Chad Herst
MS, LAc, CPCC
I’m Chad Herst, a coach in San Francisco and the author of The Performance Trap. I work with people who know something needs to change but keep finding themselves in the same pattern.
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Working together
I’ve worked in the healing professions since 1997 as a massage therapist, yoga teacher, and, for seventeen years, an acupuncturist and herbalist. I’ve been coaching since 2008. In treatment rooms, I learned to pay attention to what people noticed in their bodies as they spoke.
If you want to know what working together looks like, the coaching page describes it. The client stories show what it’s meant for other people.
My story
For the first thirteen years of my life, you might say my childhood was fairly idyllic.
Right after my bar mitzvah, when I was thirteen or fourteen, Scott landed in drug rehab. Slowly, his mental illness began to show. Grandpa was my best friend then, and he was sick with cancer. He was an incredible ally, but he had also taught me the family rule: don’t be someone with needs. In our family, you were either needy and weak or strong. So I became the opposite of my brother. I got good grades. I made people laugh. I performed, and I was an actor.
More childhood photographs and memories
My grandfather was always an entertainer. As a kid, he’d been an assistant to a well-known magician. He probably moved a few props for the guy, but he admired him so much that he picked up the way he spoke and held a room.
I deeply admired Grandpa too. His command, his charisma. Here we are at my bar mitzvah, and I want to be right next to him while he entertains the crowd. Maybe he’s giving a speech about me. I don’t remember exactly, but talking about it now makes me smile.
More family photographs and The Sweet Ache
I love my grandpa. He was sweet and deeply loving. Later, when I was struggling at fourteen, he was my one ally, even while he was sick with cancer.
Before everything changed
This was months before our family began to come apart. Scott’s mental illness wasn’t yet obvious. Grandpa hadn’t become sick with cancer. I was about to leave a class of thirty-two kids for a much bigger high school.
Read The Sweet Ache
The Sweet Ache
From my newsletter, written as I prepared to launch The Performance Trap.
Even as I write this, I can feel the gravity of what that boy was up against. The ache is right here in my chest, and I have so much tenderness for him, that fourteen-year-old boy who was carrying all of that.
I can feel how much it would have meant to have someone there who could have said, yeah, this is a lot, and I’ll feel this with you. We’ll hold it together.
Looking for a way through
Scott took his life in 1991. I was encouraged to go back to school before I was ready. People told me I would be fine. I wasn’t. I learned yoga in Hawaii.
Eventually, I went to India at twenty-one, hoping I could find a way out of the depression I was in. Yoga in India gave me a community.
A mindfulness retreat in Sri Lanka brought me face to face with my grief and with guilt about how I had been with my brother.
Back home, I thought I had figured things out, but my gut illness had become so severe that broccoli was the only food I could eat. I wasn’t going to let it stop me. I transferred to Columbia to study religion, then trained in traditional Chinese medicine, hoping I could heal myself.
More from India, Columbia, and the yoga years
The party that led me to meditation
At a yoga potluck in Mysore, I met Cole. Other students were talking about poses, but he was sitting quietly, looking at ease. I asked him what was different. He told me about Vipassana meditation and encouraged me to go to a retreat in Sri Lanka. I went, and that retreat brought me face to face with grief and guilt I had been carrying since Scott died. I’ve kept a mindfulness practice ever since.
Looking at that photograph now
I see how young I was, bright-eyed and a little tight-lipped. I was lonely and trying to find myself. The money pouch around my neck and the pants made by a tailor named Krishna still make me smile. I feel tenderness for that young man and for everything he was carrying.
Belonging and the cost of it
Ashtanga gave me a community. People from all over the world woke before dawn to practice, then ate together and shared stories. My old friends were heading in other directions. Here were people who understood the path I had taken.
My experience with Pattabhi Jois was painful too. His adjustments injured my knees, and I saw him grope women in class. I left Mysore, but returned in later years because I wanted his authorization to teach. I was not devoted to him; I was devoted to what his approval meant. If he gave it, I belonged.
At Columbia
I transferred primarily to be with Johanna, whom I had met in India. Columbia also gave me a way to look capable from the outside. Inside, I was still dealing with gut pain and afraid I didn’t belong.
Auroville and coming home
After acupuncture school, I moved to Auroville in South India to be with my girlfriend Monica and her boys, Sanjay and Satya. I worked at Quiet, a healing center, saw patients, and found a life that felt freer than anything I had experienced before.
Monica and I eventually split, and I returned to San Francisco. I helped create a dawn Ashtanga program, built an acupuncture practice, and found a community of friends, students, and clients.
Not long after, I met Melissa.
More about Auroville, returning home, and Yoga Journal
I went to Auroville for love rather than taking the expected next step of opening an acupuncture practice. I wanted to use what I had learned, and the exchange there felt simple and human: I could offer care in return for a place to stay and something to eat.
People had come to the town from many countries to try other ways of living and healing. It gave me room to begin, even as I struggled with doubt when I could not help someone. When I returned to San Francisco at thirty-three, many of my first acupuncture clients came through the dawn yoga community I helped build.
The Yoga Journal photo shoot
At the photo shoot, I was asked to make adjustments I had never learned in years of Ashtanga practice. The editor was kind, but I felt inadequate. I did what was asked because I thought getting into Yoga Journal might finally prove I belonged. When it came out, that feeling did not change. I had turned even this into another test of my worth.
