Books
Learn about our Writing
About the Authors
Cristina & Gloria Custodio
We write to make sense of complexity. To share what we’re learning. To offer tools that nourish bold leadership and joyful purpose—especially for those doing the heavy lifting in movements, communities, and organizations.
This page is a space to gather our words—essays, collaborations, and books that reflect our deepest commitments:
Leadership that sustains. Justice that includes. Purpose that feels good to carry.
Cristina and Gloria Custodio are sisters, transformational coaches, and co-founders of the Joyful Democracy Coaching Initiative, a coaching-based framework for sustainable leadership among purpose-driven professionals.
They support advocates, organizers, educators, nonprofit leaders, and other social impact professionals who want to lead with clarity and care—without burning out.
Their shared work is grounded in a simple but radical belief:
Justice work should not require self-sacrifice.
Through coaching, writing, and community-building, Cristina and Gloria are redefining what leadership can feel like for those holding it all together.
More about Cristina
Cristina Custodio is a Master Certified Coach, writer, and social leadership advocate with decades of experience in leadership, management, and coaching across sectors. As the founder of The Social Leadership Coach, she helps purpose-driven leaders build clarity, resilience, and joy in service of the greater good.
Her approach blends warm competence with strategic depth—anchoring big-picture vision in practical tools, grounded values, and human connection. A Harvard graduate with a BA in History & Literature and an MBA, Cristina is also a global leader in coaching education and diversity. She writes about leadership, collaboration, social innovation, and everyday courage in the face of complexity.
Cristina publishes in both English and Spanish, always with an eye toward accessibility, belonging, and bold possibility.
More about Gloria
Gloria Custodio is a transformational coach, lawyer, educator, and curriculum strategist. As managing partner of The Social Leadership Coach and co-founder of the Joyful Democracy Coaching Initiative, she supports purpose-driven leaders in navigating complexity without losing themselves.
Gloria brings a unique blend of legal insight, classroom experience, and deep coaching presence to her work. With a background in both K–12 and higher education—as well as a law degree—she helps clients unlearn burnout, reclaim agency, and lead from alignment rather than obligation.
A Harvard graduate with a BA in Literature, Gloria is known for her clarity, compassion, and fierce belief in her clients’ power. Her work focuses on sustainable leadership, equity-centered curriculum design, and organizational healing.
Our Bookshelf
The Book – This Work Should Feel Better: Joyful Democracy for the People Holding it All Together
Part field guide, part soul balm. This book was written specifically for democracy defenders like you. Inside you’ll find coaching prompts, real stories, and small practices to help you reclaim clarity, presence, and purpose.
This book is for you.
This Work Should Feel Better offers transformational support for people doing hard, high-stakes, purpose-driven work—often inside systems that weren’t built for their thriving. Whether you’re a nonprofit leader, attorney, educator, organizer, policy professional, or justice-driven soul navigating burnout, this book meets you with honesty, insight, and hope.
Rooted in the principles of coaching, sustainable leadership, and joyful resistance, this book will help you:
Because joyful purpose isn’t just what we protect—
It’s how we lead.
Joy Is Fuel: How Coaches Sustain Themselves and Their Clients in Hard Times (A SoLead Guide for Coaches Book 1)
Coaching through hard times tests your resilience, often leading to burnout. In Joy Is Fuel, Cristina and Gloria Custodio show that joy isn’t a reward for surviving tough seasons—it is the essential energy that carries you through them. Drawing on decades of coaching practice, this book offers grounded, repeatable tools to help you hold space for others without losing yourself.
Inside, you will find:
Practical strategies for burnout, exhaustion, and imposter syndrome
Guidance on coaching heavy client realities while evoking genuine hope
Honest advice on finances, isolation, and wrong-fit clients
An Emergency Kit, actionable toolkits, scripts, and a 1-page sustainability plan
An honest, empowering guide for coaches who are exhausted yet committed to meaningful work. Discover how to find, keep, and share the joy that sustains your practice.
Joy Is Fuel: The Coach's Workbook: Practices & Tools for Coaching Through Hard Times (A SoLead Guide for Coaches)
Joy Is Fuel: The Coach’s Workbook is the hands-on companion to Joy Is Fuel: How Coaches Sustain Themselves and Their Clients in Hard Times, built for the coach whose calendar is full and whose reserves are not.
It treats joy as fuel for the work (never a reward you have to earn, and never a demand that you look away from what’s happening in the world), and it gives you a place to practice that, ten minutes at a time.
Inside, you will find:
24 guided sequences with space to write, moving from personal reflection to client work
Reusable trackers, open prompts, and check-ins for long-term sustainability
An Emergency Kit for your hardest days
A bound-in deck of 13 quick-reference cards for when sessions go sideways
Full color and printed in an 8.5 × 11 format, this workbook meets you exactly where you are with adaptable tools that respect your time and energy.
Creatividad en el Coaching
(Spanish Edition)
Creatividad en el Coaching is a vibrant collection of insights and practices from 38 Master Certified Coaches across Latin America and Spain, offering a rich exploration of how creativity enhances the power of coaching.
Cristina Custodio contributes a chapter to this collaborative work, exploring how creative tools like storytelling, role play and psychodrama can deepen coaching partnerships—especially for clients navigating complexity, purpose, and transformation.
Rooted in art, innovation, and professional growth, this book invites coaches and leaders alike into new ways of seeing, listening, and facilitating change. It’s a celebration of what becomes possible when creativity and coaching meet.
