coaching business that barely kept my connection to society, two years passed without a place to speak my true feelings.

Here, I finally felt I couldn’t go on like this, incorporating homeopathy and natural therapies, focusing on recovering my physical and mental state, and connecting with people I wanted to connect with, rising from what felt like the bottom of my life.

Looking back, this period felt like a time of cultivating true confidence and self-trust to raise a child in an English-speaking country.

Cultivating Self-Trust: As a Professional Coach

Taking pregnancy as an opportunity, I earned my ICF (International Coaching Federation) coaching qualification in English. The reason I insisted on the ICF qualification is that I value having a clear standard for being a coach and ethical guidelines.

In coaching, we touch upon deep, delicate, and core parts of each individual. For that, a safe and secure space and relationship are prerequisites. Having firm ethical guidelines means promising to build a coaching relationship in an environment free of judgment or evaluation, accepting human beings as they are, starting with confidentiality obligations.

I truly feel that precisely because it is a safe and secure space and relationship, clients can begin the process of uncovering possibilities they themselves do not yet know and demonstrating their innate power.

The ICF defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential”

In coaching, the coach does not give advice to the client. Through dialogue, we support you in finding the answers and important things inside you, making choices, and taking action.

What Coaching Can Do

What I feel through coaching is that many Good Girl people, or those who have walked through perfectly fit and meet outer expectations, are looking for correct answers in the external world.

• The correct answer among the options in front of them
• The correct content they should speak
• The correct answer for the other person

Is it the correct choice? Opinion? Action?
Many people feel anxious and hesitant to express themselves out of fear.

However, a truly free, deeply fulfilling, and abundant life is gained by “finding your own answer, taking action, and making it the right answer.”

Imagine: If you could express your choices and opinions and take action with peace of mind, rather than acting out of anxiety or worry, how would your life change?

Through coaching, I support finding “your own correct answer” and expressing and acting on it with confidence.

Also, for entrepreneurs and leaders in organisations who feel an “indescribable sense of discomfort,” “incongruity,” or a “feeling of being on a plateau,” coaching serves as a safe space and process.

Due to social roles, many people do not have a place to talk about their struggles or discomfort.

That is why, through coaching, by delving into topics that are hard to put into words or things you haven’t discussed with those close to you, you can discover possibilities you have not yet realised.

Coaching will play a crucial role as a safe base so that you can fully fulfil your role and mission on the front stage in everyday life.

Lastly

Because I value safety, security, and relationships of trust, I start by offering a free trial session.
First, please experience Coach Yuki’s coaching and see what possibilities we can explore together.

Profile & Qualifications

• ICF Level 2 Certified Coach (Diploma of Coaching, over 200 hours of practice toward PCC)
• Public Health Nurse
• Registered Nurse
• Certified Aroma Swedish Massage Specialist (Watec Australia)