Nice to meet you. I’m Nancy Elliott.
I coach executives and leaders, and the whole human being that exists underneath the title.
Before sharing about me, let me tell you about a story I heard many years ago that has shaped my life.
Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, came back to Earth, and fell into a depression so deep it inspired him to write a book. As he shares in Magnificent Desolation, “I wanted to resume my duties, but there were no duties to resume. There was no goal, no sense of calling, no project worth pouring myself into.”
On behalf of future space missions, NASA studied what happened and the lesson was simple:
In order to thrive, people need something that calls them forward into what’s next, something that’s always waiting for them on the other side of achievement.
I call this the Astronaut Plan, and it's shaped how I've lived my life.
I first felt it pulling at me decades ago, sitting down with my oldest son for his first lessons. I wasn't dissatisfied - I loved that season. It was merely the quiet knowledge that every season ends, and I wanted something calling to me from the other side of it.
In my career, I’ve built and sold businesses, was a financial analyst for a multi-agency police task force built to dismantle major drug trafficking organizations, co-founded a private school and was a facilitator in an educational co-op.
And for years, I thought the Astronaut Plan meant finding “the next thing”. The next role. The next project. The next challenge.
What I've come to learn is that it was never a ‘thing’ at all. It's actually about staying in deep and real connection with myself, the people I love, and with what makes me feel fully alive. Achievement, when it comes, is a byproduct of that. Not the point of it.
And, as it turns out, approaching achievement this way creates less friction and makes the path to success more enjoyable.
What I Went Looking For
When my husband and I were approaching the “empty nest” stage of life, I could feel another vocation coming. I just didn't know what shape it would take.
Up to that point, every role I'd held had been pragmatic or for someone else. Running my father's company was for our family. The analyst job paid the bills. Homeschooling my three sons was a true vocation - the most purposeful one yet — but it was ultimately for them. This next thing, I could tell, was going to be something where I could fully express my own Zone of Genius. That was unfamiliar territory, and it was uncomfortable.
I started engaging in conversations with trusted contacts about my next steps. Someone who knew me well asked if I had ever considered becoming trained as a coach? I dismissed it on the spot, because the coaches I knew of were part consultant and part mentor, and that kind of work didn’t interest me. But the idea refused to leave me alone.
So, I hired a coach of my own, started doing the experiments she gave me, and somewhere in there I realized:
I want to do this.
The Thing That Changed
Looking back, I'd been doing some version of this my whole life.
People had been bringing me their stories, concerns, and problems from the time I was young - friends, family, and adults I knew. It felt natural. It felt like I had access to some wisdom that wasn't entirely mine, and I passed it along as advice. The advice was frequently good, and they kept coming back.
But the change came for me years later, when I slowly started shifting from giving advice to asking questions to help people make connections that they hadn’t yet seen.
This started to happen organically, but it wasn’t until I started my training as a coach that this capability really began to bloom and I realized that this work exists squarely in my Zone of Genius.
I now know that everything we are seeking is “hiding in plain sight”, and what we need is someone trained and skilled in creating the right kind of container in which, when good questions are asked, we can make the connections to bring clarity that once seemed so illusive.
It works this way every time. When a client finally sees something about themselves they've spent years not seeing, something in me lights up like a pinball machine. When a door appears where there wasn't one, and a client walks through it - I feel deeply grateful to have been there for the breakthrough. And even if they don't act on it right away, they can't unsee what they’ve seen, and it will keep working on them until they're ready.
I simply love this work.
Behind the Title Is a Whole Human
Most people arrive with some version of the same question: how do I get more of what I'm after without paying for it with my life? More growth, more peace, at the same time. It's a fair question – and it’s usually not the root.
Patterns never stay where we first notice them. When we avoid the hard conversation, we don't only avoid it at work - we avoid it with our partners, our kids, our own bodies, and the voice in our heads.
Which means working only on the “professional” slice of a person’s life experience isn't the most direct route to transformation. It is better to find the real blockage in the line so that everything downstream can start moving again.
You are not an executive who also has a life. You are a whole human being who currently holds an executive role, and you bring your entire self into it every day - physical, emotional, relational, spiritual, and otherwise.
Sometimes getting to the root answer results in a person changing everything in their lives. But more often than not, it means they keep doing the same work, but from an entirely different place. I've watched clients move from their Zone of Competence into their Zone of Excellence and then their Zone of Genius without ever changing companies. This dramatically improves the results they achieve, but more importantly transforms how they experience all of life while they become more effective at creating the results they are after.
Where This Comes From
For over twenty years, through the private homeschool academy I founded and the co-op I helped run, I've watched more than thirty children grow up - from early childhood through college, close enough and often enough to see the same forks in the road appear again and again. Early, natural self-trust was either held close and allowed to blossom, or quietly suppressed by self-consciousness and doubt.
And I've also spent twenty-five years walking alongside a global tech CEO - not as a bystander, but as his wife, closest thinking partner, and informal coach. I've had a front-row seat to what leadership at the highest levels actually costs: the pressure, the loneliness, the gap between the title and the person underneath it.
I know where the stories come from that get in someone's way - the ones about why they can't, why they shouldn't, why it isn't the right time. I've watched those stories form in real time across many lives.
This gives me a particular kind of insight.
I'm Not Coaching From a Safe Distance
I'm an athlete. A wife. A mother. A brand new grandmother.
And right now, I’m in the middle of the unfolding of my own next phase.
I'm building a new business. I recently earned my private pilot's license (a childhood dream), am part of AOPA and The Ninety-Nines, the women pilots' organization Amelia Earhart founded in 1929, and am continuing training towards advancement of my skills in aviation. I'm also rebuilding: our home was one of thousands damaged when wildfire tore through most of our city, and I'm still in the midst of that recovery.
All throughout, I’m doing the very work I ask my clients to do.
In other words, I'm not teaching this from a place I've already arrived at. I'm living in the same territory, in real time, right alongside you.
Before every session, I take fifteen minutes alone to get quiet. Not to prepare talking points, but rather to fully arrive in the space I’ll be coaching from. Unless I am willing to step into that place where I am fully present, open, and ready for whatever may arise, how can I ask anyone else to do the same? This is a vocation for me rather than a job, and I hold what happens in those conversations with the deepest reverence.
Credentials
I started my professional coaching practice in 2023, have performed hundreds of hours of coaching with a wide range of people including tech executives, founders, and creatives, and have continued training ever since:
Certified Professional Coach (CPC) and Energy Leadership Index Master Practitioner (ELI-MP), Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC)
Member, International Coaching Federation (ICF)
Trained in the Restoration Coaching methodology
Additional programs on human connection, decision-making, the nervous system, and principles and practices of the Conscious Leadership Group
Currently in a multi-year, selective training program with the Art of Accomplishment, founded by an executive coach to some of the top leaders at the world's largest tech companies (incl. Apple, OpenAI, and Google)
If anything here is landing for you - even if you can't quite put your finger on why - let’s talk.
This work isn’t for everyone.
But for the right person, it can change everything.
By the way…what does Inveris mean?
Inveris is a word I built, drawing on Latin — "in" for what's happening underneath the surface, and "ver," the root at the center of both veritas — truth — and the word for spring itself.
Inveris: what's been dormant, finally answering the “calling” and coming up into the light.
My logo is also a nod to the attitude indicator in an airplane — the truest read of your actual orientation, even when you can't see it yourself.
I designed it to show an adjustment in direction, because that's what this work helps you navigate.