I didn't start in coaching. I started in film.
I studied Film and Television Production at the USC's School of Cinematic Arts. I learned how stories are built, how narrative shapes what people believe is possible, and how the person who controls the story controls the room. That understanding never left me. It became the foundation for everything I do.
But as a Thai-American woman married to a Black multiracial man, I kept seeing a different story playing out. The story that systems tell about who gets to lead, who gets to belong, and whose potential gets recognized. I wanted to do something about it. So I became a social worker.
Social work is the container. It's how I've applied that narrative understanding ever since—not just to storytelling, but to the structures that write the stories people live inside.
I earned my Master of Social Work from USC, where an internship in an employee assistance program introduced me to coaching and I fell in love with it immediately. After graduating, I trained as a psychotherapist. That's where I learned to see what's underneath: the patterns people can't break, the narratives they've internalized about who they are and what they're capable of, and the ways self-doubt gets reinforced by environments that were never designed to support them. Then I returned to USC to complete my Doctor of Social Work in Social Change and Innovation.
Psychotherapy and coaching aren't separate from social work. They're expressions of it—one working with what's underneath, the other turning that into action.
Now I integrate all of it in my work with leaders.
The filmmaker in me understands that leadership is narrative. The systems you operate in have already written a story about who you are. Social work gives me the tools to see the structures that wrote it, work with what it did to you, and help you author a new one. The coach in me turns that into action.
My own experience with limiting self-narratives shapes how I work with clients. I understand what it takes to move beyond the stories we tell ourselves about our capabilities while also acknowledging the very real systemic barriers that feed those stories. Imposter syndrome isn't just self-doubt. It's what happens when bias and exclusion make normal self-doubt feel like proof.
When leaders shift from self-doubt to confidence, from avoidance to engagement, from imitation to authenticity, everything around them shifts too. Their teams change. Their cultures change. That's what this work is for.
Jacqueline Ashley, DSW, PCC