“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you live forever.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi
Learning is about patience and movement and voice and emotion. It is about a willingness to engage in all the parts of yourself that are stiff or unused or hurt to unveil the freedom that education provides. My life is about opening myself to every opportunity in which I can learn and connect with the world around me. It is my goal to help re-direct frustrated and stagnant situations into moments full of hope, promise, connection, and happiness through individual and group coaching, presentations, speeches, and readings.
I am thrilled to discover that my teaching, counseling, and writing backgrounds shape my discussions with clients looking for motivation, inspiration, and grammatical clarity. I am a graduate of Whitman College, where I also swam competitively, The University of Montana, where I earned a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing while tutoring first year law students, and I am currently completing a personal and executive coaching certification program through the Newfield Network. With my degrees in English, education, and creative writing, I have worked as a teacher, swim coach, college advisor, and legal assistant. I write, paint, and I have proofread, edited, and re-created thousands of essays, applications, resumes, cover letters, reports, speeches, marketing pieces, and writing projects for the people around me.
As a teacher I often found myself focused on the attitudes of my students. Through my own discoveries as an athlete as well as the struggles I have faced with my own health issues, I have found that physical activities often help in changing a person’s perspective both in the short and long term. I applied that philosophy to the classroom. My classroom was filled with light, color, movement, and positive reinforcement. I often found myself challenging students to rephrase questions or comments with a more positive and deliberate use of language, tone, and body movement. The attitude, pace, and willingness to learn opened immensely in my classroom as opposed to classrooms with more traditional discipline. Students felt confident in voicing questions as well as difficult concerns in well-developed thoughts and sentences.
I have developed teaching curriculums that not only capture grammatical necessities, but that allow individuals to tap into their own hopes, needs, and dreams through writing, analysis, creativity, and even movement. All my life, strangers have approached me to tell me their stories—on buses, in grocery stores, in front of banks, on the street, in restaurants, coffee shops, airports. I have found that people want to open to me, and I can assist them simply by pointing out a new perspective, a pattern in their speech, a habit in the way they hold their posture.
After being physically attacked at my last job and then dealing with harassment issues because of being attacked, I found myself in a career crisis. I hired a company to help me find a new path and bounced from one interview to the next. As I was searching to find something new while bumbling along in my own confusions, I realized that people were still asking me to help them with their own resumes, workplace difficulties, and writing projects. They came to me with grammatical issues, workplace dilemmas, and personal crises, and as I began examining their writing, the way they used language, and the way they presented themselves, I found that I could tap into some of the hopes and fears that affected their entire lives rather than just their immediate problems.
The career of personal and executive coaching brings together my passions for language and physical health, as well as the challenge to continually search for positive and specific results.
In my position as a coach, I am able to assist clients who are facing difficult personal and professional issues. I help them uncover a new perspective and new possibilities. My own health history of six surgeries, radiation, and continuous care as well as daily injections and other medications gives me a unique perspective in sympathizing with the challenges we all feel are overwhelmingly singular and which somehow end up blocking our career and personal paths from the success we desire.
My goal is to aid clients in finding a new voice and a new way to carry themselves, which will ultimately lead to more successful results and a happier life. I am a coach, confidant, grammar geek, and drillmaster, and I am ready to challenge clients into becoming all they have hoped they can become. I am invested, I am engaged, I am full of energy, and I challenge myself to pursue positive choices. I have faced six surgeries as well as radiation, and from those experiences, I have been given the opportunity to learn about patience and appreciation for life in the present. My gifts have to do with honesty, compassion, creativity, connection, and integrity, and I find that these gifts really only mean something when I offer them to others.
