Hi, I’m Christel 👋🏻
At 37, I hit the floor. Unable to help myself further except for a silent cry to the universe: What else is possible? That moment became the doorway to everything that followed. A decade of consciousness work. Thousands of clients. A $1.4M business I built from scratch and deliberately walked away from when I knew, energetically, it was complete.
What I do now is the distillation of all of it.
Executive coaching for founders who've stopped trusting themselves. Team coaching for leaders who know their people are capable of more. Somatic Bars work for anyone carrying weight that isn't moving. Three different doors. The same core truth underneath all of them: the answer is already in you. Let's unlock it.
One question changes everything.
Most people have been thinking about their problem for months before they sit down with me. They come in with the noise — the history, the justifications, the competing priorities, the story they've been telling themselves. Within minutes, I can see what's underneath it. Not because I'm following a framework. Because I've done thirty years of my own work, lived through more reinventions than most people have careers, and developed a pattern recognition that is genuinely uncommon.
I don't need your whole story to find the thing. I usually already see it. The question I ask is just the door.
Cut through fast.
I spot stuck places quickly — not to rush the process, but because time spent circling the wrong problem is time stolen from the real one. My clients consistently say the same thing: they didn't expect it to move that fast.
From the inside out
I don't hand you a framework and send you home. The work happens in the conversation — in real time, out loud, in the moment you hear yourself say the thing you didn't know you needed to say. That's where it shifts.
My story
I haven't had one life. I've had about sixteen.
No college degree. At 21, I saved up, bought a plane ticket, and flew to Hong Kong on a missions trip. I came back different. I didn't know then that "coming back different" would become the theme of my entire existence.
What followed was not a career path. It was a life that refused to stay in one lane.
Hospitality. An architect's office. Eight days in a jail cell. Foreign countries. Bible school. A theology and leadership degree. A first marriage. Moving countries. A pizzeria. A landscape design certification. Another company. Another country. Another marriage. Another reinvention.
By the time I was in my thirties, I had lived in multiple countries, married into multiple cultures, built and closed multiple businesses, and accumulated a kind of pattern recognition that you simply cannot get from a classroom or a corporate career.
And then, at 37, I hit the floor.
I was suicidal. And that moment — the darkest one — became the doorway to the decade that changed everything. I spent ten years doing deep consciousness work, changing people's lives, and in doing so, completely rebuilding my own. I built a facilitation business that reached $1.4M. And then, when every external signal said keep going, I shut it down.
Not because it failed. Because I knew — energetically, in my body, before I could articulate a single rational reason — that it was complete. It took me over a year of wrestling to trust that knowing enough to act on it. But I did.
That decision is where Freebuilt & this coaching practice was born.
What I bring to this work isn't a methodology I learned in a certification program.
It's three decades of living at full volume across industries, cultures, marriages, failures, reinventions, and one very dark night that turned into a new direction.
I am an INTJ. A systems thinker. I see patterns before most people know a pattern exists. I have been the founder who couldn't see the exit. The person who knew something had to change before they could name what. The one performing fine on the outside while privately navigating something no one around them fully saw.
I know what it costs to ignore that knowing. And I know what becomes possible when you finally stop.
Most coaches did one thing before they became a coach. I did everything. That's not a boast. It's the reason I can sit across from a founder navigating something genuinely complex — and actually understand what they're carrying.
If you're an established founder wrestling with a decision that won't resolve, a team leader who knows your team needs a coach, or a sales leader whose key players need support -
I've been there, done that.
And I am the right person to do it with you.