What happens when capable people have the knowledge to succeed but lack the confidence to share their ideas, the creativity to handle new challenges, or the self-awareness to lead effectively?
Without these qualities, individuals may hesitate to take initiative, teams can struggle to communicate and collaborate, and organizations may miss valuable ideas and potential. Often, the answer is not more knowledge, but the right environment where people can build confidence, explore their strengths, take meaningful risks, and turn their potential into action.
Creating these opportunities through the powerful combination of theatre, education, and transformational coaching is Natalia Jansen, MFA, Founder, Speaker, Educator, and Author at Starring In Your Life. With more than two decades of experience in theatre education, she brings together curriculum development, teacher coaching, storytelling, improvisation, and experiential learning to support personal and professional growth.
Under her leadership, Starring In Your Life is extending theatre-based learning into education, leadership development, and workplaces, helping people develop stronger communication, empathy, adaptability, creativity, and confidence. Her work has already delivered measurable results, including a teacher who, after one coaching session, gained the confidence to advocate for her professional value and secured $12,000 in additional annual compensation.
As Natalia continues her dissertation research and develops a future certification program, her work is helping educators, coaches, facilitators, and leaders recognize their abilities, use their voices, and take an active role in shaping their lives and careers.
From Educator to Transformational Coach
Natalia’s journey toward building Starring In Your Life began with a desire to create work that reflected her purpose and allowed her to make a meaningful difference, one person at a time. Her connection with theater began at the age of 15, eventually leading her to pursue a BA and MFA in Theatre Directing. Her career later took an unexpected turn into education, where she found a way to stay connected to theater while building a stable career and being present for her daughters as a single mother.
The pandemic gave Natalia an opportunity to step back and reflect on what she truly wanted. Although she appeared strong and accomplished, she felt unfulfilled and realized that motherhood and other responsibilities had caused her to put her own aspirations aside. She began to recognize that she had been playing a supporting role in her own life.
Determined to reconnect with her sense of purpose, Natalia Jansen turned to the Brave Thinking Institute, where she became certified as a DreamBuilder Coach and Life Mastery Consultant. She first applied the transformational principles to her own life before bringing them to others. This experience shaped her belief that every life experience offers lessons about who people are and what they want to create. Today, she encourages others to take responsibility for their choices, rewrite limiting patterns, and confidently step into a more meaningful role in their own lives.
Theatre as a Practice Ground for Being Human
Natalia’s approach brings together theatre, transformational coaching, and embodied learning to help people grow in ways that go beyond traditional training. She sees theater as a space to “practice being human,” where people can strengthen presence, self-awareness, deep listening, creativity, empathy, collaboration, and the confidence to handle uncertainty.
Her methodology encourages people to look closely at the beliefs and expectations that have shaped them, decide what role they want to play, and take greater ownership of their lives. Through improvisation, storytelling, reflection, and hands-on exercises, participants do not simply learn new concepts; they practice new ways of thinking, communicating, and leading.
Skills Natalia Helps People Develop:
- Confidence and self-awareness
- Deep listening and communication
- Creativity and problem-solving
- Empathy and collaboration
- Adaptability and presence
- Personal agency and decision-making
- Comfort with uncertainty and meaningful risk-taking
Her dissertation research further explores how confidence and personal agency can grow through participation, healthy risk-taking, self-expression, interaction, and identity exploration. Her book, Your Amazing Itty Bitty The Joy Code Book, adds another important element by highlighting joy as a source of energy, resilience, and possibility. Together, these ideas form an approach that focuses on the whole person and recognizes that individual growth is closely connected to the well-being of the people around them.
Mentorship and Learning Outside Four Walls
For more than two decades, Natalia Jansen has built her career as a theater educator and arts ambassador in public education. She has developed curricula, lesson plans, and learning goals for students, has coached theatre teachers, and has helped classroom educators use arts-based strategies to improve engagement, academic rigor, and cognitive development. One of her biggest challenges has been recognizing that this experience has value beyond the classroom and can contribute to leadership development, team building, and workplace growth.
Moving from education into entrepreneurship, coaching, training, and thought leadership required her to step outside familiar boundaries. She had to become more visible, trust her voice, and communicate the value of an approach that does not always follow traditional corporate models. These experiences strengthened her as a courageous, adaptable, and compassionate leader.
Today, Natalia Jansen creates environments where people feel safe, trusted, and valued for their ideas and perspectives. She believes creativity grows when people have the freedom to take meaningful risks, collaborate openly, and learn from their experiences. Her own journey reflects the same principle she teaches others: embrace uncertainty, trust your abilities, and take an active role in shaping your path.
Creating Space for Confidence and Growth
Clients often experience meaningful breakthroughs during workshops and improvisational activities. By encouraging presence, deep listening, adaptability, and open thinking, improvisation helps participants see challenges differently, reduce stress, and discover solutions they may not have considered before.
These experiences show how the right environment can give people the confidence to take risks, trust their abilities, and create positive change.
One example is a teacher who worked with Natalia Jansen during a single coaching session. The experience helped her recognize her professional value and communicate it with greater confidence. Feeling empowered to advocate for herself, she approached her employer and secured an additional $12,000 in annual compensation.
While the financial outcome was significant, the greater achievement was the change in how she viewed herself. She stopped downplaying her contributions, recognized her worth, and took action.
This reflects the central focus of Natalia’s work: Recognize your value. Trust your voice. Take action.
Keeping Human Skills at the Heart of the Workplace
As technology takes on more administrative, clerical, and analytical responsibilities, human qualities such as creativity, empathy, compassion, collaboration, and individual perspective are becoming increasingly important in the workplace. These qualities are no longer simply considered soft skills; they are essential for effective leadership and meaningful workplace relationships.
