Meet Jen, your coach

Practical, compassionate coaching for emotional eating, weight management, and lasting behavior change.

I’m Jen Rives, MA, LMFT, founder of Insights Coaching. I help people who are tired of knowing what they want to do, doing it for a while, and then finding themselves back in familiar patterns.

I understand that experience professionally, but I also understand it personally. I knew that cycle well: getting “on track,” losing momentum, and getting off track for days, weeks, months, or sometimes much longer. I knew what I was supposed to do. Knowing was never the problem.

What eventually changed wasn’t that I found a perfect plan or became perfectly consistent.

It was learning how to return.

That experience has profoundly shaped the way I think about behavior change—and the way I coach.

What it’s like to work with me

We’ll work together as a team. I’ll bring structure, curiosity, ideas, accountability, encouragement, and a deep toolbox of knowledge and practical strategies developed through more than 16 years of helping people understand and change patterns that keep them stuck. You’ll bring your experiences, your goals, and your growing understanding of yourself.

Clients often describe me as warm, compassionate, real, and direct without being pushy. I gently challenge because sometimes we need someone else to help us see what we’re doing. But you’ll never need to pretend you’re doing better than you are. You can show up after a great week or after everything went sideways, and we’ll pick up right where we left off.

I’m naturally curious and practical. I enjoy understanding why something works, breaking overwhelming challenges into manageable next steps, and creating worksheets and handouts that turn our conversations into everyday action. I’m also flexible: if something isn’t helping or life changes, we adjust the plan.

I believe growth doesn’t have to feel heavy all the time.

Working on ourselves is already hard—why make it harder than it needs to be? There’s room for humor, perspective, compassion, and the recognition that we’re all human and none of us does this perfectly

Why I created Insights Coaching

After more than 16 years as a licensed marriage and family therapist, I kept seeing the same struggle in different forms. People wanted to change their eating, drinking, exercise, spending, routines, relationships, or other habits. They often knew what they wanted to do—and still had tremendous difficulty doing it consistently.

I’ve experienced that gap myself, and one question continues to fascinate me:

Why is change so difficult, even when we genuinely want it?

I’ve come to believe that sustainable change depends on several things working together: flexible structure, practice, accountability, support, and the ability to adjust and return.

Rigid plans work beautifully—until they don’t. Miss a few days, fall out of your routine, have a difficult week, and suddenly getting started again can feel enormous, even impossible. Instead of trying to return to the whole plan at once, sometimes the most useful question is: What is the smallest step that gets you moving again?

A ten-minute walk instead of the full workout. One meal that supports your goals instead of waiting until Monday to “start over.” One small action that interrupts the shame-and-avoidance cycle and helps you begin again.

That philosophy became the foundation of Insights Coaching.

How I think about change

I don’t believe people struggle with change because they’re lazy, weak, or don’t want it badly enough. Human behavior is much more complex than that.

Sometimes we need better structure or stronger accountability. Sometimes we need to examine the thoughts that keep changing our course of action. And sometimes a behavior we desperately want to change is also doing something for us—helping us manage stress, overwhelm, boredom, sadness, fear, or other uncomfortable experiences. Simply taking the behavior away doesn’t necessarily take away the need it was meeting.

That means I’m not interested in pushing you harder simply for the sake of pushing. Sometimes we’ll challenge. Sometimes we’ll problem-solve. Sometimes we’ll make the goal smaller. And sometimes slowing down is the most productive thing you can do.

My work is informed by Cognitive Behavioral Coaching, the Formation Framework, and the Murmuration Principle—three approaches that help us understand what gets in the way, build supportive structure, and keep adjusting as real life unfolds.

What you can expect

Coaching with me is practical, educational, playful, creative, and active. We’ll talk about what happened between sessions—not to grade your performance, but to learn from it. When something works, we’ll pay attention to why it worked. When it doesn’t, we’ll get curious instead of critical: What got in the way? What could make the next attempt easier?

Accountability matters to me, but it’s not about pressure or perfection. It’s about staying connected to what matters to you and having support when you begin to drift.

Over time, my hope is that you’ll trust yourself more—because you’ll have built the skills and support systems that help you find your way back.

Coaching and therapy are distinct

Although my background as a licensed therapist informs how I understand people and behavior change, Insights Coaching is a separate service and is not psychotherapy.

Coaching is practical, educational, skills-based, and future-focused. We focus on developing skills, strengthening habits, improving follow-through, and working toward personally meaningful goals. Coaching does not diagnose or treat mental health conditions.

If another form of support would better meet your needs, I’ll be direct about that.

Begin with a consultation

If you’ve spent years feeling as though you know what to do but struggle to do it consistently, I understand how frustrating—and sometimes discouraging—that can become.

You don’t need to arrive perfectly motivated or have everything figured out. We can start with where you are.

During your complimentary 20-minute consultation, we’ll talk about what you hope to change, where you tend to get stuck, and whether Insights Coaching feels like the right kind of support.

Get Started with Coaching