The Alchemy of Becoming: A Guide to Growing into You
Introduction: Where is Your Teacher?
I became a step-parent overnight. My fiancé and her two daughters moved in 5 months ago, and suddenly, I was no longer a successful coach, award winning entrepreneur, or recognized author—I was a student, a child, a friend, a romantic partner, a stepparent and so much more. The lessons I’ve learned have reshaped my understanding of what it means to grow, heal, and thrive.
This isn’t a story about parenting. It’s about how life’s changes & challenges become our greatest teachers, and how personal transformation isn’t a solo journey—it’s a collective dance.
This guide is for anyone who wants to break free from limiting patterns, cultivate deeper relationships, and step into a more meaningful life— for yourself, for the people you love and the world you influence.
1. The Foundation: Humility as Your Superpower
Growth begins when we admit we don’t have all the answers. My transition into step-parenting stripped away my “expert” identity. I’m having to relearn everything every day.
20 years of coaching 30,000+ people, writing 12 books, and studying human behavior mean little in the face of the everyday reality of being part of a new family. When I work with clients, the interaction is limited in time and space, of mutual accord, and with a clear transaction defined in advance. Living with my new family, I’m confronted with myself 24/7, and I have to see myself through a thousand more lenses than I ever have before. Every day is a blessing for growth and becoming a better version of myself.
At first, I failed because I believed I could do parenting and wife-ing. My fiancé helped me wake up from this illusion and helped me realize I had to go back to doing for myself, what I had helped so many do through coaching. The questions I’m re-learning to ask myself isn’t what I can do for them, but what I need to do for myself. The question isn’t what they need from me, but what I need from myself. The focus isn’t on what I can do to help them heal, but what they’re doing everyday to help me heal.
Humility isn’t weakness—it’s the courage to say, “I don’t know, and I’ll try.” Admitting “I don’t know” doesn’t undermine authority—it humanizes it. Humility as power is realizing I’m here to heal me, and in doing so, I’m healing others.
Growth is non-negotiable. When we stop evolving, we stagnate—and stagnation harms everyone around us. Change happens everyday, whether we want it or not, the direction and quality of our everyday changes is up to us. We can stir change so that it’s the construction of a cathedral or a garbage dump, a butterfly sanctuary or a bareland.
2. The Interconnected Self: You Don’t Heal in a Vacuum
Growing up as a straight white boy, I internalized societal messages about what was “acceptable” for me because I wasn’t a girl. I transitioned at the age of 35, and my mother defensively told me, “I never taught you those stereotypes”. I replied “Whether it’s true or not, I didn’t live in a vacuum. I went to school, watched TV, and absorbed messages I couldn’t ignore about who I was allowed to be.
Most of the big and small traumas we experience through our lives don’t happen as a solo act.
Healing requires me to confront not just my own pain but the systems that caused it—and to rebuild my sense of self alongside people who see and love me fully. Understanding the systems that caused my pains and traumas took me on a never-ending journey. I quickly became faced with the realization that there isn’t one system that caused my trauma. The causes of my traumas have come from systems that are political, social, parental, biological, economic, religious, artistic, historical, cultural, and so many more.
Personal growth is often framed as an individual pursuit: “Fix yourself, and everything else will fall into place.” But this is a myth. We are shaped by our relationships, communities, and cultural contexts. Healing doesn’t happen as a solo act. Healing happens by walking alone with a community within society.
Your environment is a co-author of your story. To grow, you must critically examine the “scripts” you inherited—from family, media, or societal norms–otherwise you’re doomed to grow within the same stories of hurt and pain you lived in your childhood.
Healing is relational. You cannot outthink trauma; you must out-relate it through safe connections. The relations we create with others is part of how we heal.
Others can’t heal us, as much as we can’t heal without others.
3. The Courage to Unlearn: Breaking Generational Chains
“We learn to love from our parents… If we say all you need is love, we risk repeating their patterns—the good and the bad.”
It’s not that all you need is love, but that we all need love.
