For most of my life, I experienced two distinct sides of myself.

There was the corporate Joanna — the executive, the strategist, the leader who thrived in complex systems and high-pressure environments. And there was the creative Joanna — the photographer, the observer, the person who found meaning in light, perspective, and the beauty of everyday moments.

I never thought those two parts of me belonged in the same room. One felt serious. The other felt free. So I kept them apart, each living in its own lane, each serving a different purpose.

It wasn’t until I entered Georgetown University’s Executive Leadership Coaching Program that something shifted. In the process of learning how to coach others, I began to understand something about myself: these two parts of me were never in conflict. They were made for each other.

Early in the program, we were asked to choose an object that represented what coaching meant to us and build our coaching declaration around it. I reached for my camera without hesitation.

At first, the metaphor felt simple — the camera as a lens, a way of seeing. My perspective. My view of my clients and their experiences. But as my understanding of coaching deepened, so did the metaphor.

There’s a moment I often experience during photography sessions that I keep coming back to. After capturing a series of images, I invite my clients to step behind the camera and see what I’ve been seeing.

Something always shifts in that moment. They relax, their faces light up, and ideas begin to emerge. They start to contribute, experiment, and co-create. Suddenly, we are no longer photographer and subject.

We are collaborators.

That moment became a mirror for my coaching.

I’ve come to realize that coaching is not about what I see in my clients. It’s about what they begin to see in themselves — sometimes for the very first time.

In photography, aperture controls three things: how much light enters the frame, what comes into focus, and the depth and clarity of the image. Adjust the aperture, and everything changes — what becomes visible, what sharpens, what was there all along but difficult to see.

That’s exactly what I believe coaching can do. It creates the conditions that bring more light and more clarity to what may have felt difficult to access alone. It calibrates certain elements for a truer picture to emerge.

When I began searching for a name for my coaching practice, Aperture arrived before I had even finished asking the question. It was the only word that could hold both worlds — the photographer and the executive, the creative and the strategic, the observer and the leader.

It wasn’t a compromise between two identities. It was the place where they finally became one.

That convergence sits at the heart of everything I do.

I bring both the precision of a seasoned executive and the perspective of a creative to every coaching relationship — the ability to see what’s often difficult to recognize alone, to hold space for what is emerging, and to help leaders step behind the lens, see themselves in a new way, and move forward with clarity and conviction.

That is Aperture Coaching.