WHO I AM

Hi, I'm Igal. You can call me Iggy.

I've rebuilt my life and my career more than once, on purpose, because staying somewhere that didn't fit wasn't getting me anywhere. That instinct is what I now help my clients act on.

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Iggy

That's what Jeff told me on Isabela Island, in the Galápagos, the only place on Earth with a pink iguana. He owns a special bar there, the Pink Iguana Bar. I understood exactly what he meant: the whole island made you want to stay. Wildlife everywhere, nothing rushed, space to actually think, to be present.

I couldn't stay. So I've tried to be an ambassador for that feeling ever since, wherever I go, in whatever I do. Including in the name of this practice.

Here's how it got its name.

When I decided to build a practice for the ADHD and LGBTQ+ communities, a standard name was never going to work. Naming it after myself was out, and so was any boardroom name built to sound safe.

People like us spend years trying to fit into boxes that were never built for us: told to tone down our colors, fix our rhythms, follow a script that ignores how our brains and hearts actually work. The name had to break that script. Bold. A little rebellious, even. Deeply meaningful.

I knew it also had to be rooted in nature, because that's true to how a lot of ADHD brains work. Psychologist Dr. Lara Honos-Webb calls it ecological consciousness: many people with ADHD are simply more tuned to the living world than neurotypical people are. Not a deficit. Attention, aimed somewhere most people don't look.

I felt it most in the Galápagos, swimming with sea lions and turtles, watching blue-footed boobies until I ran out of words. It reminded me we're one species among millions, built from the same stuff as everything else on it.

Pink is vibrant, visible, rooted in queer history and pride. For the LGBTQ+ community, living authentically means stepping out of the shadows.

That defiance has a soundtrack: “I Am What I Am,” the anthem at the heart of La Cage aux Folles since 1983. A drag queen refusing to shrink herself, or her color, for anyone's comfort.

In my sessions, your identity isn't something to manage or minimize. It's the foundation of your strength.

I named the coaching practice after the pink iguana: found on one volcano in the Galápagos, nowhere else on Earth. Only recognized as its own species in 2009. Rare. Thriving exactly where it is.

But it's actually her cousin who taught me one of the most important lessons I wanted the practice built on: sustainable change takes time. It doesn't happen overnight.

Millions of years ago, one Galápagos ancestor split into two lines. One stayed on land and became the pink iguana and her relatives. The other landed on islands with nothing to eat, and went into the ocean, not in a season, not in a lifetime, but one trait at a time, over millions of years, until diving into cold Pacific water became something its body could actually do.

Today the marine iguana grazes on algae off the rocks, then hauls itself out to warm up in the sun. The only lizard on Earth that does this. It didn't become a fish. It didn't stop being an iguana. What changed was the range of places it could feed itself, and it changed at the pace real change happens: slow, then all at once, in the right conditions.

Change to survive a room that doesn't like you, and that's masking. It costs you.

Change to reach something you actually want, and that's range. It gives you something back.