I'm Ruben Dario Martinez, and my life's mission is to be the candle that lights people's inner fuel on fire.

I was formally trained as a coach in 2018, but allow me to share my story in order to explain this lifelong obsession:

I was born out of wedlock in the Bronx, NY, and grew up with an older brother and our mom. As first-generation Dominican Americans living in subsidized housing, “being successful” was nothing but a nebulous dream. 

Today I’m a happily married college graduate, homeowner, entrepreneur, and life coach. My brother’s an incredibly accomplished software engineer and our mom is financially stable. I have a great relationship with my dad, siblings, and amazing family from his side. On paper my life worked out perfectly.

I started this site to share lessons learned in this roller coaster because my life—like yours—has never been perfect. In fact, I believe pretending life even could or should be perfect is exactly what paralyzes us from improving it in the first place. 

I’ve learned the importance and life-giving power of taking up space in your own body, owning your truth, and evolving from your mistakes and circumstances to make an even better future. It’s a lifelong obsession and helping others through this process is exactly what drew me to coaching. I call it Self Actualization Coaching.

I started this after years of only doing in-person, private 1:1 coaching. I realized that time with me was getting prohibitively expensive for people who grew up like me. My life’s mission reminds me to share this obsession as accessibly as I can in hopes that people like me don’t ever, ever give up on themselves. 

Self actualization coaching involves having really hard conversations with yourself—not in service of judgment, but in service of your personal growth and transformation. As James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Our time together won’t be painless or easy. That’s because sitting with hard questions and pursuing your best self never is. What I can promise you is that on the other side of hard questions come new possibilities, and from those possibilities arrive new choices.

We can no longer control anything that happened before this very moment, but we can start to make choices that influence what happens next.

Thank you for believing in your human capacity to evolve, and for trusting me to play a role in your self actualization.

Enjoy your stay 🤟🏽

Ruben