Lane Changer - Marissa Bastidas - same lane, new direction
Walks on the Humber involve some laughs!
Marissa and I have walked the same path together for three years. Literally. We meet at James Gardens two Sunday mornings every month and walk the Humber Trail. And we’ve talked about our plans: as I geared up to leave law and move to Chandlerville, she left her 35 year job leading a supportive housing provider and reinvented herself as a life coach. Only through this interview though, did I realize coaching’s always been her schtick - her tenants, her staff, and her children have all benefited from her innate talent for helping people find their calling. And now she’s found hers!
Marissa spent her early years in small-town Amherstburg, near Windsor, Ontario. She’s the second eldest of six and the only one to go to university where she studied social work. As a young woman, she sought to improve her French at an immersion in Quebec. There she fell for her tutor, a Latin American, who joined her in Toronto where they had five (!) daughters, including identical twin girls born when Marissa was 43. Marissa took positions working in service to others. As she describes it - without complaint or resentment - she’s had a lifetime of “spiralling around other people’s needs.”
By her early 30s, Bastidas was Executive Director at Accommodation, Information, and Support (AIS), a supportive housing provider that, under Marissa’s leadership, acquired four small Toronto apartment buildings and housed and supported 100 tenants who had been homeless and who lived with mental illness, substance dependency, or both. Marissa’s proud that some of AIS’s clients, as she refers to those who lived there, became valued members of the board of directors providing strategic direction to the organization.
From my role as a lawyer, I accepted her invitation to join the AIS board, mindful of conflict of interest given AIS was a client of the firm. There I saw Marissa’s passion for her work and how she created an environment where people could thrive, sometimes for the first time. I left the board when I became a partner in the firm and then became Marissa’s go-to for tenant matters, including some Friday afternoon crisis-calls where we’d puzzle through delicate situations knowing outcomes for AIS clients often meant life and death. Neither one of us enjoyed those stressful situations but we both knew Marissa was making a big difference to a small group of people.
Her 20 staff knew Marissa was making a big difference too - she coached them into leadership roles, often even coaching them out of the organization if she saw they needed other work. She remembers decompressing as a team at St. Anne’s Spa one year or at their annual holiday lunch at the Old Mill. She knew treating them well couldn’t offset the job stress but it was a start and many stayed for decades.
That stress started to ramp up proportionate to drug use in society. Her clients, perhaps more than some, were susceptible to use and overdose, and her staff became afraid to be onsite alone. Marissa found a larger organization, WoodGreen, for AIS to amalgamate with, knowing they had the resources to provide the services her clients and her staff needed.
Marissa remembers one of her staff once saying if he started to dread going to work, he knew it was time to leave. After the amalgamation, and with the challenges still increasing, Marissa began to feel that dread. Marissa retired at 66. Burnout so often leads to a lane change, true for Marissa and a factor in my own decision to leave law too.
That was January 2022. For February and March, Marissa was justifiably“non-doing.” She spent time with her adult daughters. The twins were, by then 25, and both acting for film and television, something they’ve both done from a young age. While she’d often used her vacation days to sit in on shoots, she had a new flexibility to go when she felt like it. Her older daughters were all partnered and two had given Marissa and her husband six grandkids (a third daughter has recently given them a seventh). Now she was available to spend more time with them. Her empty schedule also allowed pursuing friendships. It was then we realized we live in Weston so we turned our professional relationship into our biweekly walks.
But two months in, she found herself frustrated, questioning her identity, and consuming too much Netflix and chocolate late into the night. She laughs that she could have ended up in the film critic lane! She thought about how her own mother, only recently dead, golfed up until her death at 95. Marissa knew she couldn’t spent the next 30 years on the couch. She coached herself into action. She replied to a random email about becoming a life coach. She knew the reason she couldn’t move forward was that spiral — serving the needs of others prevented her from investing in herself. The realization unstuck her.
She jumped into the course, learning the techniques after decades of coaching using her instincts. Within a year she was a certified life and health coach. Marissa's branded herself as “Marissa’s Life Coaching Cafe” and loves the work. One of the biggest bonuses is the flexibility - when her daughter had her first child, Marissa took time away from clients to coach her into new motherhood. She couldn’t have done that in her old role. The beauty of this too is she can do this for as long as she wants to at whatever pace her age allows.
The toughest part? Placing a dollar value on something she’d done off the corner of her desk. And the marketing - that’s tough too. With five daughters in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, though, she’s got lots of help there! Although she’s got a website and a small social media presence on LinkedIn, Marissa’s focussing on word of mouth and knows that unless she’s out talking about it, that model doesn’t work. So she does.
Marissa’s proud she’s attracted clients from ages 23 to 80, proving it’s neither too early nor too late to make a change. People seek coaching for different reasons but there are a few themes - lack of confidence or being mired in imposter syndrome or self-doubt; feeling overwhelmed or confused; and fearing success, failure, or rejection. She’s quick to tell me coaching is not therapy - that her techniques are more about encouraging curiosity about other ways of living and promoting changing habits - can nonetheless feel therapeutic.
Who’s supportive of this lane change? Well, people Bastidas met through her course, including the accountability buddy she zooms with every couple of weeks. Her daughters, though, are her biggest champions. They’re excited for her to be starting something at this stage; she hopes they’ll think about lane changing, when the time is right. She credits her late mother too, as someone who led by example with her can-do attitude and a cheerleader to all her children, in whatever they pursued. Seems like Marissa may have adopted some of that in her own parenting!
Any regrets? Life-long Catholic, Marissa, draws on a quote from Pope Francis: “Even the pain points ripen into something.” That period as a couch potato, those times of self-doubt - all that produces the joy she now has.
Finally, I asked Marissa Bastidas about another lane change. She’s turning 70 this weekend and so I expected her to say ‘no.’ But not so. Ever the social worker, Marissa thinks it’s absurd only those with money can be coached. She hopes one day the system will pay for her to coach anyone, from school children to clients like those she supported at AIS. I hope for that world too.
Thinking of a lane change? Check Marissa’s website: https://www.lifecoachmarissa.com/about
To hear from Marissa directly, here’s a podcast she’s in: https://theonpurposepodcast.podbean.com/e/life-coach-marissa/
Missed previous Lane Changer profiles?
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