Proudest Achievements as a Professional Coach

Being a coach has been the most satisfying work of my life. It is such a gift to witness my clients’ growth and to play any tiny part in facilitating that. Watching clients embody and live from their core values is an honor. Following are some of the achievements that mean the most to me:

• I help clients increase their income—doing what they most love to do.
• I assist clients in moving from unsatisfying work to true life purpose fulfillment.
• I develop artists (all kinds) into business people, and love watching them make money from their art, using the power of their creative business sense.
• I encourage clients to step into their power and embody it humbly, and witness this change in them.
• I foster self confidence and self esteem and watch clients blossom.
• I guide clients in breakthroughs about fears, self defeating habits, negative beliefs, ineffective patterns, or self esteem issues, and am amazed as they become self confident people with healthy self esteem.
• I watch clients incorporate their new skills so fully that they quickly forget that they once had less effective habits or beliefs.
• I support clients in learning to express their needs and desires effectively in a straightforward manner.
• I assist clients in identifying and changing unsatisfying aspects of their marriage.

• I watch their delight in a “new” marriage with the same mate.
• I work to develop strategic abilities in clients and celebrate their strategic successes.
• I advise clients to make compassionate, loving, enlightened choices when facing personal challenges.
• I encourage clients to stand for their highest ethics in business and personal dealings.
• I assist them to recognize, hear, honor and act on their inner guidance.

• I encourage clients to develop a spiritual practice.
• I’m proud of having worked with hundreds of clients and having contributed to their lives becoming better.
• I am thrilled to have worked with scores of clients to have success—according to their definition of success—despite their disabilities or chronic illnesses.

Big Things Accomplished for Clients

It is an honor to encourage and support great clients to become what they once only dreamed of or hoped to become. It is a joy to watch their vision expand and suddenly, they know, in the core of their being that they can do, be, and have what they want. It is a thrill to assist these changes and share the path. 

Some specific accomplishments are:

• Many of my clients now have the confidence to earn money from their art.
• I pride myself in helping my clients learn to love business when they previously hated or avoided business.
• One of the best parts of my work is enjoying my clients bragging about their increased income—doing their creative work—definitely one of the best parts!
• It is a delight to listen to my clients thrill as they tell me about earning income from work they love—so fun to do that it does not even seem like work!

• It is a special pleasure to assist clients in creating passive income from existing expertise or products.
• It is a joy to brainstorm with clients and work on developing new products for income streams.
• I have worked with scores of disabled and chronically ill clients. It is wonderful to help them achieve success and fulfillment in spite of disability or chronic illness challenges.
• It is thrilling to support clients in developing the courage to step out into the market place and make money on their products and/or services.
• I ALWAYS assist my clients in doing less, earning more money, having more fun—all at the same time
• It is an honor to support my clients in giving up fear, indecision, inaction, uncertainty and doubt—and taking action—strategic and effective action.

• An important part of what I do with clients is to work with them to take fewer, but more targeted actions for greater results.
• I am an excellent source of support during extreme crises and help my clients put their lives back together afterwards.
• I am very knowledgeable about creativity and helping my clients follow their unique path in life, joyfully.
• One of the most exciting parts of what I do is help my clients have expanded visions of what they can be, do, and have—and helping them attain them.

My Greatest Satisfactions from Coaching

At this point I can’t imagine it getting any better than this—but that’s my job—expanding the vision, especially my own. I passionately desire to expand the number of people I help, and magnify and multiply the effect of their work. This is what coaching is to me: 

• Foster growth in my clients.
• Help them easily move past fear.
• Witness them making quantum leaps through taking many small steps.
• Teach strategic thinking and helping clients develop strategies to accomplish their goals.
• Have fun and laugh, celebrating the client’s large and small accomplishments and growth in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

• Always look for the loving, compassionate and ethical approach to challenges.
• Empower fearless progress.
• Brainstorm and identify the easiest, simplest and most satisfying approach and strategies.
• Look forward to hearing exciting news from my clients about what they’ve done and created since our last call.
• Support them through crises, tears, losses, doubts, frustrations and fears—and move them through it as healthily and quickly as practical.

• Feel the delight of knowing that I play some tiny part in creating a better world through my clients’ growth and successes and work in the world.
• Be a “No BS” friend—kindly pointing out anything that could be blocking good from the client’s life.
• Do a little gentle “hiney kicking” (with a soft padded sock) to remind clients of their goals, commitments and intentions.

