Our relationship with you is important to us. We are both dedicated professionals committed to providing quality coaching, teaching and consulting to health care professionals and to the larger systems in which they work. We believe that all people are valuable and unique and deserve to be treated with dignity, understanding and kindness. We also believe that given the tools and skills that are targeted towards their specific needs and goals, people can become better resourced to manage demands in their personal and professional lives and explore for meaningfulness in ways that are most authentic to them. In this sense, we strive to support the uniqueness of each individual’s life, acknowledging that most professionals have the capacity and the wisdom to make decisions if we can follow a half step behind and shine a light on their path.
We customize our work to the distinctiveness that exists in all individuals and in all organizations that make them unique and special. At the heart of this work is our understanding that all organizations are comprised of people—people who bring a plethora as well as a variety of talents, skills, experiences and yearnings. Organizations typically recognize that their greatest strength lies in their personnel, yet they struggle with how to motivate and inspire the people in the organization to link their differentiated parts into a unique and energized whole. Often, the result is a series of rigid protocols and rules that are intended to govern behavior and productivity, but that fail to connect to the creative spirit that exists in the professional workforce.
The end product is often burnout, mediocrity and inability to manage challenges, often resulting in errors, conflict and disengagement (either emotionally, spiritually or physically—people just “leave” in whatever way they can).
We see ourselves as coaches who are most concerned with what each individual and team needs to succeed. While this may include tools and techniques to help support some elements of change, we are trying to help people learn how to manage a variety of situations—not just the one that is currently presenting—by having the internalized resources to manage from the inside, out. This kind of change doesn’t have an end point—it is a continuous journey of learning, struggling, occasionally failing, trying and learning some more. It is lifelong and results in greater capacity to lead, to build and maintain highly resonant teams, to manage conflict, and to promote choices that support greater balance in life.
Integrated Life Skills is not a recipe for communication, conflict management, teamwork or work life balance. Rather, it is designed to teach skills for integration that are more organic (individualized and internalized) and that result in unflinching self-awareness (for individual team members and leaders) and options for self-management, paving the pathway for growth potential. We will teach skills for exploring to understand the perspectives of others with empathic openness to what those perspectives mean, in order to generate awareness of differences and create a more expansive map for leadership, choice and team management.