Chad Herst, MS, LAc, CPCC
Your mind doesn't turn off. There’s a constant, low-grade churn around work and big decisions. From the outside, it looks like you have it all together. You’re the one everyone else leans on for decisions, reassurance, and calm. It's a job you can't quit. The pressure feels overwhelming more days than you'd like to admit. You replay the things you said, or didn't say. You put off the hard conversations, then disappear into work, Netflix, or your own head, and feel worse after. You snap at the people you love and hate yourself for it. And even when surrounded by friends and family, some part of you feels alone.
I recognize you because I was you. The polish was different. The trap was the same.
When I was seventeen, my brother took his life. I grew up in a house where performance mattered more than sensitivity, so I learned to keep going even when it was empty inside. I went looking for the fix in the usual impressive places: India, the Ivy League, acupuncture school. I treated other people's minds and bodies until mine gave out and the performance failed with it. What followed was a long unlearning, and it's the reason this work exists.
I've been in the healing professions since 1997. I’ve been a massage therapist, a yoga teacher, and for seventeen years, I practiced as an acupuncturist and herbalist, with my hands on people's actual bodies. I've been coaching founders, executives, and other driven people since 2008. People who are successful by most measures, but feel lonely, anxious, or stuck in patterns they can’t think or optimize their way out of.
The 120 five-star reviews are on Yelp. My book about all of this, The Performance Trap: The Ache No Success Will Ever Fix, comes out October 1.
The work we’d do together is simple but profound. You bring the real decision where you feel stuck—the job, the marriage, the move, the next chapter—and we get curious not just about the story, but what happens in your body as you tell it. Together we get to know the parts of you that are afraid, hopeful, defensive, or simply done. I help you put clear language to what you’ve been circling, and you practice staying with it a little longer than you usually do, long enough to see what it’s asking of you and what a truer next move might be.
Over time, this leads to something quieter than a breakthrough. The churn settles. Decisions stop taking weeks. You start trusting your own perception enough to act on it, even when nobody else is confirming it. The pressure doesn't vanish; it just stops driving.
Two ways in. If you want to feel what the work is like, book a 30-minute conversation. No pitch; for most of it, we'll just do the work.
If you're not ready to talk to anyone yet, start with the first chapter of the book, read in my voice. Twenty-eight minutes.
Melissa Herst, CPCC
I work with people who feel stuck but not in a dramatic way. More like a quiet, internal dissonance. They're capable, creative, and often deeply thoughtful. But something's not clicking. A project that won't move forward. A relationship that feels off. A next chapter they can't quite step into.
That's where I come in.
Since 2009, I've helped people reconnect with their bodies, clarify what matters, and move through the blocks that are harder to name: creative paralysis, burnout that hides behind competence, old emotional patterns that show up in new relationships.
I use a mix of coaching, movement, and deep listening. I'm trained in Open Floor Movement, which brings the body into the process, not as performance, but as presence. Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we move. Sometimes we sit in the in-between and wait for the next true thing to surface.
Clients often describe me as warm, grounded, and disarmingly honest. I don't rush to fix things. I don't need you to be more productive. What I offer is a space where you can slow down enough to hear what's actually going on, then start to move from a place that feels more like you.
My background includes work around creative process, purpose discovery, relational healing, and somatic integration. I draw from values-based inquiry, mindfulness, and the kind of conversations that don't stay on the surface for long.
I believe that movement is medicine, truth has a frequency, and showing up as your whole self is always worth it, even when it's messy.