From Accounting Ledgers to Life Coaching: How Anne Wooten Let Go of the 'Why' and Found Her Calling

She was 63 years old, sitting at a desk surrounded by the quiet collapse of the team she'd built her work life around, and Anne Wooten knew something had to break — either her or her silence before God.

It was early 2023. Two senior colleagues on her accounting team had given their notice within weeks of each other. The company was about to hand management of their region to a team in California. For anyone else, it might have felt like the floor giving way. For Anne, it felt like a door finally closing — one she had been afraid to close herself.

"I could see signs coming," she says, "but the stress kept building because I kept putting off making any kind of decision. I was not at peace with making a decision."

What happened next didn't look dramatic from the outside. There was no burning bush, no thunderclap. Just a woman on her birthday, alone at 6:45 in the morning, on her knees in tears — and then, suddenly, at peace.

The peace comes from being reconciled with God, but not the clarity. I gave Him my yes. I am leaving accounting for good.

That morning marked the end of nearly 50 years in accounting and the beginning of something Anne could not yet fully name. What she didn't realize was that God had been building toward this moment for years — through a Canadian actor, a blog title that arrived while she was brushing her teeth, two rainbows on an ordinary Saturday, and decades of buried pain she had never wanted to face.

The Weight Beneath the Work

Anne grew up as the daughter of a World War II veteran who ran his own small accounting firm. She was practically raised in that office, watching her parents work side by side during the relentless pace of tax season. The numbers were always there. So was a quieter ache she wouldn't name for a long time.

"I saw my friends and their parents and the relationship they had," she recalls. "I thought, Mom and Dad, you should be telling me all the time that you love me and encouraging me." Her parents loved her — she knows that now — but her father was a man of his generation, shaped by hardship and stoicism. Her mother was strong and independent. Neither offered the verbal affirmation a young girl's heart was quietly keeping score of.

Anne was saved at 12. Her faith was real. But when God isn't the primary anchor of our identity, we search for it elsewhere. For Anne, that search played out as decades of people-pleasing — in her career, in her friendships, in the quiet interior of her own heart.

"When God was not the primary focus of my faith, I people-pleased to try to get immediate validation, affirmation, and identity," she says. "Pride comes forth, and we put ourselves above God. When the reasons behind all of that stay buried and unforgiven, that stuff festers."

She carried it through a ten-year run at a major international construction firm, through two acquisition mergers and a sell-off, through years of multifamily housing development projects, through a career that by most measures looked successful. But by 2019, the weight had become unbearable. She stopped going to church. Stopped praying. Stopped reading Scripture.

"I never wanted to admit it. I did not want to deal with it."

One evening, alone in her home, she whispered to the walls: I am just tired of this. I am tired of trying. I want to give up.

She is quick to clarify what she meant. It wasn't despair in its darkest sense — it was exhaustion. The kind that precedes surrender. And surrender, it turns out, was exactly what God was waiting for.

Two Rainbows and a Triangle of Forgiveness

What followed that whispered prayer was a slow, deliberate unraveling of everything Anne had buried. She found a new church home after hearing a youth pastor preach — on only her second visit — that we are our own worst enemies. She recognized the message immediately. God had already been saying exactly that to her.

But the deeper work came on a quiet Saturday when she drove to her parents' gravesite, her mother already gone for over a decade, her heart finally ready to do what she'd been avoiding: forgive.

"The hardest thing for us to do is forgive ourselves," she says. "But if we invite God into it, He helps release the guilt and shame." She stood at the grave and did what she now calls the Triangle of Forgiveness — releasing bitterness toward her parents, releasing guilt toward herself, and releasing the whole tangled knot to God.

On the drive there, she spotted a low-arching rainbow in the direction she was headed. On the quiet, oddly empty four-lane road, she stopped just long enough to photograph it. On the drive home, she asked God — gently, without demanding — for a tangible sign if it was His will to give one.

I said, God, humans love tangible signs, physical things we can hang onto. But I know Your will is to be done, not mine. If it is Your will, just provide it. If not, I am okay with it, because I felt at peace.

Pulling into her subdivision, a second rainbow arched over the entire neighborhood. From where she sat, it appeared centered directly over her house. She still has both photographs on her phone.

