About Me

Thank you for being here. 

I am Pam Covarrubias with a big RRRRRoar in CovaRRRubias. If you don't roll your Rs, I want you to try to say my name and feel the miles my mom travelled when she crossed the border and English speakers would make fun of her. I won't make fun of you. I'll smile with compassion and invite you to try again. My correctly pronounced name honors my lineage, my identity, and my humanity. I will say your name as you give me permission to say it.

I grew up in Mexico City, but I was born in the United States. In other words, I'm an immigrant to the US with the privilege of being a US citizen. Super wild, and I'm grateful to have so many opportunities just because I was born here. I promise, I don't take it for granted. I have learned to navigate the intricacies of what it means to be someone like me in the United States while staying true to my core values.

I am based in the original land of Kumeyaay Nation, now known as San Diego, California, and I live in a multigenerational house with my husband David and our dogs Thor and Bennie. We are child free by choice and love our nieces and nephews.

I am a rebel and a disruptor by nature.

I like deep, thought-provoking questions and I suck at small talk. Don't talk to me about the weather. Tell me what's the last thing you ate that evoked an explosion of pleasure in your mind and soul.

I became a business coach after my life coaching certification. I had the opportunity to start coaching small businesses for a nonprofit and I fell in love. I was helping Spanish speakers navigate the small business world in the United States as immigrants and first-time business owners. They were doing it without speaking the language fully, without knowing the law, and they were making their dreams come true. That early work taught me something I never forgot: the problem was never capability. It was always conditioning.

Over two decades of working with hundreds of leaders and businesses, I kept watching the same thing happen. Brilliant women, fully capable, hitting an invisible ceiling they couldn't strategy their way through. They had done the mindset work. Read the books. Attended the seminars. And they were still exhausted. Still performing. Still waiting for the moment it finally felt like enough.

That's not a character flaw. That's Calladita Culture®.

Who I do it for

For the first-generation Latina executive who has built something real and is still performing her way through rooms that weren't designed for her. For the founder who can quote her value to you on demand but still quotes herself too low when it counts. For the C-suite leader who has followed every formula and wonders why, at this level, it still doesn't feel settled.

I see you. You don't need more confidence. You need certainty. And those are not the same thing.

I do it for the generations that come after her. Because when a first-generation Latina leader stops performing and starts leading from certainty, the ripple doesn't stop with her. Her team feels it. Her daughters watch it. The women she mentors carry it forward. Her liberation isn't just personal. It travels.

I grew up with a single mom raising three kids by herself. She moved countries and chose to bring us to the United States to give us a better life. She worked arduous jobs so I could have a better chance. I do it for her. I dream of retiring her one day.

About business

Foundationally, I have been trained in traditional business practices. Capitalist business practices. I believe there's a better way to do business. I believe we can do business sustainably for everyone involved. I believe in transparency and honesty. And I absolutely believe you can make a lot of money this way, because money isn’t the problem, exploitation of resources is.

What I know after two decades of working with founders and executives is this: the business problems most women bring to me are not strategy problems. They are certainty problems. She has the strategy. She has the skills. She is undercharging, over-explaining, and over-delivering because something underneath the strategy has not been settled yet. When that something gets settled, the business decisions change. The rates change. The conversations change. The rooms she walks into change.

I want you to commit to unlearning the oppressive practices we have absorbed in business culture. That unlearning is not soft work. It is the most precise, high-leverage work a leader can do. When you arrive on the other side, you will not just feel different. You will lead differently. And the people around you will feel that.

My body of work

For the last 20 years, I have worked with small businesses, executives, and founders, helping them build the operational and internal structures that actually hold. Across the last decade, I have focused specifically on what happens when first-generation Latina leaders hit a ceiling that strategy alone cannot move.

That work became the Constanza Leadership Model™, my proprietary framework for first-generation Latina leaders navigating high-stakes leadership. It is not therapy, a personality test, or DEI training. It is a leadership-under-pressure diagnostic and development system built from a decade of direct work with hundreds of first-gen Latinas, grounded in nervous system science, somatic practice, and clinical EFT.

The model identifies five distinct leadership archetypes shaped by Calladita Culture®. Each one is a competent survival strategy. Each one becomes costly when over-relied on. The work is to move from performance, adaptation, and over-proof into something more durable: Rooted Authority™. Leadership that is regulated, responsive, and real.

I don't teach confidence. I build certainty, so confidence becomes inevitable.

That body of work now lives inside Certain & Rooted™, my flagship leadership program for first-generation Latina executives and founders. It is where the Constanza Leadership Model™ becomes something she actually embodies, not just understands.

Lineage

I have arrived in this world with little knowledge and I am grateful to have gained more wisdom from the humans I have encountered and the trainings I have been very fortunate to receive.

I have a BFA in Graphic Design with an emphasis on Photography and a minor in Spanish. That one I had to take a test to get, which remains wild given that Spanish is my first language.

I am a double Certified Life and Business Coach, a Certified Clinical EFT Practitioner, and hold a certification in Women in Entrepreneurship from Cornell University. I am trauma-trained, somatic practitioner, and soon Brainspotting practitioner. My early certifications in healing modalities, including Therapeutic Doodles and ceremonial facilitation, gave me a foundation that deepened over time into the clinical, body-first work I do now. The through line has always been the same: the body knows before the mind catches up.

I am a Board Member and Finance Chair of the Chicano Federation of San Diego County. I am an SBDC advisor and have coached 1,000’s of businesses. I serve as a facilitator for a BIPOC Affinity Group affiliated with my life coaching school and I’m also an instructor for new life coaches.

I have learned and continue to learn from incredible women: Tay Triggs, Rachel Rodgers, Kelly Diels, Margaret Lynch, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, Linda Garcia, Dr. Rocio Rosales Meza, Rachael Maddox, Naomi Janzen, Usha Anandi, Dr. Mozelle Armijo, Kathryn Rogers, and Amber Vilhauer, among others. This list continues to grow. I am grateful these women have believed in me or passed on their knowledge and wisdom, directly or indirectly.

My blood lineage: my mother Leticia and both of my grandmothers Carmen and Ofelia continue to teach me the power of connecting to my inner voice. My father Osvaldo, who always insisted on embracing my magic, who taught me to believe in it more than the bullies laughing at the fairy dust. I know it's real.

Because I am magic. I believe you are magic too.

Let’s work together.