I’m Ixchel, but you can call me EESH!

I was born in Texas about two months premature after a complicated pregnancy and spent my first month in the hospital. Not long afterward, my family returned to California, where most of both sides of my family lived, and I grew up in the San Fernando Valley surrounded by a large Filipino and Mexican family.

My mom immigrated from the Philippines. My dad is Mexican American and was born in Los Angeles. They met in college, built careers, and raised my older brother and me around education, responsibility, organization, respect, hard work, and the belief that stability would create a good life.

Cousins were more like siblings. We slept at each other’s houses, shared meals, celebrated everything, went to many of the same schools, and were constantly moving between grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and family gatherings. On my mom’s side, I was the youngest cousin. On my dad’s side, I was one of the older ones. I grew up being both the one who watched and the one being watched.

Food, faith, language, celebration, respect for elders, family obligation, humor, work ethic, and showing up for people were woven into everyday life. Connection was not something I later learned to value. It was one of the environments that formed me.

I have always been someone who wants to move, touch, try, explore, taste, build, question, and experience things for myself. Growing up, that looked like years of soccer, basketball and volleyball. Today it can look like hiking somewhere new, traveling to a place I have never seen, trying an activity that scares me a little, dancing freely to music, wandering through a market, or saying yes to an adventure simply because I want to know what it feels like.

I love amusement parks, thrill rides, music festivals, animated worlds, Disney, cartoons, Mickey and friends, bright colors, glow-in-the-dark anything, and places that make the world feel a little more imaginative. I am a dreamer and a vision holder. I like experiences that remind me life can still feel playful.

I am also a huge foodie. Cooking became one of the skills I taught myself over time, and I love using my hands to create. Food, art, problem-solving, movement, arranging things, building something, figuring out how something works: I feel most engaged when I can participate rather than only observe.

Nature does that for me too. The ocean. The desert. Mountains. Camping. Sunshine. Rain. Thunder and lightning. Looking up at the night sky and remembering how small we are underneath the stars. Animals. Plants. The earth itself.

I have a deep respect for the natural world and the fact that so much of what sustains us comes from it. I can love being surrounded by people and still need time alone outside to hear myself again.

Even growing up inside a fairly strict household, that exploratory part of me kept finding ways to come through. I learned how to be responsible, organized and respectful. I also learned that freedom matters deeply to me.

Relationships became part of my identity very young. I entered serious relationships during some of the years when I was still learning who I was. One long-term relationship became a future I had already imagined: growing together, living together, building a family, and continuing adulthood beside someone I loved.

When that relationship ended, I did not only lose the person. I lost the future I had attached myself to. For the first time since I was a teenager, I had to figure out who I was when there was no “us” defining part of the answer.

I went through a season of trying things I felt I had missed. I wanted freedom, experiences, independence, dating, fun, nights out, and a life without wondering whether I had been too careful. Some of it helped me discover myself. Some of it also showed me how much hurt I still carried.

Fear and insecurity eventually showed up as defensiveness, anger, reactivity and attempts to control what I was afraid of losing. My current relationship challenged me to look at those patterns instead of pretending they belonged entirely to someone else.

I had to learn that understanding why something hurts does not remove responsibility for what I choose to do with that hurt. I learned to communicate more honestly, regulate myself more intentionally, become more vulnerable, and trust that another person could matter deeply to me without becoming responsible for holding my entire identity together.

That changed the way I understand growth. Compassion and accountability can exist in the same conversation.

For a long time, healthcare seemed like the obvious future for me. Science interested me. People interested me. Children especially interested me. At different points I imagined becoming a pediatrician, working in physical therapy, and eventually practicing orthotics and prosthetics.

I studied biology and pre-medical sciences before completing my B.S. in Kinesiology, Exercise Science. Later I earned my master’s education in Orthotics and Prosthetics and moved through hands-on clinical training and residency.

But my professional foundation became much larger than one clinical specialty.

I spent years tutoring children from preschool through high school. I worked in physical therapy and rehabilitative settings. I supported people navigating neurological injuries and major changes to their lives. I worked in childcare, caregiving, pediatric environments, mobility care and orthotics and prosthetics.

I learned that children, adults and families rarely need exactly the same thing. One child may need a different explanation. Another may need movement. Another may need humor. Another may need you to stop talking and give them time. Sometimes a person needs confidence before they need another instruction.

I love being around children because they are still so close to curiosity. They ask why. They experiment. They play. They learn with their whole bodies. They can remind adults that development is not supposed to look exactly the same from person to person.

I also believe young people deserve practical life and world skills, not only academic information: communication, emotional awareness, problem-solving, decision-making, self-trust, responsibility, creativity, independence and understanding how the world around them works.

Over time, I realized many of the skills I now use in coaching had already been developing for years: listening, teaching, observing, encouraging, problem-solving, adapting, asking questions, and helping another person see what they may not yet see in themselves.

