Who am I?
Like you, I’m multi-dimensional. A lifelong learner. A human fractal operating in many dimensions of space and time.
I combine and integrate the skills of an executive coach, organizational psychologist, and psychotherapist to help you and/or your team find a process to integrate your thoughts and feelings to a place of wholeness where your boundless creativity, energy, and expression of self can safely and freely emerge, whether at work, in personal relationships, or the relationship you have with the many parts of yourself.
To read my official bio, please click here:
My current internal improvement project involves taking in the loving kindness and support of others more deeply. My worldly aspirations include creating a media platform where I can share the tools of coaching and therapy for people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to them.
For the sake of coaching and psychotherapy, here are a few, important things you ought to know. Please reach out if you’d like to know more; I’m happy to share. Click here for my official bio and CV.
Organizations & Leaders I Work With:
- Microsoft
- Bloomberg
- Goldman Sachs
- JP Morgan
- United Nations
- Weather Channel
- Columbia University Medical Center
Business Experience:
I worked at JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in various leadership, mentoring, and team-building roles. In 2007, I co-founded Social Security Advisors, a successful Manhattan-based financial technology company that helps the millions of Americans who retire every day maximize their Social Security benefits. (Would you believe that Americans leave $25 billion dollars on the table every year that they have earned in Social Security benefits but underclaim?) With the additional Social Security benefits that our clients receive, Americans have been able to send their grandchildren to college, stay in their homes during the financial crisis, and have a much happier, healthier retirement. I’m proud of the company we built and retired as CEO after 10 fulfilling years in order to do the thing I most loved about being an executive: executive coaching and leadership development.
My Leadership Philosophy: Soft Skills Bring Hard Results
As a CEO of Social Security Advisors for 10 years, I helped create a work environment in which team members could live up to her highest human potential while also fulfilling the mission of our company. I enjoyed marrying the “inside with the outside”—the great capacity for creativity, drive, and achievement within each of our employees—with the “outside,” or the hard-core business results around productivity, sales, and profits that we returned to our shareholders. I learned that cultivating certain Soft Skills actually delivers Hard Results. The company, which flourishes to this day, was able to start from humble beginnings because of the investments we made in human potential.
Credentials
Education
- Columbia University, Doctoral Studies in Leadership and Andragogy
- Columbia University, M.A., Change Leadership and Organizational Psychology
- University of Texas at Austin, Studies in Business and Public Policy in the MBA and Public Affairs Program
- Tufts University, B.A., Economics, Concentration in Neuroscience
- Leader of the largest on-campus organizations, the Tufts Economics Society
- Spearheaded a new initiative teaching economics to high school students
- Valedictorian, Southampton High School. Also attended Phillips Academy Andover –Secretary of the Student Council
- Elected Class Brains. Egads! For my senior yearbook, I dressed like my favorite sitcom character, Steve Urkel, because I was and still am a proud polymath (aka a HUGE NERD!!!)
Executive Coaching
- International Coach Federation (ICF)
- Gestalt Institute of Cleveland
- The credential under the credential is the 20 years I spent working on Wall Street, 10 of which were as a CEO.
Psychotherapy
- William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology, certification in the treatment of Anxiety, Compulsions, and Eating Disorders.
- Gestalt Center of New York, four-year Licensed Psychoanalyst program. This program requires a combined total of over 1,000 hours of clinical practice, coursework, and individual and group psychotherapy. I have done advanced training in Dialectal Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Existential Psychology, and Family/Systems Constellations. This has been by far the most rigorous program I’ve ever done because of all of the things I’ve had to work on within myself in order to be fully present for my clients. I’m proud of the fact that some of my clients have been able to rekindle and heal relationships with their children, reenter the workforce after almost giving up, and drive forward a new vision of themselves that is free of a heavy past.
My Approach to Working Together:
We can’t teach anyone anything. We can only help them discover it in themselves.”
Galileo Galilei
To see a graphical process map of the steps I use during a coaching engagement, see HERE
My approach is non-authoritarian and highly collaborative. I see you as the expert in the content and me as an expert in the process. Together we will discuss your goals and desires, co-create a roadmap for how to work toward those goals, and a plan to check-in regularly and assess how our collaboration meets your needs. I believe that both the questions and the solutions are within you, and it’s my job to help you adjust some of the barriers that have kept you from receiving what is yours to claim. I use a proprietary framework developed over decades of experience in corporate life. It combines the Scientific Method, Appreciative Inquiry, SWOT analysis, and SMART goal-setting.
Coaching vs. Therapy vs. Consulting
It is both ethical and essential that we hold boundaries between coaching, therapy, and consulting.
Coaching: Helping you find your own answers. Supporting you in the choices you make. Partnering with you to stay accountable to your goals.
Consulting: Advice-giving. What I think you should consider or what I would do if I were you.
