If you stumble on Olabisi Ola-Soetan’s page online, you probably will not have to spend too long there to understand what she cares about. You will find a woman talking about marriage, relationships and emotional intelligence, sharing practical counsel that makes you want to keep watching and listening.
Olabisi is a certified Emotional Intelligence and Marriage Coach and the founder of Secret Place Wife, a platform where she provides godly, relatable and useful counsel to wives and wives-to-be, bringing clarity and understanding to the many things that puzzle women and men about marriage. She works with individuals and couples, facilitates group sessions, leads workshops, webinars and online courses, and is a sought-after conference speaker.
Her work is centred on helping people identify the challenges and obstacles that may be standing between them and the kind of marriage or relationship they desire. She calls it personal and marriage mastery.
Spend enough time with her content and you begin to understand the message. Marriage works when people put in the work, and she is committed to teaching and showing couples how.
And this is a message she has also had to live.
But if you think you have understood Olabisi simply because you have seen the marriage coach, watched her videos or listened to her speak about relationships, you may actually be missing the bigger picture.
And the more I began to look at her story, the more I realised that marriage is only one thread running through it.
And that was what fascinated me.
Because if you look closely at her journey, you will find that people have always been at the centre of what she does.
Long before marriage coaching became the work most people know her for today, there was Clothe-A-Child, an initiative she founded to support children, including providing clothing and raising resources towards school fees. There was also her volunteering with organisations including Beyond the Classroom Foundation.
And I think this is important because working with children makes you see things differently. You do not just see a child who needs school fees; you begin to wonder about the family that cannot afford those fees. You do not just see a child going through a difficult season; you begin to ask what is happening at home, what the parents may be dealing with and what circumstances may have brought the child to that point.
Over the years, Olabisi encountered children whose lives were being shaped by poverty and difficult family circumstances. The more she encountered those realities, the harder it became to think about children without thinking about the families they came from.
And maybe that is where the connection becomes clearer.
Her passion for marriage is really a passion for family.
Olabisi says she is deeply passionate about children and marriages and strongly believes that family is the vehicle for restructuring society. She also believes fiercely that marriage works when people put in the work, and she is committed to teaching and showing couples how.
Because marriage does not end with the two people who say “I do.” It becomes a home. And that home becomes part of a child’s world.
The way the adults in that home communicate, handle conflict, express affection, resolve disagreements and relate to one another becomes part of what a child observes and learns about relationships. The family is where so much of who we become is first formed.
And perhaps this is why the journey from working with children to working with couples does not feel as disconnected as it might seem.
Olabisi met her husband, Ola Soetan, during her NYSC year, but their meeting is only one small part of the story. Their own marriage became part of the education that shaped her work. She has spoken about the challenges they faced and how those experiences pushed her to study marriage more deeply because she wanted her own marriage to work. She reflected, journaled and learned, and some of those personal lessons eventually became part of what she shared with other people.
Then there was another part of her family story that she could not simply teach her way through.
It took Olabisi and Ola ten years of marriage to welcome their daughter, Olantesiwaju Glory Ola-Soetan, affectionately called OGO.
For years, while she was helping other people make sense of their marriages, counselling couples, teaching women about relationships and encouraging people to make better choices about the families they were building, she was carrying a deeply personal wait of her own.
And she kept showing up.
She continued to teach, counsel and pour into other people while she was still waiting for something she deeply desired in her own home. She did not wait until every question in her own life had been answered before she began helping other people. She kept learning, serving and showing up while her own story was still being written.
There is something about that part of her story that makes the work she does today even more personal. It tells you something about the woman behind the work: someone who has had to live through seasons of uncertainty and still found a way to keep giving to other people.
There is a wisdom that comes from having lived through different seasons and still choosing to show up with something to give. Perhaps that is part of what people see when they describe Olabisi as wise. There is also a resilience to her story, and a tenacity that is easy to miss when all you see are the polished videos, the workshops, the counselling sessions and the wisdom that now comes so naturally in her conversations.
Eventually, the thing she had waited for came.
And the work continued to grow.
Today, through Family Central Coaching, Olabisi and her husband work with people across different stages of relationships, from dating and premarital preparation to marriage and family counselling. Their work is centred on helping people gain the awareness and confidence to do relationships right while building strong families through love and knowledge. It also connects healthy family life with raising emotionally stable and socially intelligent children.
And when you look at all these different pieces, the story begins to make sense.
The woman who served children now helps people think about the homes those children will grow up in. The woman who had to learn the work of marriage herself now teaches other couples how to navigate theirs. The woman who spent years waiting for her own child continued to show up for other people and their families.
She has seen the child, the individual, the couple and the family.
That may be why her work with marriage has never really felt confined to marriage alone.
Her voice has travelled from counselling rooms to workshops, webinars, online courses, conferences and public conversations. She has become a sought-after voice on marriage and relationships, while her work has also received recognition, including being named among Africa’s 100 Most Impactful Voices by ABCD Africa and being nominated for the Guardian Seven Wonder Women Award for inspiring inclusion in social impact.
But even that does not quite capture the whole story.
Because if you started with the woman on Instagram, you would see the marriage coach. Look a little closer, and you find the woman who has spent years serving children and families. Look closer still, and you find a woman who has had to live through some of the very lessons she now teaches, who waited through a deeply personal season and continued to serve while waiting.
And somewhere in all of that, I think I began to understand what really runs through Olabisi’s life.
It is people.
The child who needs help. The woman trying to understand her marriage. The couple trying to make theirs work. The family trying to build something healthier.
Perhaps that is why, when you go back to her page, the message feels a little different after knowing the story behind it. You are no longer just listening to a marriage coach telling people that relationships require work. You are listening to a woman who has spent years learning, living and teaching that truth herself.
She has built her work around bringing clarity to the things that puzzle people about marriage, helping them identify what stands between them and the relationships they desire, and showing them that marriage can work when people are willing to put in the work.
