Sheena Murphy: Founder of Radiant & Rooted Coaching
Female Founder Features: Chapter 2
The sun creeps in through the blinds, casting light across the bed. Sheena starts to stir as she hears one of her two miniature schnauzers shuffling nearby.
(Or sometimes it's a big slurp on the face.)
Sheena opens her eyes but doesn’t immediately throw off the covers. She likes to stay snuggled underneath for a little longer, especially on a cooler morning. She takes the time to check in with herself.
Do I need a few more minutes to rest? Or am I ready to get up?
There’s no alarm blaring from the nightstand and no rush to jump out of bed.
She wakes up when her body is ready.
Once she’s up, she journals, takes the dogs for a walk, and eases into the day ahead.
For someone who doesn’t consider herself a morning person, she’s found that she naturally wakes up earlier than she used to.
She’s worked hard to build a life where mornings like this are possible.
After all, it wasn’t always like this.
Sheena Murphy is a mom, dog lover, and self-proclaimed pickleball enthusiast.
And also, she’s the founder of Radiant & Rooted Coaching, where she helps women recover from burnout, rebuild self-trust, and create a life that feels sustainable.
It’s work that’s deeply connected to her own experience. After years of overthinking and putting pressure on herself to constantly achieve, she’s passionate about helping other women recognize that internal pressure and figure out what they actually want.
But Radiant & Rooted wasn’t something Sheena had always dreamed of building.
In fact, entrepreneurship wasn’t on her radar at all. She’d always imagined herself climbing the corporate ladder.
Climbing the Corporate Ladder and Adopting “High Achiever” as an Identity
A little over a year ago, Sheena was in the whirlwind of her corporate career. She worked for a global company with coverage from the UK all the way to Australia.
A typical workday lasted 10 to 12 hours and included at least eight meetings. She started answering emails and Slack messages first thing, with phone calls sometimes beginning as early as 6:30 a.m. Some nights, she worked until 9 or 10 p.m.
And part of her loved it.
Sheena had always been a high achiever. She saw herself as a hard worker. A productive person who was constantly improving. There was always another goal to reach or something else to accomplish.
But slowly, work started taking up more and more of her life. She distinctly remembers taking calls during school drop-off and pickup. She’d load the dogs into the car, put the meeting on her phone, and drive on autopilot.
She could be mid-sentence when her daughter climbed into the car. She’d quickly hit mute. “Hey, how's it going? Hope you had a good day. I’m on a call.” Then she'd drive home, get back on her computer, and continue the meeting.
Life outside of work became a blur.
“I was a mom when I could squeeze it in, which I hate that reflection, but that's the reality of what my life was,” Sheena told me.
At the time, it felt like she didn’t have a choice. That she couldn't say no.
Then she got laid off...
And despite everything, Sheena's first instinct wasn't to leave corporate life behind—it was to get back in.
Course Correcting After College Move-In Day
After the layoff, Sheena threw herself into the dreaded job search. She applied to hundreds of jobs, trying to get interviews, networking, and fighting her way back toward the corporate life she'd just left.
Then, at the end of August, she moved her 18-year-old daughter into college for her first year.
Watching her daughter step into adulthood made Sheena reflect on how different that stage of life had looked for her. She had her son when she was 19, so she went straight from high school to becoming a mom and working full-time.
When Sheena returned for family weekend a couple of months later, she saw her daughter building a life around what she wanted. She found her community and made intentional decisions about how she wanted to spend her time.
It put her job search into perspective.
What am I doing? I don't want any of this.
She was working so hard to get back to a life she already knew she didn't want.
When she stripped away everything else about her corporate career, there was only one thing she missed: the one-on-one conversations with her team. She loved helping people work through whatever they were trying to tackle or accomplish.
“I genuinely only want to talk to people and help them with whatever they're trying to tackle and accomplish. And then when I was like, well, what, what role is going to give that to me? That doesn't exist unless you work for yourself,” she says.
As Sheena started figuring out what she wanted her life to look like, she began working with a coach.
Starting Radiant & Rooted Coaching
Working with a coach created a major personal transformation for Sheena. She found so much value in having someone help her embrace a new perspective and grow into a life that better suited her.
