Intensive Coaching

I have witnessed and experienced tremendous growth and change when there is a time devoted to critical times. Sometimes or even often these are crises, when we are ready to take action, what has served us in the past no longer entirely serves. Building on past learning, integrating and/or choosing to leave behind old patterns, and moving forward, these are times when I feel the most called and most able to provide what is needed for development

There are many coaches, counselors and therapists providing services; I have and will refer clients to them based on client needs and goals. My best fit is working with individuals who know that they need something different and/or are facing crises where working with someone with both business and psychological expertise is even better. 

 Let’s discuss. Depending on our work together, I may have already recommended a referral, or at this juncture, there is certain work to be done that you can do for a period of time on your own. Potential paths forward: 

1. Agreeing to one more intensives package, where because we are clear on what is different at this point in the journey, there time-bound specific goals 

2. Identifying goals and outcomes that will require intensive work for 9 mos to a year, we develop a supportive map of sessions and milestones for that period of time

3. Bringing your workplace team, or a partner or key team members, into a group coaching context, where we have shared team goals for a specific period of time*

*This would be for organizational needs and goals, where Grunert & Meyer, my organizational consulting partnership with Tiffany Grunert, would be brought in for a defined scope of work.

I earned a PhD in Human Development (lifespan), with a masters program in couples and family therapy and a MSEd in Organization Development and Workplace learning, which focused on career development and adult learning. During graduate school and post-doc, I engaged with intervention research and research groups studying adolescent teen mothers, parent-children and pre-school teacher-children interactions. Video-taping, small group feedback, direct observation and self and other-feedback, were the most powerful tools for individuals to develop capacities in these projects. Before graduate school I worked with financial institutions, in NYC and Tokyo, as a Strategic HR Director for a  bank during an international M&A and director of an association of 90 foreign banks where I advanced initiatives including a health insurance association and a training institute. During and immediately post-graduate school I led two private schools through significant change processes that resulted in sustainable businesses delivering on their missions and values. Before becoming an independent consultant I returned to academia as a special appointment faculty (tenure-track) teaching medical communication skills to human medical and veterinary students, as well as veterinarians and MDs coaching and developing simulation labs, the gold-standard of medical communication teaching and learning.

I am a developmentalist and an ecologist, sometimes called a systems thinker. I have studied and been supervised in family theories, object relations and attachment theory applications because I believe that early childhood experiences and patterns, including those that are formed in normative and traumatic settings, are integral to understanding how we interact with ourselves and others. My work is most grounded in the Piaget/Kegan viewpoint of making meaning that takes into account a form of human evolution that suggests we can become constrained or limited unless provided with opportunities to experience alternative conditions. Because of this I do bring a certain kind of seriousness to diagnoses, to accurately identify issues and constraints. This is not the DSM kind of diagnosis, rather an individual and systems approach. I deeply wish for my clients to be able to guide themselves, just as I too seek out guides along the way, and believe in the value of diagnostic accuracy on this path.

These are useful for both the client and myself, as a means to orient, check assumptions, and test hypotheses. Assessments or types are not end points. At the end of the day, I am a developmentalist, and I look for ways that individuals can find their own sense of self across traits and states, to find both more integrity as well as more freedom.

Clients and friends have said to me: “Consultants and coaches seem to “keep” clients or find new ways that they are needed.”  I will not “keep” a client. I also no longer provide standalone training programs or event programming for a similar yet different reason: my goal is to provide consulting, coaching or guiding that has a longer-term impact. From the beginning, including the 20-min pro-bono session, I consider and identify other options for what you are seeking, and share with you, the client, for your decision-making. And, along the way, we will have checkpoints and milestones where I sincerely offer other options for the work.