The “Say It Like It Is” Executive Coach: Donna Star Announces Her Second Book, Stop Chasing Balance, Coming This Fall
After decades of climbing, Donna traded corporate life for entrepreneurship and built a coaching practice around a simple observation: she wished she had a coach during her corporate years because she made it harder than it had to be. That is now her mission — to provide more ease and flow and less worry and stress. Laughter is part of the prescription: Donna believes in humor and joy as great balancers for a full life, and she is convinced most of us take ourselves way too seriously.
Donna is also an author and thought leader exploring the evolving relationship between work, identity, and balance. Her first book, Unsuccessfully Successful, drew on her own experience and three decades of leadership. Her second, Stop Chasing Balance: Do Less. Feel More arrives this fall and introduces her “Archetypes of Balance” framework. The book takes direct aim at the modern obsession with doing it all. “Stop Chasing Balance will leave you questioning not only how you work, but how you want to live,” says Gaby Abrams, Donna’s former coach and Subconscious Strategist.
Ask Donna what’s behind her success and she’ll point to hard work — and an ability to see around corners. Highly intuitive, she didn’t always know how to leverage that ability early in her career, but she has always had a strong sense of what’s going to happen next. Fittingly, the best career advice she ever received was simple: trust your gut. It’s now a guiding principle in her practice, where she helps clients learn to hear — and trust — their own internal knowledge. That intuition is central to how she coaches: Donna understands there is often more underneath your words than you may even realize, and with your permission, she brings what she senses into the session.
One of the most compelling lessons from Donna’s training at the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC) is that to be an effective coach, you must take care of yourself — participants were required to receive coaching while learning to coach others. Donna believes in coaching so strongly that she has her own coaches to this day. Coaches face many of the same challenges, emotions, and growth opportunities as their clients, and she credits the ongoing work she does on herself as a big part of why her coaching works.
At the center of it all is one goal she names plainly: “I want to match your insides with your outside.” Coaching, for Donna, isn’t about polishing a résumé or a LinkedIn profile. There is far more to a person than what appears on paper — and her work helps clients understand themselves deeply enough to create careers and lives that reflect who they truly are.
She is candid about the state of her industry, too. Coaching is a crowded and sometimes unclear field, and in her view, the best predictor of strong outcomes is fit. As with any relationship, trust is key. Coaching is both an art and a science, requiring knowledge and skill alongside emotional intelligence and genuine connection. And while she acknowledges that artificial intelligence offers real opportunities for efficiency in the coaching space, technology cannot replace the human connection, intuition, and personal understanding at the heart of the work.
The values that guide her, professionally and personally, are honesty and integrity — honesty first, with integrity following naturally, because it reflects authenticity, accountability, and consistency in how people show up for themselves and others. It’s no accident she has named herself the “Say It Like It Is” coach.
Through her coaching practice, writing, speaking engagements, and her online community Moments of Momentum, Donna Star creates spaces for honest conversation and real growth — helping professionals build lives that feel as good on the inside as they look on the outside. Her whole philosophy fits in four words, the same four on the cover of her new book: Do less. Feel more.
Learn More about Donna Star:
Through her Influential Women profile, https://influentialwomen.com/connect/Donna-Star or through her website, https://dstarconsultants.com/
Influential Women
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