Elisabet Barnes PhD

Coaching for people who perform well and are beginning to wonder why it feels like a cage

 

I work with leaders, founders, and high-performing professionals who are successful by conventional standards — and are beginning to question what that success has required them to suppress.

They have built something, led something, endured something. They are competent, self-aware, and by most measures — winning. And yet something is asking a question they haven't quite let themselves hear.

I work at the intersection of endurance, identity, desire, and power. I examine what it actually means to live and lead from choice rather than conditioning.

My background is deliberately unconventional.

I have won the Marathon des Sables — 250km across the Sahara — twice. Not as a metaphor for resilience. As a physical reality, in extreme heat, at the edge of what the body and mind will tolerate. I know what genuine limits look like, and I know what happens to people when they finally meet one.

I also hold a PhD in Clinical Sexology. My research examined how deeply cultural and social conditioning shapes identity — particularly around power, sexuality, and gender — and how invisible that conditioning remains until it is deliberately surfaced.

We absorb scripts about who we are allowed to be, what we are permitted to want, what constitutes success, loyalty, possibility. We mistake them for character. We call them values. We don't examine their origins.

This is where my work begins. The arenas differ. The depth does not.

I work with a small number of people at a time. Choose the path that calls you — or contact me if you're not yet sure which door is yours.

  • Endurance and Capacity — UltraCoach

    For those who want to meet themselves through physical challenge — where discomfort is non-negotiable and feedback is immediate.

    Ultra-marathons are crucibles. Environments that strip away status, certainty, and performance — and reveal how you actually function when conditions are hostile and no one is watching.

    This is where self-trust is either built or exposed.

  • Identity and Freedom — Rise Unscripted

    For those ready to confront and dismantle the conditioning that shapes their sexuality, relationships, desire, and sense of self — and live with greater agency, honesty, and aliveness.

    This is intimate and provocative work for people willing to tell the truth — first to themselves.

    It is not about self-improvement.
    It is about self-reclamation.