And I still hate my hair in these photographs. I would never have chosen that orange shirt.
Finding my work
Before we married in 2008, Melissa talked me into a coaching workshop. Something in that work felt natural to me in a way teaching yoga and practicing acupuncture hadn’t. I could hear what someone was saying and what they weren’t yet saying. Eventually, patients began booking coaching conversations instead of acupuncture treatments, and coaching took center stage.
More about finding my way to coaching
Melissa was a hairstylist then, and listening was already a large part of her work. She asked me to join her at a coaching seminar. I was skeptical, having seen enough intense personal development workshops to distrust the language around them.
In one exercise, a woman mentioned someone at work, and I heard her voice catch. I asked about it and stayed with her as she found words for what hurt. I did not leave knowing I was a coach. I knew only that the conversation felt different from trying to get a treatment right.
At first, I folded coaching into my acupuncture practice. Over time, patients began asking for conversations instead of needles. The work drew together meditation, yoga, and years of listening to people. It finally felt like mine.
When work took over
For years, I thought I had figured it all out. Then COVID moved my work online. I feared my practice was a goner, but it grew quickly, and I began seeing clients around the world. I finally had the success I thought would make me happy. At the same time, my gut pain was worse than ever, and I wasn’t sleeping.
I tried the things that had worked before: more yoga, herbs, changes to my diet. Eventually, I had to ask for help. Through my work with my therapist, I began to understand the role I had lived in for so long. Because Scott had struggled, I had learned to be the good kid who needed nothing.
That insight mattered, but the way back was slow and uneven. I learned to rest, set limits, and let people see me even when I wasn’t doing well. I’m in a very different place these days, and I have my wife Melissa and our dog Disco to thank for it.
A moment with Disco and dancing
Read a moment with Disco
From a LinkedIn post.
Melissa is in the other room right now calling her. "Come and get me!"
Our dog. Disco. For her whole life, that was a guaranteed thing. Melissa says, "Come and get me," and Disco is up and around the corner before the sentence is finished.
But she's staying glued to the couch. Then, I watch her look toward the room where Melissa is calling, wanting to come, but she clearly just doesn't have it. She's tired. So she's staying put.
It feels like it was yesterday when she'd drag us down the streets of San Francisco on the leash. Now she trails behind, and we lure her along with treats every few steps.
Her joints ache, and she sleeps most of the day. When I watch her sleep so much, it breaks my heart. I sense that we don't have much time.
We didn't have kids, but we had Disco, instead. She is how Melissa and I learned to love something more than ourselves.
And she is so tender right now, so sweet in this stretch of her life, that I can barely stand how much I love her.
There is a part of me that wants to do something about all of this. Fix the joints. Give her herbs to help her bounce back. I can't. Nobody can. She's just getting old.
So today, I am not going to coax her up so she goes into the other room with Melissa. I am going to sit on the couch next to her. Meet her where she is.
Melissa, come and get us!
A different kind of practice
These days, I still show up to my mat, but I’ve also started dancing. Sometimes it’s on a Sunday morning in a big gymnasium with Melissa and a hundred or so friends. At first, my movements are contained. I’m self-conscious, afraid of looking stupid.
As I keep moving, I stop correcting myself so much. I let the beat start to lead. I twist. I sway. I reach. I doubt any of it looks graceful, but I don’t care how it looks anymore. I’m starting to trust how it feels.
How I work
For a long time, I thought I could work through my struggles once and for all. I still catch myself trying. What I’m learning is to welcome what’s here, including the part of me that wants to get everything right. I can step back, notice that drive, and sometimes have a little humor about it. I can let someone else see it, too.
That’s the spirit I bring to coaching. You don’t have to arrive calm or know exactly what you need. Even the frustration that an old pattern has returned has a place in our conversation.
We begin with what’s happening in your life. I listen for where the story catches: a shift in your voice, a feeling in your body, or a part of you pulling another way. We slow down and get curious together. I may offer what I notice, and you can tell me when I’ve got it wrong. I want you to have room to hear what matters to you before deciding what to do.
Melissa Herst
CPCC
If I were to say anybody is my coach, it’s Melissa. Everything I’ve done professionally as a coach has had her ears and her feedback in it. She’s funny and sassy, deeply sensitive, and willing to tell me when I’m getting caught. She knows how to reach me. Sometimes I’m laughing while realizing she’s right.
Early in our relationship, she asked me about my brother Scott. How he died. What it had been like for me. Almost nobody had asked those questions. Melissa stayed curious, and I felt the care in that. When someone shares something vulnerable, she doesn’t shy away. She steps toward them.
Melissa has been coaching since 2009. She works with people who feel stuck: a creative project that won’t move forward, a relationship in which something feels off, or a next chapter they can’t quite find their way into. Her approach combines conversation, movement, and deep listening. She’s trained in Open Floor Movement and brings attention to the body into her work.
People naturally turn to Melissa. She’s a nurturer and a leader, and she’s also learning when she wants to step in and when she needs to say no. I appreciate that she’s working with these questions in her own life.
If you’re looking for someone who brings warmth, humor, and directness to a conversation, I’d encourage you to meet her. You can email Melissa, tell her a little about what’s bringing you, and ask about working together.