Dr. Morgan Ellis
Licensed Psychologist · Life Design Coach · San Francisco, CA
"I won't sugarcoat it. Falling apart is disorienting and painful. But it's also the moment when a genuinely different life becomes possible. My job is to walk with you through the wreckage — and help you build something intentional from it."
I spent the first years of my career in clinical settings — inpatient, outpatient, crisis intervention. I learned a tremendous amount about what breaks people. But I kept noticing that the clients who recovered fastest weren't the ones who processed their pain most thoroughly. They were the ones who found a direction to move toward.
That observation led me to Positive Psychology, then to Stanford's Life Design program, then to a complete rethinking of how I practice. Today, I work with people in the middle of major transitions — divorce, job loss, grief, identity shifts — using a framework that combines evidence-based psychology with the iterative, prototype-test-learn approach of design thinking.
I created Life by Design because I was seeing the same patterns in my private practice that I'd seen in clinical settings: people who needed support between sessions, at 2am, in the middle of an airport, three weeks after the divorce was finalized. The research on AI-assisted coaching is early but promising. I built this tool to extend what I do — not replace it.
I still take a small number of private clients. Everything on this platform reflects my actual methodology and is reviewed by me personally.