Founder Interview with Liam Clickenger, Liam Clickenger Coaching
Photo Credit: Liam Clickenger Coaching
Liam Clickenger is a dedicated Integral Coach® and advocate who brings a deeply nuanced understanding of the human experience and transformation to his practice. His journey has been anything but straightforward, shaped by a rich tapestry of personal and professional explorations, from growing up queer in the Midwest to leading in creative and non-profit sectors. With a passion for attunement and connection, Liam combines his background in photography, business, and education with his certification as an Integral Coach®, working to support others in embracing their whole selves and reshaping their lives with intention.
During the interview, we explored Liam’s unique path from navigating identity as a queer person to cultivating a coaching practice rooted in authenticity and presence. He shared how his nonlinear journey has fueled his commitment to creating spaces where marginalized voices can show up fully. Liam also offered insights into how his queerness inspires his work, emphasizing the importance of leading with one’s full self, and discussed the impact of integrating trauma, neurodivergence, and lived experience into his coaching approach. His story is a testament to resilience, authenticity, and the transformative power of living more in alignment with one’s truth.
Check out the interview below!
Can you walk us through your professional journey and how you got to where you are today?
My path has never been linear, which is something I’ve come to celebrate. I grew up queer in the Midwest, constantly navigating questions of identity, belonging, and visibility. The experience of living at the intersection of marginalization and privilege—queer and white, tender and tall, outsider and achiever—shaped everything about how I relate to the world today. It taught me to pay attention to nuance, to complexity, and the spaces in between.
Professionally, I meandered through a lot of terrain, starting in photography, then spending many years in sales and business development. I was the managing partner of a studio in San Francisco, and later served as Executive Director of a local photo non-profit. On paper, it looked like a creative-to-corporate arc, but underneath, the thread was always people. It wasn’t the images or the gear that drew me in, it was the people behind them. The relationships. The trust. The quiet moments of connection. That curiosity helped me realize that the real pursuit wasn’t about products or pictures, but about attunement.
Becoming an educator helped me see this more clearly. Teaching photography and the creative process gave me a front-row seat to human transformation. I found that the real joy wasn’t in the subject itself, it was in the interaction, the reflection, the shared discovery. Those classroom moments taught me that being of service, holding space, and witnessing growth are not just what I do well, they’re what bring me alive.
Photo Credit: Liam Clickenger Coaching
The pivot to becoming a certified Integral Coach® wasn’t just a career move; it felt like a homecoming. It gave me a framework to bring together my lived experience, my creativity, my deep respect for complexity, and my desire to help others become more fully themselves.
Coaching allows me to show up with my full self, queer, sensitive, a little punk, deeply intentional, and meet others in the richness of who they are.
I follow a holistic approach, which focuses on the whole person rather than isolated areas. I see this as shaping a person’s form, molded by cultural, experiential, traumatic, and community influences, and working together to reshape it for growth. When someone enters the process with me, we evaluate that shape and then consider where they want to go. From there, we work on reshaping that form to better align with their goals. This approach involves understanding different centers of intelligence, incorporating body awareness, and engaging emotional and cognitive processing, creating a balance of head, heart, and body. Rather than focusing solely on what’s missing or rooted in past trauma, like therapy, coaching supports movement forward from the present moment, recognizing that all parts of us are valid and valuable. Often, working with a therapist in parallel can be helpful, especially when trauma or diagnoses are involved, since therapy provides space for healing while coaching helps with integration and forward momentum.
There have been losses and reinventions, tender moments of doubt, and unexpected turns, but through it all, I’ve kept following the thread of truth, curiosity, and connection. That’s what brought me here, and it’s what I bring to every coaching relationship.
What inspired you to offer the services you provide?
I was inspired to offer this work because I didn’t see enough spaces where people like me, and people I love, could show up fully. Too often, we’re asked to compartmentalize: to be professional but not emotional, driven but not soft, queer but not too queer. I wanted to create a space where that fragmentation could begin to heal.
So much of my life has been about learning to navigate complexity—identity, reinvention, grief, ambition, love—and I realized over time that the thing I’m best at is walking alongside others as they do the same.
Coaching became the container where I could bring all of my experience, empathy, and curiosity to bear. It’s not about having answers, it’s about offering presence, perspective, and space for something true to emerge.
