Life coach follows her own advice

“If an opportunity is presented to you,” Joanna Lindenbaum advises her clients, “it is important to follow it.”

When the opportunity arose for Lindenbaum, 37, to relocate from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Charlotte with her husband, Jonathan Polsky, 41, and their 4-year-old daughter, Penina, she had to follow her own advice.

“I was very reluctant to move,” Lindenbaum says. “I’d lived in the Brooklyn area my whole life. My daughter was thriving there.”

But, just as she helps her female clients do as part of her personal development consulting business, Soulful Coach, Lindenbaum “listened to my inner wisdom.”

It is fortunate, for both Lindenbaum and her 100 Soulful Coach clients, that her business was able to relocate with her.

“Much of what I do is via Skype and phone call,” Lindenbaum explains, “so I didn’t have to leave any clients behind when I moved.”

Among her clients are yoga instructors, real estate brokers, fitness trainers and therapists, authors and performers, all of whom Lindenbaum helps with launching their endeavors, building their businesses, and increasing their visibility.

“I work the inner and the outer,” explains Lindenbaum, who lives in Elizabeth. “What I see as the road to success.”

She encourages women to work on internal barriers to their success, such as inner fears and anxieties, time-management and self-care, because “marketing strategies will only get you so far if you have a fear of success or a fear of surpassing your spouse.”

She works with her clients in a variety of ways, including one-on-one consultations, group workshops, and public speaking engagements. She often shares her own story of personal development because she epitomizes what she is dedicated to helping other women do, to discover and pursue their own soul-centered projects.

“I never expected to be doing what I’m doing,” Lindenbaum, who is trained as an art historian, says. “It happened organically.” She was working as a curator at the Jewish Museum in New York, what should have been her dream job, but she sensed “something was missing.”

That something, it turns out, was helping other women find their own paths to success.

Lindenbaum began taking courses on women and ritual and, she says, “it struck a deep chord in me.” She began helping facilitate women’s workshops and knew she’d found her life’s calling.

“I left my museum job,” she says, “and I have never looked back.”

Lindenbaum became certified as a coach in 2007 and began “helping people create change and explore themselves and their options.”

As her business grew, women increasingly approached her to help them build their businesses or get visibility for their shows and books or assist them with getting an inspired idea off the ground.”

Lindenbaum’s own inspired idea was leaving her successful art historian career to pursue her Soulful Coach business.

She thinks we all benefit from women being true to themselves.

“When women are contributing to a community,” she says, “the world is a better place.”