Stark Career Coaching: The Story Behind the Name

I realize not everyone believes in signs from God, the universe, etc., but a few things happened that made me want to call this business Stark Career Coaching instead of, say, Michelle Fetherston Coaching.

It occurred to me that Fetherston gets misspelled a lot (Featherston and Featherstone, most commonly). I realized that an easily misspelled name might make the whole “brand awareness” thing a bit more challenging (thank you, first career in marketing, for making me think about that!)*

So I started brainstorming name ideas and searching to see what names and domains were not already taken. I thought about the very straightforward “Holistic Career Coaching”, but something about it felt a tiny bit clunky. (It’s also quite literally a little clunky to type the back-to-back “c”s in “holisticcareercoaching.com”.) Like any good wordsmith, I started searching “holistic” in an online thesaurus to see if synonyms would spark any ideas. I clicked a few different words from the results to look at their synonyms and ended up on “total”. That felt less clunky, but still not quite right. And then under the list of related words I saw…stark. And one of the definitions for stark was “to an absolute or complete degree: wholly.”

Oh by the way…Stark is my maiden name. And the Stark name lineage begins with my grandfather, Dennis “Coach” Stark. Our family’s original last name was Strzalkowski (thanks, 7th grade family history project!), and I’m told at least part of the reason Grandpa changed his name to Stark was to make it easier to write, spell, etc. for coaching stuff. Grandpa Coach was also hands-down one of the best people I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. He taught me to swim and the importance of balancing salty and sweet snacks, but most importantly he set an example by being a kind, caring, and supportive coach, father, grandfather, and friend to so many people throughout his life. I’ve got a long way to go to live up to the example he set, but I couldn’t have a better set of guiding footsteps to follow. In fact, awhile back I got a tattoo of the Stark name, in his handwriting. It helps me think about him often and helps me feel simultaneously Stark and Fetherston, which I love.

So there you have it.

W

elcome to Stark Career Coaching!

*Stark also tends to be easier to spell, although I have still encountered some issues over the years. Probably the worst was being listed as “Michelle Stork” in a middle school basketball program. I was a tall tween with skinny legs at the time, that one stung.