LILIAN SHEKINAH
Helping Black women build the self-trust and discernment to take the wheel of their own lives — and finally make decisions that feel like theirs.
Life coaching for Black women rooted in clarity, confidence, and self-trust.
Hello, my name is Lilian Shekinah...
And I did EVERYTHING right.
I graduated in the top 10% of my high school class in Mississippi. I earned my Bachelor’s in Radio, TV, and Film at Howard University — working through college in hospitality, taking on unpaid internships while working full-time and carrying a full course load, because I believed effort was the whole formula. Do the work, follow the steps, and the life you want follows.
I followed that formula for over a decade.
After graduation, I went into teaching — a practical, respected path. When it didn’t fully fit, I went back to school and earned my Master’s in Library and Information Science, building a career as a school librarian that let me keep helping students without some of the pressures reshaping the classroom. I was still following the formula: work hard, get the next credential, stay the course.
Then life started asking me a different question.
I watched colleagues who had given their entire careers to education lose their positions almost overnight. I lost people close to me to the stress this profession puts on the body and mind. And at a certain point, it stopped being abstract — it became personal enough that doctors told me plainly to start prioritizing my own health. That’s the moment the formula stopped making sense to me. I had done everything I was told would guarantee security, and security was the one thing I didn’t have.
So I pursued another version of “right.” I earned a graduate certificate in Records and Information Science and moved into corporate librarianship, briefly working for a well-known oil company. I told myself a bigger paycheck and a corporate title would finally be the fix. It wasn’t.
Standing in rooms I’d worked years to reach, I realized I’d spent my whole life optimizing for the next credential and the next dollar — and none of it was actually built around what I wanted. That was the real turning point: choosing my mental health and my actual quality of life over the next line on a resume.
Once I stopped chasing the formula, something clarified. I’d always had a gift for helping people see the misalignment in their own lives before they could see it themselves — and I’d been doing it for free for years. I helped teachers and educators find the courage to leave roles that were costing them their health, and land somewhere that actually matched their values. I did the same for friends and family, over and over, without ever calling it “coaching.”
Eventually I turned that instinct toward myself, and toward a wider audience, through YouTube. What started as simple work-life vlogs became something more intentional once I began sharing what I was actually learning about alignment, discernment, and self-trust. Women started writing to tell me that something I said helped them make a change they’d been afraid to make. That response is what turned this from a passion into a purpose — and now, into a practice.
Why This Qualifies Me — And What You Get From Me
Most coaches teach frameworks they read about. I teach frameworks I built by living through three full career reinventions and one complete identity overhaul — while still doing everything “the right way” on paper the entire time.
That’s the difference. I’m not guessing at what self-abandonment costs a high-achieving woman. I’ve paid that cost — in a body that couldn’t keep up, in years spent optimizing for a life I didn’t actually want, in watching people who did everything right lose everything overnight. And I’m not guessing at what it takes to reverse it, either.
I’ve navigated the actual, practical mechanics of leaving a secure path for an uncertain one, more than once, and landed somewhere better every time.
For ambitious Black women specifically, that lived experience matters in a way credentials alone don’t. I understand the specific pressure of being the one who’s “supposed” to have it figured out — the pressure to keep proving yourself through the next degree, the next title, the next salary bump — because I lived inside that pressure for over a decade before I learned to trust myself enough to choose differently.
What you get from me isn’t motivation or a generic framework. You get someone who has actually walked the specific road you’re on — education to corporate, security to alignment, achievement to fulfillment — and who has already helped other women walk it, long before this became my profession.