Darcy Luoma

DARCY LUOMA, creator of Thoughtfully Fit®, is the CEO of Darcy Luoma Coaching & Consulting, a firm that specializes in creating high-performing people and teams. As one of America’s most highly sought-after and credentialed coaches, she’s worked in forty-eight industries with more than five hundred organizations, impacting tens of thousands of leaders and employees. Darcy is also the author of Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life & Business Success, published by Harper Horizon.

Darcy is a lifelong learner and self-help junkie. She’s constantly studying the best ways to develop strong leaders, create high-performing teams, and transform organizational culture. As such, she regularly has ten books on her nightstand, attends professional conferences and webinars more often than she goes to the movies, and has more degrees and certifications than shoes. Her Thoughtfully Fit® model weaves together all of her research on the six hurdles that get in the way of peak performance. It helps leaders be intentional in their interactions and successfully deal with their people problems, so they can focus on their mission and what they do best.

Darcy started her coaching and consulting firm in 2013 and quickly built it into a half a million dollar a year company. Before launching her business, she worked for a leadership consulting firm and ran U.S. Senator Herb Kohl’s office for twelve years, where she was entrusted to handle urgent matters and contentious situations. She met with savvy lobbyists and concerned citizen groups, and organized political events and rallies with tens of thousands of people. Darcy even managed protestors who staged die-ins and hijacked her office for days at a time to protest the war, requiring her to sleep there with federal protective services by her side.

She worked in Florida for thirty-eight days on the grueling presidential recount. She’s done national advance work for the White House, traveled the country while working for two presidential campaigns, and served as Deputy Transition Director to a governor.

Throughout each of these roles, Darcy learned what it looks like to not be Thoughtfully Fit®, the leadership model inspired by her love of being physically fit. These first-hand experiences contributed to her ability to help clients effectively handle their people problems.

Darcy has been coaching since 2004. She has four prominent coaching credentials, including the prestigious Master Certified Coach from the International Coach Federation—a distinction held by fewer than 4% of coaches in the world. She is a Certified Professional Coactive Coach, an Organization and Relationship Systems Certified Coach, and a Board Certified Coach.

She completed her Master of Science in Organization Development at Pepperdine University, where she did her master’s thesis on the effectiveness of coaching on overall life satisfaction.

Four times, Brava Magazine and The Isthmus newspaper have named Darcy as Madison’s favorite  executive coach. (The year she didn’t win, she finished second.) The University of Wisconsin–Madison likewise sought out Darcy to design its rigorous nine-month Certified Professional Coach training program, which earned the International Coach Federation’s accreditation and has a waiting list every year. She has served in many roles since its inception in 2012, including the program’s director, lead instructor, and director of training and quality assurance.

Darcy has coached C-suite executives, senators, college presidents, non-profit directors, surgeons, attorneys and even an NFL Super Bowl champion!

She received the prestigious Certified Speaking Professional™designation from the National Speakers Association in 2019, which is held by fewer than twenty percent of professional speakers worldwide. Prior to that, Darcy earned the “Rising Star” award from the National Speakers Association’s Wisconsin Chapter in 2017. She has spoken at more than five hundred conferences, workshops and corporate events in front of audiences ranging from five to five thousand.

Darcy has also been honored with the Dame of Influence Award, given to women business owners for the feat of reaching the million dollar revenue mark – a milestone achieved by only 2% of female-owned businesses.

As a regular contributor to NBC15, WKOW27, and BRAVA Magazine in Madison, Wisconsin, Darcy is affectionately known as The Official Life Coach of The Wilde and Tausch Show on ESPN radio. She has also been featured in Forbes.

In her spare time, Darcy is an athlete and has competed in triathlons every year since 1998. The only season she missed since then was the year her second daughter was born and she had a one-year old at home! This includes a full Ironman, six half-Ironman races, five marathons, cyclocross, and too many other races to count. At age sixteen, she rollerbladed 300 miles from northern Minnesota to the state capitol to raise money for the March of Dimes. She uses her grit and determination in both her athletic and professional endeavors.

Darcy was featured on the cover of BRAVA Magazine, where she shared the story of how her life blew up in the most extreme way when her husband of ten years was unexpectedly arrested for sexual assault of a minor he met online. He was sentenced to ten years in federal prison. Darcy became ground zero to test drive her new leadership model, Thoughtfully Fit®, that had been finalized just five days before his arrest. It became her lifeline to parenting two daughters on her own, handling the daily stressors of navigating the legal system, filing for divorce, keeping her company alive, and learning to use the washing machine.

Along with her favorite job being a mom of two energetic teenage daughters, she enjoys adventure travel, yin yoga, kickboxing, spicy chai lattes, and afternoon naps.