This shift also creates greater space for people to use their imagination, communicate with purpose, solve problems creatively, and build genuine connections. Rather than viewing technology as a replacement for human creativity, Starring In Your Life sees it as a supporting tool that can help organize information, simplify research, and encourage new ideas. At the same time, people remain responsible for bringing judgment, imagination, ethics, purpose, and emotional intelligence to their work.
Through theatre-based and experiential learning, Starring In Your Life helps professionals and organizations prepare for these changing expectations. Improvisation, storytelling, role-play, and reflection help participants build confidence, adaptability, active listening, empathy, creative problem-solving, and the ability to handle uncertainty. By creating safe and supportive spaces where people feel valued, the approach helps organizations bring together technological efficiency and human strengths to build more creative, connected, and effective workplaces.
The Power of Theatre
As a speaker and thought leader, Natalia Jansen works to broaden the understanding of arts education, particularly theatre, as an important tool for developing social skills, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, confidence, and personal agency. Her work through speaking, mentoring, research, and collaboration focuses on creating environments where people can explore, express themselves, take meaningful risks, and grow.
She believes children benefit greatly from safe and supportive spaces where they can play, create, and discover their strengths. These experiences help them build confidence, develop a positive sense of self, and strengthen their ability to communicate and connect with others. She also sees creativity as valuable far beyond the arts, as it influences how people in fields such as science, design, healthcare, education, and business think, communicate, innovate, and solve problems.
For adults, she believes play, curiosity, and creative expression can be equally important. Everyday responsibilities can sometimes leave little room for exploration, making people less curious and connected to their authentic selves. By sharing research, practical strategies, and personal experience, she encourages people to bring more creativity and purpose into their lives while helping develop leaders who are confident, compassionate, resilient, and ready to navigate change.
Creating Safe Spaces for Meaningful Personal Growth
Natalia Jansen highlights that every client is the best authority on their own life. Her approach is built on confidentiality, clear ethical boundaries, and thoughtful guidance. Rather than telling clients what to do, she helps them recognize blind spots, reflect on their choices, and trust their judgment. Regular feedback also helps her improve her programs, strengthen client relationships, and create lasting growth based on each person’s strengths and abilities.
Looking ahead, her vision for Starring In Your Life is to expand theatre-based experiential learning across education, leadership development, and the workplace. She is currently developing her dissertation proposal, with plans to publish the findings and use the research as the foundation for a comprehensive certification program. The program would equip educators, coaches, facilitators, and organizational leaders with practical methods to create safe and engaging spaces that build confidence, creativity, emotional intelligence, collaboration, and personal agency. Her larger goal is to build a community of trained practitioners who can carry this approach into their own communities and workplaces, extending its impact and helping more people take an active role in their lives.
Snapshot of Daily Routine
- Early Morning — 5:00 a.m.: Practices gratitude, meditation, prayer, yoga or strength training, and cares for her cats.
- Start of Workday — 7:00–8:00 a.m.: Prepares her daughters for school, makes breakfast and lunches, drops her daughter at school, and heads to work.
- Midday — 12:00 p.m.: Takes a short walk or spends quiet time outdoors to reset and recharge.
- Key Work Priorities — 3:30–6:30 p.m.: Works on her dissertation research, coaches, writes, supports her daughters’ activities, and develops the Theatre Heritage Gallery with her creative team.
- Evening — 7:00–9:00 p.m.: Spends quality time with her daughters over dinner, conversations, and occasional entertainment.
- Night / Wind-down — 9:30–10:30 p.m.: Cares for her cats, practices self-care, journals, visualizes future goals, and reads before bed.
Throughout the Day: Pays attention to how she feels, pauses when she notices tension, and takes time to reset before continuing.
Stop Waiting and Start Believing in Your Potential
Natalia’s advice to aspiring educators, coaches, entrepreneurs, and leaders is to stop waiting for permission, perfect circumstances, or outside recognition. She believes everyone already carries the wisdom, creativity, and ability needed to build a meaningful life. What matters is staying curious, listening to oneself, trusting one’s abilities, and having the courage to act on what feels meaningful.
She encourages people to learn from every experience, including difficult and unexpected ones, as each can reveal their strengths, values, and direction. The knowledge gained through education, work, relationships, and life should never be underestimated, as every individual’s unique perspective can become a source of meaningful contribution. She also believes effective leadership means creating spaces where people feel safe, valued, and confident enough to be themselves, while balancing compassion with courage and keeping curiosity, playfulness, and continuous learning alive.
Above all, Natalia Jansen encourages people to take responsibility for the role they choose in their lives, trust their voice, and actively shape their own path. Her leadership journey is captured in one powerful thought:
“Stop waiting in the wings for your life to begin. Rewrite the script, trust the wisdom within you, and step boldly into the starring role only you can play.”
Quick Takes
1. One tool or app you would recommend:
ChatGPT as a collaborative partner for researching, organizing information, synthesizing ideas, and expanding creative possibilities.
2. One quote that motivates you the most:
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
Albert Einstein
3. One piece of advice for upcoming entrepreneurs and future leaders:
Trust your unique perspective, take full responsibility for your vision, and stop waiting for permission to begin.
4. One book everyone in business or leadership should experience:
The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks—a powerful invitation to move beyond limiting beliefs, embrace your full potential, and create success rooted in purpose and authenticity.
Natalia Jansen’s 5 Impactful Business Mantras
- Create an environment where people can grow, take risks, and thrive.
- Trust your unique perspective and turn your potential into action.
- Use creativity, empathy, and confidence to lead through change.
- Learn from every experience and let it shape a stronger path forward.
- Lead with courage, create meaningful connections, and help others recognize their potential.
