About Hang Zhao — Hang Zhao | Leadership Coach, Grief Coach & End of Life Doula

About Me

I've crossed many worlds to get here: chemistry labs, accounting firms, corporate boardrooms, and eventually, the quiet threshold between life and death.

None of it was planned.

All of it made me who I am.

For nearly a decade I worked as a CPA. I was good at it but didn't feel fulfilled. Coaching allowed me to experience what it was like to make a real impact on others' lives, and since then there has been no turning back. I completed my coach training, left accounting behind, and moved to Toronto to build something new. It was harder than I expected and more revealing than I anticipated.

Building a practice from nothing confronted me with every belief I had about myself. It still does.

The move toward grief and end-of-life work came from two directions at once. During COVID, my clients were facing massive losses all at once — deaths of parents and colleagues, disruption of ordinary life, uncertainty about the future. At the same time, they were being asked to lead and perform. The grief had nowhere to go, and I found myself sitting with it alongside them.

Around the same time, I was visiting my grandmother, who had been requiring around the clock care for years, unable to communicate. I wanted to know what she was thinking. I wanted to help and couldn't. What I felt sitting beside her was simply compassion, and a quiet recognition that the conversations families should have had, never happened.

Those two threads led me somewhere I hadn't expected. What becomes clear is that grief and dying strip away all the noise in life. People are confronted by what is real and can no longer avoid it. And in that nakedness, something opens — an access to vulnerability that brings forth compassion and unconditional love. That is what makes this work feel like home.

I hold dual roots in Chinese culture and in the communities I've built in Canada. Death is rarely spoken about openly in Chinese communities. Facilitating those conversations, in Mandarin, with people who have never had space for them, is some of the most meaningful work I do.

When I'm not working I'm running near Lake Ontario, baking sourdough, painting, meditating, or reading poetry slowly in the morning. I travel whenever I can and find that nature has a way of returning me to myself — its rhythms, its wisdom, its healing energy. I try to bring that same quality of presence into the room with every person I sit with.

I am a leadership coach, a grief coach, and an end-of-life practitioner.

The work is, to me, more connected than it appears. It all requires the ability to be present with what is difficult and uncertain.

It all involves supporting people in finding their footing when the ground has shifted. And it has all shaped me into a more grounded, more present, and more human practitioner.