All of us carry inherited wounds. Maybe your family avoided conflict, equated love with control, or silenced vulnerability. Growth means asking: “What cycles am I here to break?”. Breaking our own cycle happens by giving ourselves more love. And it’s an illusion one can give oneself all the love one needs. We’re inherently social beings, and we need love from others. Finding love for ourselves helps us be open to receiving love from others.
Your triggers are signposts. When a child’s defiance or a partner’s criticism sends you into a tailspin, ask: “Whose voice am I hearing? When did I first hear this?”
4. The Renaissance Approach: Cultivating Wholeness
“Being a human is about being the interconnectedness of everything”
Leonardo da Vinci is the most famous of the Renaissance people for his ability to see everything as one giant web rather than individual silos. For him, science and arts are one thing, as are the study of nature and engineering.
Modern society glorifies specialization. The better you are at one thing, the more money you make. But thriving as a human requires versatility. You don’t need to excel at everything—you need to nurture enough competency across key areas to create harmony.
My experience as a step-parent makes this infinitely more clear. One has to be emotionally available, and setting boundaries, mastering finances and logistics, being a friend and family, being a romantic partner and a co-parent, being a lover and loving oneself, building a home together and thriving as an individual, and so much more.
I’m learning that parenting isn’t something we do to children, it’s something we do to ourselves. In the same way that being a good lover isn’t something we do to someone else, it’s something we do to ourselves. And in both cases, others benefit from us doing it to ourselves.
5. The Legacy of Loneliness: When the Healer Needs Healing
Coaching owners of multimillion dollar companies is infinitely more difficult than being a parent, but infinitely easier than parenting. Being a parent requires only having a child and keeping it alive. Parenting is the art of healing ourselves for the purpose of giving children a better life than ours.
As a healer, I trained myself to hold space for others. But what happens when I’m the one struggling? My journey exposed me to the paradox of expertise: the more we know, the harder it can be to admit we’re lost. One of my roles as a step-parent is to hold space for my fiancé when she needs it, and my step-children when they need it. But when I can’t hold space for them because I need someone to hold space for me, what do I do?
Nobody can be for others all the time. Nobody can be for oneself all the time. In Africa, the Nigerian Igbo gave us the gift of beautiful wisdom: “It takes a village to raise a child”. We’re all children, and we all need a village. One of the common mistakes is believing we have to be the entire village for ourselves and for others.
On the day that my fiancé and I were both overwhelmed and lost, it was the youngest who held space for us. From the height of 8 years old, she gave hugs, encouraged us to eat, kept us hydrated, and gave each one of us a positive motivational talk. Seeing everyone in the village as a valuable member, who both takes and gives, helps us reconcile with our vulnerability and need for help and love.
My story taught me to critique the myth of self-sufficiency. I did everything I could to be 100% independent and self-sufficient, and it was a major failure. I moved to the middle of nowhere in Costa Rica, and I was going to build a life that would mean I would never need another human being. Solar panels meant I was going to have free electricity. But it requires people to maintain them unless I learn to. The same goes for food, water, and everything else that needed to be built.
Living alone in the middle of nowhere with more trees and monkeys than humans, I discovered that true healing emerges in solitude and community. The quest for self-sufficiency is perfect when balanced with recognizing and appreciating the love we create through chosen family, friends, loved ones, and people we work with.
6. The Discipline of Joy: Relearning Play as an Act of Rebellion
“Joy is not a feeling, it’s a daily practice.”
In a productivity-obsessed world, prioritizing joy can feel immature and unreasonable. Play is a form of resistance—a way to reclaim aliveness from systems that reduce us to roles or outputs. Play is presence. When I’m obsessing with work and responsibilities, my fiancé reminds me that children aren’t distractions from “real life”—they’re masters of living.
When I lived in London, I was approached by a charity to become one of their Trustees. They’re the Play Association of Tower Hamlet, and they taught me the difference between playing a game and play. Games have a goal, rules, winners and losers. Play is the creative process we go through when we enjoy turning our imagination into reality, without any goals beyond joy, without rigid rules because play creates and recreates them on the spot, and nobody wins or loses because everyone enjoys. Thanks to the years I spent helping the Play Association of Tower Hamlet, I learned that play creates a joy of living and that joy is subversive. Joy defies the lie that our worth is tied to utility.
