Death Cafe

Death Cafe profile for Annie Valdes

About Annie Valdes:

Annie Valdes is a Life and Death Design Coach. Through her firm, Design Tugboat, Annie brings a human centered design approach to her coaching. She specializes in helping individuals gain new perspectives and take action towards building meaningful lives, no matter how much or how little life they have ahead. She is a CTI-trained Co-Active Coach and an INELDA-trained End-of-Life Doula.

What brings you to Death Cafe?

I want to create space for people to explore things they don’t usually get to talk about, specifically death.

What would you like your legacy to be?

I want to encourage you to explore the various dimensions of death, figure out what you think about it, and make some decisions and take action so you can live your life (or what remains of it) fully and intentionally, and die at peace, whatever that means to you.

Thoughts for sharing:

In my other life, I do human centered design and I’m a life coach. I’ve spent my career working with people on challenging topics—not just death, but also serious illness and chronic disease, money and debt, aging, life after retirement, sexual health, mental health, and more… I truly get that tough topics are deeply sensitive and that they bring up difficult emotions.

I’ve learned that alot of the hard stuff we deal with is made harder either because we don’t talk about it, or because we don’t question it. We don’t realize we can approach things in a different way, and we don't realize how much our chosen perspective changes our experience.

I’ve also learned that talking about tough things makes them less scary, including death, and that we have way more options than we realize.

Contact Annie Valdes