• Give exhausted clients the homework of doing nothing but play for 2 days or a week.
• Show them how sometimes we make more progress by resting, doing nothing “productive”, and letting our brain rest and float back into creativity.
• Enjoy belly laughs and giggles.
• Know my work will live on, through my clients’ work, after I’m gone.

Coaching Philosophy

Some have described me as the proverbial “iron fist in a velvet glove”. Though this might be a bit exaggerated, my belief is that the client is paying to get results. If I’m not helping you get results, you might as well just chat with a buddy. Here are some of the ways I describe my coaching philosophy:

• Gentle and “organic” growth that is natural to the client is the type of growth that is retained.
• Taking numerous small steps—that don’t engender fear—results in a client turning around one day and being surprised to learn that they’ve taken a quantum leap without the leaping.
• Ignoring fear does not solve the fear. Let’s look at it, name it, get to the roots, and bust it as simply and non-traumatically as possible.
• As a coach, I always strive to “stand” for the client’s greatest good, and encourage that in them as well.
• I am a partner with my client in making their lives the greatest!

• Love, compassion, acceptance, and understanding promote growth the best.
• Choose to thrive, not just to tolerate a second rate life.
• Expand your vision—then, in the right timing, let’s expand it again.
• If we’re not laughing and having fun at least once during our session, this is not the best that coaching can offer.
• Sometimes life is absurd, and sometimes the human animal is silly. Better to laugh at the amusements than to choose to go into depression.
• We humans are very powerful beings when we get out of our own way.
• Get rid of all “victim” beliefs, attitudes, tendencies, and games.
• BE AT CHOICE in everything in your life.
• Don’t accept less than you really want and don’t hold back in fear from creating it.
• Gunk that’s been in your way for decades is best dumped the soonest we can do so.

About the Coach

In a way, becoming a professional coach was accidental. It wasn’t planned, but doing this work is clearly my Life Purpose work, and the most satisfying and gratifying work I’ve ever done. Actually, this career started with a pain in my neck. In the late 1990’s, for several years, I had been making a healthy six figure income working from my home, writing and illustrating technical manuals for major firms in the Silicon Valley. 

For six months, the pain had been so intense that I could only continue working by having extensive deep tissue massage every week. Finally, in 2000, I had a break in my work and decided I’d take a few days off to heal. I never returned to that work.

It took months and years for me to realize that I was extremely injured and had severe damage to three cervical disks and was totally disabled. The first year off work, I spent about 50% of my time flat on my back, in severe pain. For several years, I was unable to hold my head up at all. I could sit up only if my head was supported by a seatback, wall or pillows. Even a single second at the computer was excruciating. The doctor had basically told me to “grow up” and accept that I had to live a life of disability. I absolutely refused his picture of my life and NEVER allowed it into my mind.

After two years of pain and doctors, it became obvious that I would not be able to return to computer work and needed a new career. It was a perplexing situation to be in. I couldn’t continue computer work which was what I had done forty hours a week for twenty years. What on earth could I do that didn’t involve computers?

I spent a lot of time in self assessment and deep soul searching. I remembered being President of Crownmasters Toastmasters club in downtown San Francisco, and helping people get over their fears of public speaking. I remembered thinking intensely at the time, “I wish I could do THIS for a living!”

Finally, the concept of being a coach became a potential choice. I researched coach training options and was delighted to discover that through CoachU, I could get my coach certification over the phone in two years’ time—and made the choice to do so.

There were times during coach’s training when I took my classes lying on the floor in pain, but I never gave up, and got my Coach Training Program (CTP) certificate from Coach U in March of 2003.  

I began a program of physical therapy that I invented as I went along. The primary driver was to “listen to my body”. I realized that this was the lesson for me in the injury. That is, that I had spent years “running over my body’s needs”. I knew that I had to listen now to get out of pain—and to change this pattern to regain full functionality.

I spent five hours a day, six and sometimes seven days a week for six years on this evolving program. Two years into my efforts, when the doctor did my second MRI, the results showed that two of the damaged disks were now normal. He would not even acknowledge or recognize what I had done! I never went back. Happily, I am now close to 100% healed and 95% functionality with only minor and occasional pain. 

My Background

Now, back to the beginning—before the crisis. Here’s some information so that you can understand a bit more about what I can bring to your coaching.

