So, What Do You Do?

It's the simplest question I've struggled to answer ever since becoming self-employed.

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

A little over two years ago, I left my full-time job at Kaufman Children’s Center. I loved working there and was blessed to work alongside incredibly kind and brilliant people. I learned so much during those years, and when the intuitive nudges started coming in, telling me it was time to grow something else, I was sad to leave.

Once I stepped into entrepreneurship, what I didn’t foresee was how challenging it would be to answer the simplest question: What do you do? When we work in conventional roles, the answer is easy. In fact, if you’re anything like me, it’s easy to hide behind our degrees or titles.

If someone had asked me years ago what I did, I would have gladly said, “I’m a speech-language pathologist, and I work in pediatrics at an outpatient center.” When I was teaching, it was just as simple. “I’m a teacher.” “I’m a preschool director.”

Now when someone asks, I say I’m a parent coach and a life coach.

Blank stares.

“What does that mean?”

I usually explain that I help parents reframe everyday challenges so they can connect more deeply with their children and parent with greater confidence. Then I explain that I help people break free from patterns that keep them stuck so they can create lives that feel more aligned, peaceful, and meaningful.

Some people understand immediately.

Others don’t.

And I’ve realized that’s because there isn’t a neat title or degree that fully explains what I do anymore. My work doesn’t fit into a tidy box, and for a long time, I found myself searching for the right words to make it make sense. I would even catch myself wanting to lean harder on my degrees or my background because somehow they felt easier to explain.

The truth is, though, I wasn’t struggling to explain my work.

I was struggling to own it.

For a long time, I believed I helped parents become more confident. I believed I helped people transform old patterns. While both are true, I’ve realized they’re really just outcomes of something much deeper.

At the heart of every coaching session, every podcast conversation, every newsletter I write, and every stage I hope to stand on one day, I’m really teaching one thing.

How to pause.

It sounds almost too simple to matter, yet nearly every transformation I’ve witnessed begins there. Whether someone comes to me because they’re constantly arguing with their strong-willed child, replaying conversations in their head, struggling with anxiety, repeating familiar relationship patterns, or simply feeling disconnected from themselves, the work is remarkably similar. Before we can choose something different, we have to create space for something different.

That’s why the framework I teach is called PARR.

Pause. Acknowledge. Respond. Reflect.

Most people know PARR as a parenting framework, but I’ve come to realize it was never only about parenting.

We pause before reacting.

We acknowledge what’s happening within ourselves and around us.

We respond intentionally instead of automatically.

Then we reflect—not to criticize ourselves, but to integrate what we’ve learned so the next moment can look different from the last.

PARR works in parenting, but it also works in our marriages, our friendships, our careers, and in the quiet conversations we have with ourselves every single day. It’s less of a parenting strategy and more of a way of moving through life.

When we pause, we return to the present moment. We regulate before responding. We interrupt the patterns that have quietly been running our lives for years and remember that we have a choice.

Transformation doesn’t happen in the reaction. It happens in the pause.

I’ve also learned that before people can change, they need to feel seen. When we feel seen, we feel safe. When we feel safe, we soften. And when we soften, growth becomes possible.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been trying to say all along.

So now, when someone asks me what I do, I still tell them I’m a parent coach, a writer, a podcaster, and yes, sometimes a life coach.

But if they ask me what I really do, my answer has become much simpler.

I teach people how to pause.

It’s a surprisingly simple answer.

Ironically, it’s also the one that gets the strongest response.

Almost every time, someone smiles and says,

“Wow... I actually need that.”

Maybe that’s because the work we’re all here to learn isn’t becoming someone new, but becoming present enough to choose who we already are.

Love always,

Albiona