About Me
A quick story...
Before opening my coaching practice in 2011, I spent 15 years working in Human Resources, at a variety of companies and industries. In that time, I created a very successful and very costly career – my achievements came at the cost of my physical, emotional and spiritual health. My work was everything: my worthiness, my kudos, my financial security, my sense of belonging…everything.
My career became external expression of my internalized experience as the child of an alcoholic single parent who struggled with mental health issues. My career was my clumsy attempt to heal my childhood wounds and, predictably, failed to do so. Instead, it fed my fears and stoked my ever-present anxiety.
When my mother died in 2009, after a prolonged decline, it was my wake-up call to get my life on a different trajectory. I was lucky enough to be referred to a transition coach, who specialized in working with executives working through the process of leaving their careers.
During this work, the first step in my healing journey became clear: move back home to Olympia, WA, to be near my sister and take a sabbatical to figure out what came next. Newly introduced to the language, approach and structure of coaching, I realized that this is the work I am called to do. This is my vocation – my calling, not my job. I opened my practice in 2011, and never looked back.
Before I had ever heard of coaching, way back in the day, I received my B.A. in English Literature from San Francisco State University. I returned to school while living in rural Tennessee, utilizing a crazy new thing called online learning by attending the University of Phoenix and receiving my M.B.A in Organizational Management in 2002.
I left my 15-year career in Human Resources after the death of my mother forced me to reevaluate my life and where I was heading. Once I got clear on what I wanted for my life, I attended the internationally recognized coach training program, Accomplishment Coaching, graduating in 2013. I am trained as an ontological coach; however, the Type A in me still loves a good project plan, to create and track actions taken.
I am PCC certified through the International Coaching Federation, bringing 13 years of coaching and training experience to my work.
In 2018, I had the privilege of being a member of the inaugural cohort of Judith E. Glaser’s Conversational Intelligence® program and became a Certified Conversational Intelligence® Coach.
My background
What is Ontological Coaching?
Ontological coaching works from the premise that who we are Being in our lives informs everything that we do (or don’t do). What we believe about ourselves, the world and our place in it determines everything that happens in our lives.
Therefore, when we are able to identify our limiting beliefs (contexts), a whole new world of empowered actions to take opens up. Ontological coaching works with the interacting layers of language, emotions and physicality that create one’s experience of the world by shining light on the self-limiting beliefs so we can confront and dismantle them. As your Being shifts into more empowered beliefs, unlimited options for what you do (or don’t do) present themselves. And this creates an entirely new life.