Starving Artist

For ten years of my life, I was the proverbial “starving artist”, living to make art and barely scraping by financially. After ten years of that, I decided that I would work a corporate job in downtown San Francisco. I thought I was so brilliant, that surely after only a few months, my brilliance would be recognized and my salary would be increased so much so fast that I would be able to work only half a day downtown, and spend the rest of my time painting.

Corporate Drone

Unfortunately, things did not go quite according to my plans. They never did recognize my brilliance and I was so ignorant about business that when I asked for my salary on the first job, I thought that if I needed $1,000 income, I should ask for $1,000 pay. I didn’t even understand about taxes! Boy, did I have a lot to learn!

I never fit the corporate structure. For years and years, I tried to fit into it, but it was never a match. I started out as a file clerk and ended up ten years later working as an executive assistant for the top executive of a major San Francisco law firm, and various other top level executives.

My Business Is Launched!

After working for top executives for a couple more years, I negotiated my way into my first job as a technical writer with a $10,000 increase in income. During my six months as an employee there, I thoroughly learned the key skills needed to be a top-paid technical writer. 

The company I was working for was a mainframe “shop”. My boss gave me the choice to immerse myself in learning about the mainframe or moving on. Learning about the mainframe was not a career move that was going to take me to the top of the field, so I chose to move on. Within two weeks, I had my first technical writing contract at $50 an hour—and, in 1996, my business was launched, and I never looked back!

I immediately went to San Francisco Renaissance and registered for their six-month entrepreneur program, where we focused on writing our Business Plan. I tied for the top prize in writing the Business Plan. By the end of that program (six hours a week in class for six months and a 4” binder’s worth of completed homework), I had a fully developed business structure, with a retirement plan, medical insurance, and disability insurance.

Great Business Success

My business was profitable from the first month and every month thereafter. With my own business, I started to do more than survive, in fact thrive.

Like most entrepreneurs, I started out as a dba (“doing business as”). Once my income went over six figures, the tax bite and other business considerations caused me to incorporate. 

I worked strictly from my home office, and grew to love closing deals. I got about 95% of the contracts I interviewed for, and 100% of those I wanted, and became quite good at marketing. If I put my resume out for work, typically I would get 15-20 calls for work, in the first day or two.

Pain Brings A New Life

Now we pick the story back up after my coach training.

As a coach, for the first time in my life, every mistake I had ever made, every time I had to learn something “the hard way” finally all made sense! It was to prepare me to help my coaching clients move through their “stuff” faster, not waste their time, and help them succeed faster and with more satisfaction. This work is without doubt my Life Purpose!

My Coaching Practice

From March of 2004 until February of 2008, I was a contract Success Coach© for Harv T. Eker’s SuccessTracs division of Peak Potentials. Harv wrote the book, "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind". In this capacity, I coached hundreds of clients on financial freedom, and to live their life purpose.

It’s become obvious to me that I’ve been a coach all my life, but have only been paid for it since I became a professional.

My Unique Competitive Advantage

I have since realized that my journey from “starving artist” to successful business person has uniquely prepared me to be able to “interpret” business for other creative types. This life journey has enabled me to have both sides of my brain equally developed, and I can communicate appropriately with minds developed at any point on that creative/logical continuum.

Education

Degree: BA

Colleges:

B.A., Incarnate Word College, San Antonio,TX, French, History, Secondary Education

Louisiana State University, New Orleans, LA, Art

San Francisco State, San Francisco, CA, Interior and Furniture Design

City College of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, Art

Academy of Art, San Francisco, CA, Art

San Mateo College, San Mateo, CA, Real Estate

Corporate Experience

Visa, Oracle, Charles Schwab & Company, Serena Software International, Software Research Inc., The INDUS Group, Bronson, Bronson & McKinnon, PG&E 

Occupations: 
Technical Writer, Executive Assistant to top executives, Small business owner (both dba and corporation)

Professional Background:
Administration, Consulting, Creativity, Debt Recovery, Personal Effectiveness, Goal Setting, Home-Based Business, Small Business Owner, Spiritual Development, Writing, music industry

Industrial Experience:
Business (Micro 1-10 employees), Consulting, Design, Education, Financial Services, Law, Small Business Owner, Software, Spirituality, Writing, music industry

Where Do I Go Next?

Now that you have a better idea about who I am, the achievement and successes my clients have had, and a bit of my biography, go to the Contact Coach page to learn how to take the next step. I promise you it will be easy and fun and you’ll be delighted.