By the time I completed my orthotics and prosthetics residency, I had invested years in becoming the professional I thought I was supposed to be. I had the degrees, the clinical training, the patient experience and a clear path toward certification.

From the outside, continuing made sense. Internally, I was becoming less and less connected to the life that came with it.

I was arriving early, working through lunch, staying late, taking work home and using weekends to catch up. My boundaries became blurry. I was becoming a yes-person while slowly losing the energy that had made me care so much in the first place.

I also struggled with parts of the healthcare system. I wanted more freedom to look at a real person and ask, “What does this person actually need?” rather than only navigating what systems, insurance, workplaces and outside decision-makers allowed.

Eventually the title stopped motivating me. The certification exams did not excite me. Even the patients I once imagined wanting most could no longer override the feeling that I was finished.

I left.

I do not believe those years were wasted. They taught me about people, bodies, systems, limits, adaptation, patience, responsibility and myself. Completing a path does not mean you owe it the rest of your life.

One of the values that became impossible for me to ignore was freedom. Not freedom from responsibility. Freedom to be responsible for a life I actually wanted.

I am an explorer and a wanderer by nature. I love arriving somewhere unfamiliar, walking streets I have never walked, eating something I cannot get at home, meeting people with completely different stories, and learning how another community experiences everyday life.

Travel reminds me how many ways there are to live. It interrupts the idea that the version of life we grew up around is the only normal one.

Juan and I had talked for years about creating something of our own. We created The Desert Consulting before we fully knew what the business would become. Then, on the last day of my O&P job, coaching came into my awareness. I followed the curiosity.

Eventually we left California and later the United States because we wanted more space to build, experiment, travel, connect, network and find people who understood the kind of life we were trying to create.

Living somewhere new has made me even more adaptable. New foods. New languages. New customs. New systems. New people. New problems to solve. New reasons to laugh at ourselves.

I like life that asks me to participate. I like trying something before I know whether I will be good at it. I like learning by doing. I believe in failing forward.

Starting over has taught me that sometimes we do not need a perfect map. We need enough self-trust to take the next step and enough adaptability to respond to what we find there.

I do not think my biggest transformation has been becoming a completely different person. I think I have been returning to the person who was there before fear, heartbreak, achievement, pressure and adulthood made some parts of me quieter.

Little Ixchel was bubbly, energetic, silly, imaginative, expressive, colorful, friendly, curious, playful and constantly asking questions. She loved movement. She loved animals. She loved figuring things out. She wanted to laugh and play.

I still do.

Music matters to me because I love when it carries meaning, emotion and movement at the same time. I love when a song speaks to my body before my mind has even decided what it thinks. I love dancing in a way that feels free rather than performed. I love festivals, concerts and the energy of people experiencing something together.

I love cooking. Creating. Using my hands. Bright colors. Night skies. Storms. Sunshine. Animals. Nature. Long conversations. Children. Family. Community. New friendships. Networking. Solitude. Adventure. Learning. Dreaming.

I can be organized and spontaneous. Straightforward and compassionate. Social and deeply protective of my alone time. Practical and imaginative. A planner and someone willing to throw out the plan when life shows me something better.

Faith became part of that return too. I grew up Catholic, questioned religion, spent seasons atheist and agnostic, and eventually developed a personal relationship with God and Jesus that feels chosen rather than inherited.

Faith does not mean I think difficult things will stop happening. It means I have learned that challenge does not automatically mean something has gone wrong. Sometimes a season stretches me. Redirects me. Deepens me. Introduces me to someone. Shows me something I could not see before.

The more I develop, the more I find myself returning to joy, curiosity, play and the things that make me feel light. Tuning into my inner child is not about pretending adulthood is easy. It is about remembering that being alive is allowed to feel good too.

I do not believe age, stage, degree, profession, income or status makes one person more worthy of being heard than another. A child deserves respect. A parent deserves compassion. A young adult deserves room to figure things out. An adult changing direction deserves more than being told they should have known better.

I tend to see potential in people. Sometimes before they can see it themselves. I am naturally drawn to possibilities: what could change, what could be tried, what someone may be capable of, what another perspective might reveal.

That does not mean pretending everything is positive. I value honesty. I am straightforward. I believe we can name what is difficult while still believing something different is possible.

I also believe growth should be useful in real life. What good is an insight if we cannot translate it into the way we communicate, choose, repair, care for ourselves, raise children, set boundaries, solve a problem, build a relationship or move through the world?

With children and youth, I want them to understand more than how to follow instructions. I want them to build life skills, world skills, emotional awareness, self-trust, communication, curiosity, independence, responsibility and the confidence to keep learning.

With adults, I want there to be enough space to understand what shaped you without making your past the permanent explanation for your future.

I am dependable, adaptable, patient, organized, empathetic and caring. I am also silly, energetic, expressive, curious and human. I make mistakes. I adjust. I learn. I fail forward too.

I am not interested in standing above someone and telling them how to live. I am interested in walking beside people while they understand themselves well enough to participate more intentionally in their own lives.