In the summer of 2000 Ed Johnson was a new college graduate beginning a career in banking. He worked for, what was then, First Market Bank, selling CD’s, credit cards, and other banking products in Richmond, Virginia.

Ed began volunteering with a youth group sometime after September 2001—giving up just a little free time and, more significantly, his cigarette habit in the process. On a youth retreat he ended up having a long conversation with a student about faith. The next morning this student handed him a group of papers. It was writing that shared how that student had felt Jesus through their conversation. It wasn’t quite audible, but it was in this experience that Ed felt called to attend seminary. The next Monday happened to be a bank holiday (as these things tend to happen) and Ed found himself talking to his church’s pastor, who told him to go over and talk to the staff at the seminary. And so he did.

Ed was given information, a packet of papers to fill out, and told to return them by the next Friday to be considered for financial aid. Ed laughed.

But the next Friday he turned in those papers.

Ed went on to serve three churches in Virginia over eleven years. Within this time he also got married and had three beautiful boys. In 2014 he was appointed to a church in Northern Virginia, but he never could have imagined that year would become his last year as a pastor.

Somewhere within these eleven years, life caught up with Ed. There was an aching in his marriage and an aching in his vocation that was being numbed by the busyness of career and the busyness of raising children. If you were to ask him now, Ed would say something like—“If you don’t pay attention to your surroundings and live a life of mindfulness and consciousness—you will catch up to yourself,” and that he was “blind to [his] blindness, not recognizing how much I was hurting my family and myself.”

This blindness came full circle and led to a moment that jolted Ed to self-awareness. He then made decisions that ended his career and forever altered his family.  Ed never returned to his congregation and he grappled with the ripple effect his choices had on his family, community, friends, colleagues, and all those who had turned to him as a leader in their faith journey. His future was uncertain and he held a new fear he would never be able to recover. 

How had he gotten to this place?

Somewhere, within the pain of losing everything he knew, he still held a hope for the future. He left a career he loved, but that had broken him in ways he never imagined and he started the seemingly impossible task of starting over. Starting over meant an end to his marriage, estrangement from friends and family, trying to find a new career, and starting the work towards healing relationships.

In the years that followed, Ed had the humbling experience of having to take jobs just to make ends meet. He relied on the guidance and generosity of those who, for reasons he may never understand, chose to stand beside him.

Somewhere in this place of brokenness, healing began. Each job moved Ed closer towards rediscovering his sense of purpose. He began to experience others in ways he had never been able to before—to offer empathy to their stories without justification. There is a freedom to being in relationship in this way and this experience was significant in Ed’s journey towards becoming a leadership coach.

Ed’s journey has also been guided by an overwhelming number of right conversations at just the right times. He has met people in the last four years that, in a lifetime before, could have remained just another face in the crowd, faces that are instead his biggest supporters, advocates, and mentors. These relationships helped steer and continue to support Ed in his coaching work.

Starting over for Ed also meant he had to reflect on his prior career, to understand the elements from his ministry that still held meaning and could serve a purpose in his future work. At its core, Ed realized his work was centered in helping individuals and groups understand how they might influence others. He had been training others to develop their soft skills, especially to hone their leadership potential—how to develop confidence as a leader and how to lead within a community or organization. He was also still drawn to helping organizations share their purpose through effective mission and values statements and how these statements help provide the framework for their work and purpose. 

An opportune group of conversations and a little bit of fate led Ed to the Leadership Coaching for Organizational Well-Being certificate program at George Mason University. Within the first few days of this course Ed knew he had finally found an intersection where he could merge his skills, passions, and desire to help others. A few months later he began the process which led him to open his business, Crafted Coach.

Ed is motivated by a desire to help others become better versions of themselves, serving as a guide toward the potential we all hold within, even when it doesn’t seem possible. 

He is a believer in second chances and that we each have the ability to lead and influence others for good.

Ed resides in Northern Virginia and is married to his partner, Alecia. He is now dad and step-dad to five amazing small humans.