Natalie Youssef, MPH, NBC-HWC

A Performance Coach with a Public Health Lens

I'm Natalie, a performance and health coach who built a career at the intersection of science and human behavior. I kept asking the same question: why do capable, driven women keep hitting a ceiling that more effort can't move?

The answer isn't more willpower. It's understanding the deeper patterns, biological, behavioral, and environmental, that are running the show without anyone noticing.

That's what I help people find. And change.

How I Got Here

I grew up as a competitive freestyle skier, eventually making it to the Junior Olympics. What stayed with me wasn't the competition. It was what I learned later, leading wilderness therapy expeditions, watching people change simply by being removed from their usual chaos and given space to reset.

That curiosity about how environment shapes human performance led me to study Environmental Studies at Bowdoin College and earn my Master of Public Health from George Washington University, focused on environmental health, behavioral science, and the systems that shape how people live and function.

Before founding Thrive With You, I worked in public health research and policy. But I kept coming back to the same question: how do we help people rebuild their own capacity before it breaks?

Then I built a business of my own, from the ground up, betting on myself to do it. I know what it costs to run something that depends on you every day, and what it takes to protect your own capacity while you do it.

Coaching is my answer.

What Actually Drives Change

I work with women entrepreneurs and high-achieving professionals: people who are capable, driven, and hitting a wall they can't think their way out of.

Sometimes it's a business that's finally working and still costing them everything outside of it. Sometimes it's performing at a high level while running on empty. Sometimes it's knowing exactly what to do and still not doing it.

In every case, the work is the same: look honestly at what's driving the pattern, your biology, your habits, your business, as one connected system, and build capacity that holds instead of one that keeps breaking.

My background in behavioral physiology, neuroscience, and public health gives me a lens most business coaches don't have. I build the capacity underneath your business, so the strategy, the offer, the marketing, whatever comes next actually holds.

Let’s Build Something Sustainable

If you've landed here, something already told you it's time.

Not time to push harder. Time to understand what's actually been driving the pattern, and build the capacity to hold what you're building.