Before becoming a coach, I spent nearly a decade as a programme manager at Google DeepMind, working with people trying to solve extraordinarily difficult problems in a field changing faster than most of us can absorb.

I led programmes across AI research, product, publications, partnerships and operations. The work was often complex, high pressure and without an obvious map. My role was to hold a great deal of detail, bring together people with different priorities, and help teams find a way forward.

Some of that work was operational. A great deal of it was human.

I mentored new programme managers, coached project leads and worked to create kind, inclusive team cultures. I became increasingly interested in what happens to people inside high-performance environments: how identity becomes bound up with work, how people respond to uncertainty, and what allows ambition to remain energising rather than consuming.

Eventually, those questions became personal.

Motherhood, bereavement and burnout changed my relationship with work and with the version of success I had spent years building. It was not a clean turning point. For a while, it felt more like losing my bearings. But it made some questions difficult to ignore.

What is success for? What happens when an identity stops fitting? How can ambition remain alive without taking over the rest of life? How do we make choices that genuinely belong to us?

My interest in coaching grew from those questions, although the work itself was not entirely new to me. I first trained in workplace coaching in 2017 and am now completing the Diploma in Transformative Coaching with Animas.

I am also a qualified yoga teacher, having completed a 200-hour Vinyasa Flow teacher training, and have a longstanding meditation and mindfulness practice. My first academic love was literature, and I hold an MA in English from Durham University. That background continues to shape my interest in story, identity and the ways we make meaning from change.

I now work with people who find themselves between one version of life and the next. They may be navigating burnout, parenthood, bereavement, redundancy or leadership pressure. Sometimes nothing dramatic has happened. There is simply a growing sense that a career or identity that once fitted no longer does.

I do not coach by handing out neat advice or imposing tidy goals on a complicated life. I listen closely. I ask questions that can be difficult to ask alone. I bring structure when it is helpful, but I am also willing to stay with uncertainty rather than rushing to resolve it.

My role is to help clients hear themselves more clearly, examine the assumptions they have been living by, and find a way forward that feels genuinely their own.

I do not pretend to have resolved every tension between achievement and a well-lived life. I do know the value of giving difficult questions sustained attention, without making them smaller or more manageable than they are.

Julia Pawar Coaching is rooted in three words: transition, transformation and emergence. I chose them because change rarely arrives as a clear decision. More often, something old is loosening before the new thing has taken shape. Coaching can give that in-between period the attention it deserves.