What is Coaching

Coaching with me is a collaborative partnership that builds upon your natural creativity, resourcefulness and goodness. It works from your strengths rather than from a diagnosis of deficiency. Using such practical tools as goal setting, action planning and progress checking, coaching empowers you to realize your fullest potential.

The coaching interaction may seem on the surface to be as simple as talking and having tea together. And it is true that I try to keep things comfortable and straightforward. At the same time, the coaching process is a deep one in which you will be able to clarify your authentic purpose, see and reframe limiting beliefs, create effective strategies to leverage real strengths, and take concrete steps toward creating the “whole” life that you are meant to live.

Smart, success-oriented people know that both high-quality short-term coaching and longer-term development coaching give them a performance edge. A seasoned coach can both simplify and enrich your life.

Unique Approach–Unique Background

My coaching embodies distinctive currents of thought and practice and reflects my wide-ranging personal and professional experience. Specifically, as I serve my clients, I draw upon:

1. Insights from corporate, non-profit and public sector culture, which I gained from working as a product manager in the fashion industry in the US and, subsequently, from coaching many business executives and leaders of government and non-profit organizations, and as adjunct support to numerous culture revitalization programs, primarily in the Netherlands,
2. Contemporary eco-psychological perspectives that focus on individuals in the broad context of their relationship to nature, to other people within and across cultures and socio-economic systems and to their deeply human longings for meaning, purpose, and inspiration (in mid-career, to extend my commitment to sustainability as a life practice, I earned a Master’s degree in transpersonal psychology and eco-psychology at Naropa, a Buddhist-oriented university in Boulder, Colorado),
3. Ancient wisdom traditions, such as Pythagorean philosophy and Buddhist teachings and mind-body practices, including meditation, which I practice each and every day,
4. Depth psychology, especially as that has been developed in the Pathwork and Bio-Energetic approach to supporting individual development (I am a certified Pathwork Helper),
5. Intuitive and artistic modes of seeing and illuminating human experience (reflecting, for example, my academic degree in theater arts and years as a professional dancer), and
6. Multi-cultural awareness, reflecting my roots as a Chinese-American growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area and my subsequent experience as an immigrant to the Netherlands, where I lived and worked for two decades, immersing myself in Dutch language and culture.

Along with my coaching I have initiated and developed various personal development for leadership programs. I was founder of the Executive Human Development & Leadership School for executives and young professionals for the Dutch consulting firm, Koan. My personal development for leadership programs specialized in unblocking human potential, enlarging professional capacity and fostering deeper connections with self, with the underlying values of the organization with which one works, with home and family, and with the surrounding community and environment.

Some past clients: Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure & Environment, RaboBANK, Mees & Sons Brokerage, Trenite van Doorne Law, Royal Dirkzwager, KEMA Energy Consulting, Plezant Theater Productions, Radboud University Nijmegen, Portland State University and numerous individuals.