Welcome

1. Who were you when you came to coaching?   I was a marketing director in a nonprofit behavioral health agency (in Washington State) when I was tapped to be an internal coach, a position I held for about five years. I was trained by Management Action Program (out of Newport Beach, CA) along with other executives to go back into our current organizations and set up a coaching program.  After working for 14 years in this non-profit organization, I was recruited to head up a for-profit behavioral health program in New Mexico. This new position turned out to be a total misfit, as I was not willing to compromise my ethical standards.  The new owner pressed me; I left this organization.  So there I was sitting in a newly acquired house (with a lease option), having moved five states away to start this ‘dream job,’ putting my home up for sale in a downturned market (2009) and wondering what my next step was to be.  I spent the next few weeks looking for signs as to my ‘teachable moment’ and came to the realization that I didn’t want to return to Washington State. Luckily I had a little vacation villa near Tucson and felt drawn to move there. I was also in a graduate program that I had started before the job offer came about.  As I was packing up to move to Arizona, It literally came to me to look into life coaching for people in recovery from addictions, as I was also a licensed addiction counselor and had worked for over 20 years in this field. I googled it and found a distance learning program in Washington State (the only one of its kind) and immediately signed up for a one year program!  

2.What drew you to coaching?  I learned in my internal coaching capacity that I really enjoyed (and was energized by) working within an organization, and its people, to bring about change by encouraging ‘possibility thinking,’ creating plans to take effective action and to hold each other accountable for that action.  

3. What were you looking to achieve?  When I decided in 2010  to choose coaching, and to set up as a sole practitioner in Tucson, I was hoping to put together a career that would allow me to draw upon my professional experience, my education, and my life experience in order to offer support that encourages positive change in people’s lives.  

4. How was training more than you had imagined?  I came into coaching as a trained licensed counselor, but to my surprise, discovered that I really had to rethink and retool my approach to working with people. As coaching is not a ‘directed approach’ and as we don’t see our clients as unhealthy individuals needing our guidance, I had a lot to learn. ‘Be quiet and listen intuitively,’ became my mantra.  I’ve been through three coach training programs since I started my private practice, each one building on the other: a recovery life coaching program that taught me how to work with people’s behavior health issues; a graduate level university program, that taught me about evidence-based coaching and working with executives; and a program taught by a PhD, that supports the notion that people’s self-narrative is at the heart of who and how they show up in their life currently…and that those stories can be changed.  

5. For your life?  Going through a coach training program changes an individual. We’re challenged to think about our personal style and how we want to work with clients; how we are going to stay present and not get drawn into our own emotional entanglements when things come up in a session, and how to trust our own intuition to the point it becomes a true beacon in working with other people’s issues.   

6. For what you wanted to do for others?  I love the idea that my experiences and training can benefit others: a mother of four grown kids; a person who values education; a person with a 22 year career in behavior health; an executive for 15 years; an entrepreneur with a marketing firm; a person who had a traumatic childhood, marked by family dysfunction and tragedy; and an individual with a strong spiritual practice, which encouraged me to become a yoga and meditation teacher.  

7. What transformations did you go through?  I think coach training encouraged me to become a better person. My relationships with my grown children has improved. I have a better sense of who I am in my personal journey through life. I now truly know my strengths and weaknesses and what I have to offer clients. I’m not afraid to face my own inadequacies, safe in the knowledge that I can change anything that I can ‘see.’