"That propelled me," she says. "My faith grew during the safety restrictions instead of just dying on the vine."

One Day at a Time — A Title That Arrived While Brushing Her Teeth

The next few years unfolded with the kind of layered, unlikely grace that makes you believe God genuinely enjoys the details. A Canadian television drama led Anne to a podcast, which led her to an online community of writers, which led her to start writing poetry — a form she had disliked all her life. A private message from a cousin she'd never discussed any of this with pointed her toward a faith-based coaching certification. A beta entrepreneurship course introduced her to the concept of life coaching for the very first time.

And a blog title arrived while she was brushing her teeth at a beach house, praying under a deadline: One Day at a Time.

"I came out and told my friend, I am supposed to do the blog," Anne laughs. "I found out how to set it up on Substack and just said, coming soon."

That blog became a healing space — a place where an accountant-turned-writer learned to be transparent, to process grief and faith in public, and to discover that her own story was, in fact, the thing she was being called to share with others. When she attended Proverbs 31 Ministries' She Speaks conference in 2023, she came away with one clear directive: write a devotional book. She had no idea what it would be. But she kept walking.

Her coach, Francine Ivey of Consumed Coaching LLC, told her plainly: "Your story is what you are going to be coaching." Looking back at eighteen months of blog posts, Anne saw it clearly. She had already been coaching. She just hadn't known the word for it yet.

The 5F Framework: From Defeated to Daily

Today, Anne Wooten is a Certified Christian Life Coach, the author of two published books — Where Faith Takes Flight and the devotional The Red Letter Code: A 31-Day Journey Unlocking the Blueprint to Your Identity in Christ — and a third collection of 99 faith-based poems titled Where the Heart Turns Home. She coaches women one-on-one, specializing in those who feel stuck, defeated, and unable to find the root of why.

Her coaching framework — the 5Fs — moves clients through Faith, Fear, Forgiveness, Freedom, and finally, a Fervent daily walk with Christ. It's not a formula. It's the map Anne herself walked, plotted in hindsight from her own years of wandering.

"I take the person who feels defeated and help her learn how to walk daily in Christ," she explains. "You go from defeated to daily."

She begins every coaching relationship by finding out where the client's heart is with Jesus — directly, unapologetically. She incorporates writing and journaling into every pillar because she has seen firsthand what happens when the inner work stays only in the mind.

"We can think about something and forget it," she says, "but if we write it down, we do not."

She works exclusively one-on-one, because the kind of excavation she guides clients through requires privacy, trust, and the willingness to go to places most people avoid. She is, as she puts it, unapologetically faith-based — and she makes no apologies for that. Anyone who follows her on LinkedIn or reads her weekly newsletter, One Day at a Time with Jesus, already knows it.

Releasing the Why

Even in the middle of building her coaching practice, Anne found herself in a familiar wilderness — not as severe as 2019, but dry nonetheless. Things had stalled. Connections weren't being made. She knew why, even if she didn't want to admit it.

She was still holding onto a why. Still wanting an answer God had chosen not to give her. And He, in His characteristic patience, simply waited.

"God said, I am going to leave you in a dry and wilderness season until you let this go," she recounts. "I finally said, okay, God, You can have the why. Since then, I have seen connections start being made again."

We live in a world that views success as the measure of whether we are worthy or have value — and that is a false narrative.

The morning of her Kingdom Factor interview, a discovery call came in from a LinkedIn connection she had made nearly a year prior. Small, maybe. But to Anne — the numbers person, the one who notices the 6:45 on the clock, the 99 poems, the heart in two television show titles, the arc in the word arch — nothing is small when God is the one arranging it.

She is still building. Still writing. Still coaching one woman at a time through the kind of forgiveness work that doesn't resolve itself in a single conversation. And she carries with her the image of two rainbows — first and last, beginning and end — as a reminder that the God who shows up in Genesis and Revelation also shows up on a quiet Saturday in North Carolina, arching over the subdivision of a woman who finally said yes.

If you're a woman who feels stuck and isn't sure why, Anne Wooten would say this to you: the why matters less than your willingness to walk. And you don't have to walk alone.

Learn more about Anne's coaching and books at her website, or connect with her on LinkedIn where her weekly newsletter, One Day at a Time with Jesus, publishes each week.