The International Coaching Federation (**ICF** - the world's leading authority on the coaching industry) defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.

Coaching can help bring clients closer to their dreams, goals, and desires. A coach creates an environment for curiosity, possibility, and committed action while providing the necessary accountability for each step of the way.

An effective coach has the training, confidence, and presence to cultivate trust and safety, listen actively, evoke new and deeper awareness, and facilitate client growth.

Each session begins with a quick check-in and breathwork to center and arrive into the present moment.

We then discuss updates, recent wins, epiphanies, and downloads. Next, we define the goals of the session, re-engage your vision of the future, discuss what’s in the way, what changes and action steps to commit to, review your plan, set up accountability, and discuss feedback.

In between sessions, we remain in contact via email and direct message to stay updated on changes and the actions you take.

While there are many parallels between these fields, a few key differences are worth noting; one of the most important of which is the sense of power dynamics. Coaching is a relationship between two people on equal ground. While a coach may hold expertise in specific fields, ultimately, it is the client who is the true expert in their own life. A coach is there to offer a different perspective and facilitate learning, rather than providing a diagnosis or course of treatment.

This differs greatly from therapy and counseling (often interchangeable terms), which are clinical-based professions that most often deal with mental health issues, past trauma, and debilitating thought patterns. In a counseling session, the therapist is the expert.

Therapy helps clients unpack and heal emotional pain, conflict, and past trauma which prevents individuals from functioning effectively in the present.

Coaching is future-centered. Coaches may also work with clients' emotions and mental states, but always in the service of defining goals and taking action to narrow the gap between their present and future.

Coaching has distinct goals and a clear timeline, while therapy is often open-ended with a loose objective of feeling better over a longer period of time.

Both therapy and coaching help you to master your thoughts and emotions. Both deal with self-awareness, resilience, and trust.

Coaching best serves clients who are ready to invest in a high level of moral, emotional, and energetic support. Coaching is best suited for those who are already healthy and high functioning in some or many areas of their life.

People who regularly suffer from self-defeating thoughts, anxiety, depression, and trauma are encouraged to seek a therapist or counselor before beginning work with a coach. Some clients may opt to work with both a therapist and a coach concurrently, and this approach can be very helpful in providing the different types of support that a client needs.

As a lifelong rebel, radical thinker and artist, I identify deeply with this question. The simple answer is YES, you can coach yourself. We all coach ourselves through our inner dialogue. But how effectively can you really do it on your own? The mind and ego has many ways of sabotaging our goals. Because of this, working with a coach can be a life-changing investment.

To hire a coach is to take a leap of faith that another person has your back and your best interests at heart. Many of us have grown up in a society that prizes rugged individualism and perpetuates the myth of the lone genius. Many of us also grow up with trust issues based on attachment trauma. If these thought patterns are regularly running in the background, accomplishing your goals can be a difficult uphill (and solo) battle.

A coach can ease this burden by helping you lay out a path and clear the blocks in the way, so you can roll downhill with momentum and energy propelling you towards your envisioned future.

Talking with friends is important and essential. However, something to keep in mind is that they also have their own issues to unpack and goals to reach. A conversation between friends is a give-and-take relationship. This can create opportunities for mutual accountability, but it may be difficult to expect friends to provide you with consistent unpaid emotional labor.

A coach is trained in deeper levels of listening, asking powerful questions, and holding compassionate space for clients. These are skills that are honed through working with clients regularly to see patterns emerge and create systems and frameworks unique to each coach.

I find it important to define, or redefine, spirituality. My approach is to reclaim and simplify the concept of spirituality as a sense of wholeness.

Many of us have grown up with an ambivalent relationship to religion and have become disenchanted with dogmatic views and practices. The recent boom in public interest on spirituality, witchcraft, astrology, and natural health is a welcome shift from the stale systems of capital-driven and sickness-centered medical industry. However, trendy self-care strategies (such as skincare, fad diets, exercise regimens, and acts of performative wokeness) often only address symptoms and surface issues, rather than getting deep into the core of personal and cultural transformation.

Striving for Wholeness is a human endeavor. We live in modern cultures built on fragmentation, specialization, and individual exceptionalism. I believe spirituality, simply put, is the effort of putting the fragments of our life back together and returning to a sense of oneness with the human and more-than-human world.

We all have a physical body, we all have emotions, we all have thoughts. We are part of greater systems of family, community, culture, the biosphere, and planetary systems. If we can agree on this, then we already share the same definition of spirituality as Wholeness. Simple as that.

Additionally, I do my best to bring together ancient frameworks such as Traditional Chinese Medicine and the Chakra System with parallel examples and explanations validated by science and evidence-informed practice. I do not prize spirituality or science over the other, because I consider them as part of the same whole. They are different languages that speak about the same Truth.

Results vary based on your own commitment. As a coach my job is to offer regular support, but I am not here to force you or guilt you into doing the work. The more time and attention you put in to the work we agree to do together, the quicker and more powerful your results.

I offer programs with different lengths and levels of engagement ranging from a single session to a six months transformational relationship, with the option to renew the contract.