You step off the plane in a city you have never seen. It is winter. You know no one.
The airport is full of people who all seem to know where they are going, and you are not one of them. Your apartment is booked for two weeks. Your certifications from another country are not recognized here. Your accent will mark you as foreign in every room you enter. The life you built, the one you loved, the city you thought you might stay in forever—it is now six thousand kilometers behind you.
This is the moment everyone speaks about later in soft language. The turning point. The fresh start. But standing in the baggage claim, watching luggage revolve past on a conveyor belt, knowing you will have to rebuild everything from the ability to find a grocery store to the capacity to rebuild a career, it does not feel like a beginning. It feels like standing at the edge of a cliff and choosing to jump anyway.
The question that arrives in that moment is simple and terrifying: What do you do when the only path forward is the one you have to create yourself?
This is the question Lama Shaath has spent two decades answering. First for herself. Then for everyone else.
Meet Lama Shaath
Lama Shaath is a global coach, organizational consultant, and the architect of what she calls “Mining Your Inner Power.” She is based in West Vancouver, British Columbia, and holds an International Coaching Federation Associate Certified Coach credential, a University of British Columbia Certification in Organizational Coaching, and a Career Development Practitioner certificate from Simon Fraser University. But those credentials are just the container. The real thing is this: she has reinvented herself across three continents, and now she teaches leaders and organizations how to do it themselves. She does not teach reinvention as theory. She teaches it as the lived art of becoming coherent in the middle of change.
The Architecture of Becoming
Lama grew up moving between countries and languages. By the time she was an adult, she was fluent in English, French, and Arabic. But fluency in language and fluency in staying put are not the same thing.
Her first reinvention happened in the Middle East, where she built a career rooted in health, wellness, and personal transformation. She trained in yoga, studied the philosophy of the eight limbs, became certified as a personal trainer and style coach. The work was meaningful. She was helping people align their outer lives with their inner truths. But after years of building something solid, something changed. A voice inside her said: what if there is more?
So she left. She moved to the South of France, to Nice, near Monaco. For eleven years, she created a life many people only dream about. She taught yoga retreats. She worked with high-profile clients in Monaco. She facilitated transformational workshops where people discovered clarity they did not know was possible. She loved that life. Deeply.
And then, eight years ago, she chose to leave it.
She moved to Vancouver. A city she had never visited. Where she knew no one. Where her French certifications meant nothing. Where she would have to start again.
The restart was not driven by crisis. It was driven by clarity. She realized that she had been teaching personal transformation in isolation, one yoga class at a time. But the real transformation she wanted to catalyze was happening in organizations, in teams, in the spaces where most people spend most of their waking hours. To do that work, she would need different credentials. Different context. Different ground to stand on.
So she started over.
She enrolled in Simon Fraser University’s Career Development Practitioner program. She completed UBC’s Organizational Coaching certification. She earned credentials with Career Professionals of Canada. With each qualification, she was not collecting letters for a wall. She was building language that the corporate world could hear. She was learning how to carry her philosophy into the spaces where people needed it most.
The Leadership That Starts Inside
Today, Lama’s work centers on a belief that most leaders and organizations still have not truly accepted: how we show up shapes how others think, feel, and perform. And what shapes how we show up is not strategy or systems. It is coherence. Presence. Care.
She coaches individuals, teams, and organizations across industries. Her clients range from Fortune 500 companies to nonprofits serving immigrants and newcomers. At TELUS Health, she delivers coaching in English, French, and Arabic to employees navigating career transitions, leadership challenges, and life-work integration. At Immigrant Services Society of BC, she served as an Employer Relations Specialist, running job fairs and coaching newcomers into careers in hospitality and tourism. The work looks different in each space. The philosophy underneath never changes.
She believes that career development is never just about finding work. “Career development is about finding ourselves. It’s about reconnecting with our values, our purpose, and the parts of us that give meaning to what we do.”
That belief sits at odds with how most of the industry operates. Career coaches often treat the professional sphere as separate from the personal one. Find a job. Get the promotion. Climb the ladder. Lama sees it differently. She sees career as inseparable from life, and both as inseparable from who you are at your core. The work she does starts inside, in that quiet place where you know what actually matters to you, and then it ripples outward.
One of her recurring observations has become a cornerstone of her teaching. “How we show up shapes how others think, feel, and perform.” It is simple enough to print on a poster. But when Lama says it, she means something precise and demanding: that presence is not a luxury. It is foundational. That care is not soft. It is the ground on which sustainable leadership is built. That the quiet choices we make about whether to show up fully, whether to stay open when things are hard, whether to prioritize connection over convenience—those choices ripple outward in ways we often do not see until it is too late.
She has watched organizations invest millions in strategy while neglecting the human coherence that actually carries strategy forward. She has coached leaders who were brilliant strategists but lonely in their own offices because they had never learned to be present. She has sat with newcomers to Canada who had advanced degrees and decades of experience, yet were told their credentials did not count, and watched how that repeated message quietly erased their sense of possibility.
What she has learned across all of it is this: the work is never just about fixing the system. Sometimes it starts with asking one person to be more honest. To listen differently. To notice where they are holding back their presence and ask why. Those small acts of courage, when multiplied across a team or an organization, become culture.
The Shaath Playbook: 5 Lessons
Lesson 1: Reinvention is not something that happens to you. It is something you choose, even when circumstances seem to choose for you.
Lesson 2: Presence is the ground. Before strategy, before systems, ask whether people feel seen and valued.
Lesson 3: What you withhold does not disappear. It shapes the emotional and cultural world around you quietly, in ways you may never fully see.
Lesson 4: Care is not separate from excellence. In fact, it is the condition that makes real excellence possible.
Lesson 5: Your inner work is not selfish. The clarity and coherence you build inside yourself becomes the clarity and coherence you bring to every room you enter.
The Restart as Home
That winter day in Vancouver, standing in the airport with no network and no certainty, Lama was living the question her coaching clients now face every day. How do you build something when everything is unfamiliar? How do you stay present and open when fear is the loudest voice? How do you know that the restart you are making is the right one?
Eight years later, she knows the answer not as theory but as bone-deep experience. The restart is not about arriving at a destination. It is about becoming the person who can move forward, no matter what the landscape looks like. It is about learning to mine your inner power in the moment when you need it most. And then teaching others to do the same.
She was recently recognized as an Outstanding Career Leader by Career Professionals of Canada, and named one of Vancouver’s Top 15 Career Coaches for 2025. But the recognition she treasures most came from colleagues at a conference, who told her simply: “I’m here for you. You will be great.” In those words was everything her work is about. Presence. Belief. The quiet act of showing up for someone when the outcome is uncertain.
That is the restart. That is the courage. That is what happens when you choose to mine your inner power and teach others to do the same.
Lama Shaath, ACC-ICF, COC-UBC, is a Global Coach and Founder of Mine Your Inner Power Coaching, based in West Vancouver, British Columbia. She specializes in career development, leadership coaching, and organizational transformation, supporting individuals, teams, and organizations across North America and internationally.
