Episode Highlights:

• How a chemistry PhD led to an unexpected career in coaching.

• How she knew it was time to leave her traditional STEM path.

• The surprising connection between figure skating and her career today.

Timestamps:

1:01 - What is an Organizational Change Consultant & Somatic Empowerment Coach?

6:36 - What does a typical day look like?

7:47 - What do you enjoy?

10:08 - What do you dislike?

14:00 - How does your career compare to your initial aspirations?

25:19 - What were your career milestones?

28:00 - What advice would you give an aspiring professional?

About Our Guest:

Dr. Chrissy Stachl is a somatic empowerment coach, trauma-informed practitioner, and organizational change consultant based in Oakland, CA. She holds a PhD in Chemistry from UC Berkeley, a background in neuroscience and medicine, and 600+ hours of somatic coaching training—a combination that lets her bridge intellectual rigor with body-based, emotionally attuned support for her clients in a way that's genuinely rare.

Through her coaching practice, Chrissy works 1:1 with high-achieving adults who look successful on paper but feel quietly disconnected, overextended, or unfulfilled inside. Her work is not mindset coaching—it's embodied identity empowerment. Together with her clients, she unwinds patterns of over-functioning and self-abandonment, rebuilds the capacity to feel joy and desire, and supports a return to internal authority rather than external validation.

Through Reflecting Equity, her organizational consulting practice, Chrissy supports STEM organizations in creating cultures that can actually hold the discomfort that real culture change requires—integrating nervous system literacy and relational safety into equity and culture work.

Her career has never been linear, and she wouldn't want it to be. Every pivot—from pre-med to chemistry, from academia to consulting, from consulting to coaching—has been an integrity-driven recalibration toward work that honors both the body and the mind. She brings all of it into the room.

• Connect with Chrissy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrissystachl/

• Learn more about Chrissy’s Services:

• • https://www.reflectingequity.com/

  • https://chrissystachl.com/

  • https://elifesciences.org/articles/71583

  • https://www.reflectingequity.com/resources

  • https://chrissystachl.myflodesk.com/reic

• Extended Interview: ⁠patreon.com/diverseroutes

Looking for career support?

• Check out ⁠Success in Science Career Coaching⁠

• Follow us on Instagram @sciencecareercoach