Through working with people in this way, I’ve come to understand more about our individual and collective lived experiences, particularly how complex and generational trauma are so deeply embedded in our ways of being and relating to the world. I see these patterns show up frequently, and helping people acknowledge and work with the ways we’re shaped by this trauma has been an affirming aspect of my mission. Additionally, I recognize and identify with the prevalence of neurodivergence within our community. By weaving together these threads of trauma, neurodivergence, and lived experience, I aim to honor how individuals operate and respond to their worlds and to support them in moving forward from that understanding.
What is one of the biggest challenges you have faced in your journey as a service provider, and what did you do to overcome this?
One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced has been unlearning the belief that I needed to be hyper-qualified, over-prepared, or perfectly polished to be of service. For a long time, I internalized the idea that I had to earn my place, especially in spaces where credentials, traditional education, or straight white masculinity carried unspoken weight. As someone who came up through creative, non-sequential paths, and who identifies as queer and sensitive, I often felt like I had to prove my legitimacy before I could claim it.
The turning point came when I realized that what makes me effective isn’t perfection, it’s presence. Clients don’t come to me for answers; they come to be seen, reflected, and met in their fullness. I began to trust that my lived experience, my capacity to attune, and my ability to hold space are credentials. And the more I showed up authentically, the deeper the work became.
The biggest takeaway? The parts of ourselves we’re most afraid to lead with often become our greatest tools for connection.
Once I stopped trying to “fit in” and instead rooted into who I truly am, everything shifted. If you feel underqualified, I would get curious about your experience, where that might be coming from, how it shows up in your life, and start to look at how you can shift perspective or find a new orientation to that. I now have a deep understanding of where my imposter syndrome comes from and what shaped all the expectations that led me to it—societal, cultural, familial, the whole thing. But that’s my experience. My coaching is really about trying to be with you fully in the witnessing of your life and less about me projecting mine onto your story.
Photo Credit: Liam Clickenger Coaching
If you could give one piece of advice to future LGBTQ+ service providers within your field, what would it be?
Lead with your whole self. The things you’ve been told are “too much” or “not enough”, your sensitivity, your queerness, your nonlinear path are often the very things that make you powerful in this work.
You don’t have to contort yourself to fit into old models of professionalism or authority. Instead, trust that your presence, your story, and your way of seeing the world are your gifts.
Build your practice in a way that feels true to you, not what you think it’s supposed to look like. That authenticity is what creates real connection and real impact.
How does being openly queer inspire or impact your business?
Being openly queer isn’t just part of my business, it shapes it. It allows me to show up with honesty, vulnerability, and integrity, and it signals to others that they can do the same. My queerness has taught me how to live in contradiction, how to hold complexity, and how to find beauty in what doesn’t fit the mold. Those are gifts I bring into every coaching relationship.
It also keeps me accountable to build spaces that are not only inclusive, but liberatory. Spaces where we don’t just survive—we reclaim, reimagine, and thrive.
What brands or services by LGBTQ+ founders are your go-tos and why?
I’m a big fan of FOLX Health for the way they’ve reimagined healthcare through a radically inclusive, LGBTQ+ affirming lens. Access to affirming care is essential, and FOLX is leading the way.
I also love Them, the digital platform by and for queer voices. It’s a space where culture, identity, and storytelling intersect—and I deeply value their commitment to elevating nuanced queer narratives.
And I’m endlessly inspired by Alok Vaid-Menon—their work as a poet, performer, and thought leader expands what it means to live authentically and unapologetically. Their presence is a gift to our community.
Who is your favorite LGBTQ+ celebrity or figure, and why?
It’s honestly too hard to choose just one. There are so many LGBTQ+ icons whose presence and work have shaped culture and expanded what’s possible. I’m especially inspired by folks like Indya Moore, Alok Vaid-Menon, Hunter Schafer, Laverne Cox, and MJ Rodriguez, each of whom embodies authenticity, vulnerability, and creative brilliance in ways that make space for all of us to show up more fully as ourselves. Their courage, artistry, and refusal to conform continue to ripple through my own work and life.
Can you share one fun fact about yourself?
In high school, I was in a band and played bass. I’m now re-learning after a 25-year break because why not start a band at 46?
