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Rachel Goodwin is the kind of client coaches dream about.

Intelligent. Polished. Clearly rich, but not in the annoying way — in the “my Chanel shoes are silent when I walk” way.

She sits across from me in my home office, which is technically just the second bedroom of my apartment—but I’ve feng shui’d the hell out of it to make it feel less like a guest room and more like a launchpad for self-actualization.

She found me through my podcast a few weeks ago, which still blows my mind. Back when I was recording episodes in my closet and praying my neighbor wouldn’t flush during a take, I never imagined someone like her would be listening.

Her notebook is open, her pen is already uncapped, and she makes direct eye contact when she says:

“I’m not afraid of being alone. I’m just tired of building empires and coming home to silence.”

God, I love her already.

“That's a good place to start,” I say, and I mean it.

She’s coachable. Thoughtful. Smart enough to challenge me when it makes sense, but respectful enough not to treat this like some TED Talk sparring match. She does her homework, highlights her takeaways, and once — I swear to God — she color-coded her attachment patterns.

By week three, I’m ready to nominate her as my personal case study in How To Actually Do The Work.

Which is why, when she starts telling me about a guy she met at a coffee shop, I let my guard down. Just a little .

“It wasn’t even a date,” she says, stirring tea like this is some Jane Austen side plot. “He just made a joke about the line being longer than a TSA checkpoint and somehow... I don’t know. It landed.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Did he ask for your number?”

“No,” she says. “But we talked for a few minutes. And then he left.”

I smile again and say, “Let’s talk about what made that moment land.”

Because if this is the start of something, I want her anchored before the tide rolls in.

He was... kind of intense,” Rachel says, like she’s still processing it. “But not in a serial killer way.”

I jot that down in the margin. Intense, not homicidal. Comforting.

“And it felt different,” she adds. “I don’t usually get that kind of attention. Like, not the curated, LinkedIn-adjacent kind. This was... shy? Earnest?” She pauses. “He didn’t give me a pitch. He gave me a pause.”

Okay. Now she’s romanticizing.

But I don’t stop her. I’ve seen too many women preempt disappointment by talking themselves out of possibility. Let her have the moment.

I ask the usual questions—what did he look like, what did he say, how did you feel—and she answers like she’s recounting a dream. The kind that lingers, even if the details blur.

Then she drops it :

“He never asked for my number. But he showed up at the same coffee shop this morning. Just sat two tables over. Didn’t say anything. Just... smiled.”

My coaching face stays on. Inside, my eyebrows lift.

That’s either a green flag in disguise or a beige one fraying at the edges.

“He said hi?” I ask.

“Just nodded. Then left after ten minutes.”

Alright. Not red flag territory. Yet.

No emotional negging. No backhanded vulnerability. No “I usually don’t do this but...”

Just a guy being... weirdly normal.

Either he’s winging it, or he’s the rarest type: a man who means what he says and says very little.

I make a mental note.

We’ll see where it goes.