She started thinking about how she could give other people that same kind of support.
And it lined up with the one part of her previous career she already knew she loved: helping people work through whatever they were trying to tackle and accomplish.
So Sheena decided to become a coach herself.
She completed certification programs in two different specialties and started building Radiant & Rooted Coaching. Her approach to coaching comes from putting what she's learned into practice in her own life and drawing from the experiences that have actually worked for her and her clients.
For Sheena, that means being willing to do the same work on herself that she asks her clients to do. She still invests in personal coaching focused on both business and mindset, which continues to challenge her perspective, help her grow, and even give her new ideas to bring into her own client work.
She loves watching what happens when her clients commit to doing that work for themselves.
“The person that I coach on day one is not the person I'm coaching on the last day,” Sheena says.
Many of her clients come to her feeling stuck or like they don't have a choice (just like she did). Over time, she watches them start seeing possibility and opportunity where they couldn't before.
The circumstances around them haven't necessarily changed, but they have.
Pushing Back on Imposter Syndrome
Even though Sheena has made major changes to how she lives and works, some of those old thought patterns still creep back in from time to time.
And building her own business has given them a whole new place to show up. When you're doing something nobody in your family has done before, imposter syndrome can get loud.
Especially when you're building a business in an industry that not everyone takes seriously. “I think there still is a portion of the population that'll think coaching is like some MLM or it's crazy or it's not real,” Sheena explains. Add being a lifelong high-achiever on top of that, and the voice in her head gets even louder.
For Sheena, they tend to fixate on one thing in particular: the timeline. They're familiar thoughts for one who spent so much time measuring herself by achievements.
You should be further along by now.
You should be making more than your previous salary.
You're behind.
You should be doing more.
Instead of automatically believing them, she's learned to question them.
Is that actually true? Prove it. Who made up this timeline? Where did it come from?
Getting curious and poking holes in those thoughts helps her quiet them.
Another thing that helps is the “You're Doing Amazing Things” file. Inside she keeps screenshots of compliments and kudos, along with other things she's proud of. It's tangible proof she can return to when the voice telling her she's behind gets particularly loud.
Changing careers didn't automatically change her thought patterns.
She's still learning how to recognize that high-achiever voice without letting it dictate what success is supposed to look like.
Finding the Line Between Pushing and Overdoing It
Building a business requires her to push harder now than she expects to in the long term. She's constantly weighing how much she needs to do today, this week, or this month to reach a point where she can eventually pull back and spend more time doing the things that light her up outside of work.
But after experiencing chronic burnout, she's conscious of not pushing herself right back into the life she worked so hard to change.
Sometimes, though, she finds herself swinging a little too far in the opposite direction. Like all of us, there are days when she doesn't feel like doing anything. In those moments, she reminds herself what the less-fun parts of building a business are helping her work toward.
She's learning that creating a life with more freedom doesn't mean she never has to push herself. It means figuring out when pushing herself moves her toward the life she wants and when it's pulling her back toward the one she left behind.
Right now, she's still figuring out where that line is. And that's totally ok.
Sheena’s Next Chapter
So, what's next for Sheena?
She'll continue to build Radiant & Rooted and explore what she wants the business to become.
Recently, she hosted her first in-person meetup at a coffee shop. A small group who had never met before showed up and jumped into open, vulnerable conversations together. Small talk be damned!
Sheena was blown away by the willingness of everyone to connect on a deeper level and is excited to see where it goes. She's already exploring ways to offer group coaching alongside her one-on-one work.
She's also leaving plenty of room for life outside of work. There will be more pickleball. (Maybe even a pickleball coaching certification someday!)
And, of course, plenty of time with her kids. Their schedules are busy, but she sees that busyness differently now. Instead of feeling like another heavy obligation on her plate, she gets to be an active part of it. “We're just doing life together, and it's fun,” she says.
If you want to connect with Sheena or support her business, you can find her here:
Be sure to check out Female Founder Features: Chapter 1 starring Holly Bantique! She’s the founder of Little Lemon Cookies and Calique Paperie & Design.
