Today we’d like to introduce you to Jennifer Wade.
Hi Jennifer, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I’ve spent most of my adult life as a professional classical musician and teacher, and I still perform regularly as a violinist. Music has been one of the great loves of my life, and it has given me a fulfilling career, wonderful relationships, and opportunities I wouldn’t trade for anything.
But my path into coaching began with a much more personal story.
By 2015, I had co-founded a music education nonprofit, was performing in some of the places I loved most, including the Kennedy Center and Washington National Cathedral, and I had a thriving violin studio. Professionally, I was exactly where I wanted to be, but underneath all of that, I was struggling in ways I couldn’t ignore. After a series of difficult personal circumstances, it became painfully clear to me that I couldn’t keep going as I had been, so I made the risky decision to take four months off from my life to give myself the time and the space to understand what needed to change.
That sabbatical became one of the defining moments of my life. I truly think of myself as the Jennifer before and the Jennifer I’ve become since. It gave me the space to recognize how divided I had been within myself. I had been waging an internal battle between the person I knew I was and the person I believed everyone wanted me to be for as long as I could remember.
That constant self-questioning, and even self-abandonment in some cases, had led to a soul-level kind of exhaustion that was untenable. It took me choosing to set aside time that was free of obligations to anyone else to get to know the part of me that I had been abandoning. That choice was ultimately what allowed me to slowly, but completely, transform my relationship with myself.
I would say that, for a while, very little changed on the outside. Internally, however, the difference was night and day. I finally learned what self-compassion and true self-acceptance feel like, after having completely misunderstood those concepts for years. I learned how to give myself the genuine care that I hadn’t known how to offer before. That massive inner shift was the thing that eventually made an entirely new chapter of my life possible, including the coaching work I began in 2017.
I became even more fascinated by the questions that experience opened up.
How do we come to understand who we are?
How much of what we believe about ourselves is inherited from our families, our culture, and our experiences?
What becomes possible when we begin examining those beliefs and making more aligned choices about how we want to live?
Over time, my personal exploration of these big questions has turned into a calling to help other women undertake their own journeys of self-discovery and intentional living, which is what led me to create my coaching practice, 3D Authenticity.
Even though coaching is the focus of my professional life now, I haven’t left music completely behind. I’m still a musician and perform regularly as a member of the 9th Street Quartet based in Arlington, VA. What has changed is that I’ve made room for another deeply meaningful expression of who I am.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It has definitely not always been a straightforward path, and, if I am honest, some of the bumps along the way have been entirely of my own making.
When I first started my coaching business, I knew that this was the work I wanted to be doing. I believed in it, and I was excited about it. I had actually given myself permission to pursue it even though I knew people in my immediate circles might not understand or be fully on board with that decision.
So, while I did start my business, I then proceeded to tell almost no one about it. As I am sure you can imagine, that’s not a particularly effective marketing strategy. 🙂
It has taken me a while to get to the place where I can own that and even laugh about it, but I also understand what was happening for me in those early days. I had done the internal work of recognizing something I genuinely wanted and I had even taken action on it. But allowing that new identity to become visible in the world, especially to people who had always known me as a musician and a teacher, was another level of growth waiting for me.
Beyond the internal challenges, there was also the practical learning curve of running a business in a completely different field from everything I had done before. About eight months after launching, I decided to offer a retreat. I booked the space, paid for it, and was extremely excited about the experience I wanted to create.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet figured out how to get enough people to sign up, and the retreat never happened. I couldn’t recover the money I’d spent on the venue, so I literally took myself there for the week and invited a friend and my mother to join me. That was an expensive lesson in the difference between having a wonderful idea and knowing how to make it a reality in the tangible, 3D world.
Over the years, I’ve continued to learn about marketing and other aspects of running this kind of business. It has been a real process to understand who I most want to serve and to communicate the value of this life-changing work in just a few sentences. Some lessons have come more easily than others, and I’m still learning and refining all these years later.
I will say, though, that one of the most interesting things about this journey for me has been recognizing how closely the practical challenges of entrepreneurship align with the work I do with my clients. I am reminded nearly every day that knowing who we are and what we want is one thing, but giving ourselves permission is another. And then, actually inhabiting that truth in the world, allowing ourselves to be seen and known for it, is yet another.
I don’t think it is at all coincidental that building a business devoted to authenticity has provided me with an extraordinary number of opportunities to practice it myself!
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
My work through 3D Authenticity is centered on three primary things: Know who you are. Love who you are. Live who you are.
I take women on a deep dive into parts of themselves they may never have explored before. I like to joke, wouldn’t it have been nice if we’d all been born with an owner’s manual explaining how we operate? Effectively, I help my clients write their own manuals and, just as importantly, they learn how to update them as they inevitably grow and evolve.
But as I’ve already shared, knowing yourself isn’t always enough to give you the freedom to be yourself out in the world. That’s where the second part comes in. I help women completely transform their relationship with themselves. The goal is for them to genuinely become their own best friend. Their inner critic can soften into a trusted advisor, and they learn to listen to the wisdom of their bodies as a discernment tool. It’s really all about developing a relationship with themselves that is rooted in self-compassion, self-trust, and self-acceptance.
Then comes the really fun part: life design! Together, we take a look at everything they’ve discovered about themselves and begin translating it into real choices. I ask them to look at their commitments, their relationships, the boundaries they establish, and the dreams they may have finally given themselves permission to pursue. The end goal is to create a life that fully honors the whole truth of who they are.
Clients can work with me through one-to-one coaching, my small group coaching program, and a 90-minute guided mapping session that offers a snapshot of their current life and where it could use some attention. I think one of the things that distinguishes my approach is the depth and integration of the work. I’m not interested in helping someone make a few surface-level changes while leaving the underlying patterns untouched. The truth is that most women don’t need to blow up their lives or become completely different people to live more authentically. It’s more about helping women develop the discernment to choose what they want to carry forward and the tools to build a life that reflects those choices.
As for what I’m most proud of, it’s those moments when a woman begins to recognize just how much freedom she actually has.
After a lifetime of telling herself what she can’t do, what she should or shouldn’t want, what she ought to feel, or who she is supposed to take care of, she realizes, “Wait a minute. This is MY life. I get a say in it. Actually, I get the biggest say!”
Watching a client begin to claim that kind of agency, and then seeing her actually make changes in her life because of it, is unbelievably rewarding. That’s what makes this work so meaningful to me.
Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?
Yes! I can think of several that have enriched my life in different ways.
The first is the book Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach.
This book has meant the world to me and continues to influence how I live and how I approach my work. Her exploration of self-acceptance, compassion, and our relationship with our own humanity has been profoundly important in my personal journey, and I recommend it often.
The Marginalian by Maria Popova.
I have loved this extraordinary and thoughtful collection of writing and ideas for years. Maria Popova has an incredible gift for bringing together literature, philosophy, poetry, science, and art, and finding connections that illuminate something essential about the human experience. She’s been doing this work for years, and I think if someone hadn’t discovered it already, it could become a treasure trove for years to come.
The Wood Works Album by the Danish String Quartet
So bear with me here. This is not your traditional string quartet music. It’s an album of traditional Nordic folk music arranged and performed by one of the most extraordinary quartets in the world. The music is really accessible and ranges from hauntingly beautiful to music with a real groove. I love this music to listen to, and it is also music that my quartet loves to perform on a regular basis. Some of my favorites on the album are the second track and the second-to-last track, but the whole album is worth your time!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.3dauthenticity.com