“Growth isn’t one grand gesture of public celebration—it’s what you do every day when it’s 7 AM and you’re exhausted, or at 10 PM when you’re frustrated.”
Lasting change happens in the mundane moments. Bring joy and play to the everyday moments of stress, anxiety, anger, and other uncomfortable emotions, and all problems will turn into a wonderful story of healing, learning, growth, and a series of successes between failures.
7. The Unfinished Work: Making Peace with the Journey
“The goal isn’t to arrive. It’s to become more you with every step.”
Growth isn’t linear. Some days, you’re the coach proudly guiding others; others, you’re ashamed to be the parent snapping at your kids. The truth about our journeys normalizes the messiness of becoming—and the courage it takes to keep showing up.
Your scars are your syllabus. The parts of you that feel most broken are often where you’ll find most peace, love, and happiness as you heal. From meeting with love and curiosity the parts of us we feel most fear and pain, we often gain the deepest wisdom.
Conclusion: The Collective Journey
“We’re all in this together… When we share our struggles, we give others permission to heal.”
Growth isn’t about fixing yourself—it’s about showing up authentically, messily, and relentlessly for the people and purpose that matter. Whether you’re a parent, partner, healer, or a human yearning to feel alive, remember: "Whenever You Heal Yourself, You Heal the World"
As I navigate step-parenting, I’m learned that our job isn’t to “mold” children, in the same way that learning to love ourselves isn’t to “mold” ourselves. It’s to model what it means to be flawed beyond our love, curious about our mistakes, and fiercely committed to growth. Some days, we fail. And when we focus our attention on learning, every failure is a step towards some new unexpected success.
Final Call to Action
Your story is a living, breathing manifesto—not of answers, but of radical questions. The world needs more guides who dare to say, “I’m still learning.” As you deepen this work, remember: The most profound growth happens in the spaces between certainty and doubt, between healing and brokenness. Keep bridging those gaps—for yourself, and for those walking beside you.
Choose one practice from this guide and commit to it for 3 days. Then, share your story with someone—a friend, a journal, or a stranger online. If you publish your story, tag me and I’ll comment and/or repost it. Your voice matters. Together, we rewrite the narrative of what it means to grow, heal, and belong.
The next step of your journey begins now. What will you do differently today?
Practice Ideas for the Alchemy of Becoming: A Guide to Growing into You
- The “Unmasking” Experiment:
- Spend one hour daily doing something that feels authentically you—no performative smiles, no scripting conversations. Notice what arises.
- Vulnerability Inventory:
- List 3 things you’ve avoided admitting (even to yourself). Share one with a trusted person.
- Interdependence Challenge:
- Ask for help with a task you’d normally do alone. Observe the emotions that surface.
- Play Prescription:
- Schedule 15 minutes daily for purposeless joy: dance, doodle, cloud-watch.
- Generational Dialogue:
- Interview an elder about their struggles and dreams. How does their story mirror or diverge from yours?
Unconditional with Mercy
In a world where gender, identity, and self-expression are evolving rapidly, Unconditional with Mercy offers parents a compassionate roadmap for navigating these changes with wisdom, strength, and love. Written by coach and guide Mercedes Noam Kostucki (Mercy), this heartfelt book invites families into a deeper understanding of what it means to support their children—especially those exploring gender identity—without conditions, expectations, or fear.
Drawing on personal experience, stories from families she’s helped, and practical coaching insights, Mercy equips parents with the emotional tools they need to listen, connect, and grow alongside their child. Each chapter combines vulnerable storytelling with thoughtful guidance, empowering parents to lead with curiosity, remain anchored in love, and create homes where every person feels truly seen.
Whether you’re just beginning to ask questions or seeking to deepen an already supportive relationship, Unconditional with Mercy is a grace-filled companion on the journey to unconditional love.