I merge principles from psychology and evidence-based coaching to train and support clients as they optimize their personal, academic, and professional lives. My work is grounded in contextual behavioral science and choice theory. My coaching approach is pragmatic.
To summarize those ideas, our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are instruments that serve a purpose and contribute to our outcomes. We can create positive outcomes from the inside out through self-insight, practical strategies, and consistent, meaningful, targeted action. I coach to promote clients’ rationality, agency, and attention to knowledge and skills development relevant to their goals.
Unfortunately, behavioral science is not required curriculum within public or higher education, so in demand soft skills are lagging in the workforce and society. Soft skills include social and emotional intelligence, self-management, adaptability, collaboration, etc. Training programs in the workplace are most often focused on hard skills development, which leaves novice employees to find ways to develop the soft skills they’re often lacking through trial and error. That trial and error often includes documented disciplinary actions that become an impediment to promotability or income. We can address this skills gap on the front end by
1) educating adolescents and emerging adults in foundational behavioral science principles,
2) training them to apply that knowledge to build soft skills to enhance their performance, interactions, and outcomes, and
3) coaching them toward achieving higher level goals that matter to them while integrating these principles and skills.
I serve clients in organizations, academic settings, and private practice as a learning and development consultant, coach, and trainer.
Most of my clients seek support in the following areas:
Desistance and Positive Reform Coaching for Young People Transitioning Away From Problem Behavior – Encompasses Life, Academic, & Career Coaching
I developed the DPR Coaching program through formal research to understand how young people involved in delinquency transitioned from offender to non-offender and successful pro-social adulthood. It is designed to support clients as they work through each of the domains found to be essential to success. This program is ideal for teens or young adults transitioning away from delinquency toward positive reform, or those reintegrating from juvenile justice systems.
Coaching plans are tailored to the client’s needs and goals and guided by the following objectives
1. To introduce participants to the Shift coaching model and train them to apply associated life skills –
2. To understand how to be successful on the road toward positive change.
3. To learn to leverage personal strengths and traits conducive to positive change goals and refrain from using those that may threaten positive change goals.
4. To identify life direction and set and pursue goals in line with that direction.
5. To develop the skills necessary to enhance chances of success.
A career coach can help you design a career plan to reach your goals and enhance your well-being at work. From discovering different career paths to making choices that fit your desired trajectory. Many people believe that career coaches are only meant for executive level leaders, but this isn’t true. Career coaches are a great fit for workers who are unsure about what they want to do next, those lacking motivation or engagement, or even recent graduates who need guidance on finding a path that fits for them.
While a career coach will help you achieve job-related goals, a life coach will focus on your personal goals. Life coaches help their clients determine which changes they want to make in their lives, and then help formulate the steps clients need to take to reach these personal goals. Life coaching often involves becoming very aware of how your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors contribute to your satisfaction or dissatisfaction, although life coaches are not therapists.
Career coaching is a more narrowed focus on your work-life for a shorter period of time, and life coaching is a broader focus on your overall quality of life typically for a longer period of time. Either coaching client’s goals or plans may change as they reach different levels of awareness and intention in their lives. Since I offer both services, most of my career coaching work with clients takes a more integrative approach to enhance overall well-being in the process of addressing work-related goals.
As an academic life coach, I work with my students outside of their school setting. I help them reduce toxic stress and increase their effectiveness and confidence in their approaches to learning. All my coaching clients are eased through a variety of topics to enhance their academic effectiveness. Those topics usually include motivation, commitment, capacity, strategy, time management, prioritization, goal setting, striving, and achievement. They’ll learn to intentionally move themselves through higher levels of academic self-regulation by conditioning constructive habits for achievement and well-being in the process.
Like a tutor, academic life coaches work with a student throughout the semester. Unlike a tutor, who focuses on teaching a single content area, an academic life coach focuses on learning habits across all content areas, focusing on habits, study routines and learning strategies to help the student troubleshoot and enhance their own learning. Often the strategies we put in place are useful across ALL subjects and life domains, well beyond the specific subject(s) the student thinks they need support in.