Therapy: Exploring your deeper operating systems. Updating them. Understanding what programming might be driving current choices and behavior. Accessing subconscious drivers of motivation, goals, and aspirations. Making new choices around historic patterns.
I fully respect that some people don’t want to do therapy, and I would never force it upon anyone. It’s just another tool in my toolbox that I offer in the event that it can be helpful. In all my work, I distinguish between the three modalities and point out when we approach these boundaries in-session, so you can choose which framework you’d like to work in.
My Coaching Process: For a deeper understanding of the difference between coaching and therapy, please read my article here
Research:
Ever curious about the link between our brain and behavior, my adolescence was pretty much spent toiling in they neuropsychopharmacology lab of Dr. Steven Dewey at Brookhaven National Laboratory. I am humbled to have worked alongside groundbreaking researchers like Dr. Dewey, a Professor of Psychiatry at NYU, Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), National Medal of Science winner Dr. Joanna Fowler, and National Academy of Sciences member Dr. Alfred P. Wolf. I researched treatments for cocaine addiction, and my work has been published in an array of peer-reviewed academic journals. I gave my first international scientific talk at age 17 at the society for nuclear medicine annual meeting in Toronto, Canada and have been doing research on the brain and behavior ever since. My latest body of research involves looking at early childhood experiences that contribute to the development of personality disorders, particularly Schizoid Personality Disorder and Adaptations.
Confidentiality:
The only way we can do work at the deepest level of transformation is if we have the safety that come with complete confidentiality. I consider what you share with me to be sacrosanct. And I will treat it with the utmost respect and care. Your information is yours, and you and only you have the full discretion to share it as you’d like. Everything you disclose during our sessions is completely confidential. If you contact me via an unsecured method (fax, email, or telephone), I cannot guarantee confidentiality due to the nature of most Internet-based platforms. As required by law, exceptions to confidentiality are made if I receive information that indicates someone may be in danger. Also, if you request that I report certain data to your team or organization, we can discuss these situations on a case-by-case basis.
FUN FACTS ABOUT ME:
Since I’m certainly not all work and no play, here are some things that give color to my personality.
*QUARKS & QUIRKS: I’m an INFP, a type 5 on the Enneagram, and believed as a child that I came from another planet because I was born abroad. I’m a total science junkie, and love exploring the cosmos of the human psyche.
*HIDDEN PLACES! I have a hidden office! Yes, one of my offices is tucked away, far from view, smack dab in the middle of Manhattan. It’s kind of like a cave, and only a handful of people even know how to access it. I do some of my deepest thinking there. And I see clients there who face the public eye day after day and want absolute privacy.
*CHASING RAINBOWS! My favorite color is Rainbow, and I’ve been described as a “human rainbow” (thank you Becky Karush)!
*PLAY + WORK = PLERK! I did things in reverse. I’ve been working since I was 5 years old and started experiencing a childhood later in my adult life. Now I especially enjoy projects with imagination. Recently, a COO of a large bank wanted to shake things up in the innovation department. As part of a design thinking exercise, we held an “Innovation Pot Luck.” Each member of the team did a reflective exercise and brought something to the table that symbolized how they would change the current customer experience. Some really new and surprising things were brought to the table, and the results that emerged surpassed our expectations. Plus, the team really bonded over the experience.
*JOURNAL JUNKIE! I’m obsessed with journals and journaling. I complete a new journal virtually every month and wherever I travel, I look for a souvenir journal to bring home to add to my collection. I have a special journal area in my house where I lovingly store them.
*SIGNED, SEALED, DELIVERED! I’m obsessed with juicy pens, good smelling paper, and old-fashioned letter writing. Between Christmas and New Year’s, I write at least a hundred hand-written gratitude letters to people who have been kind and generous to me throughout the year. I buy perfumes and scents specifically for my stationery. I want the recipient’s olfactory experience of my letter to be as scintillating as their linguistic experience.
*PANCAKE MADNESS! My favorite food is BRUNCH! Anything that you can slap butter or syrup on is my thing. I spent 20 years trying to find the perfect pancake recipe, only to land on a Just-Add-Water mix from Amazon which is the BEST!! It is served at one of the finest private clubs in Boston (need I say more)?!
*GIVE ME COUNTRY! I *love* Country and Western everything—especially the music! With two left feet, I managed to be a regular two-step dancer at the Broken Spoke. I have a whole wardrobe built around fringe, suede, and pearl snaps, which I wear to events like the Calgary Stampede, the Carnivore’s Ball, and when walking down Fifth Avenue (well, only during harvest time).
* HALLELUJAH! I had the great opportunity to sing in two gospel choirs in college. The Seventh Day Adventist Gospel Choir, and the Innervisions Gospel Choir. Singing songs of praise and exaltation is so uplifting to the spirit, and I will never forget the feeling of Oneness I felt with my fellow gospel choir members.
*TOOTHY HOBBIES! As a kid, I collected weird things–old glass coke bottles, vintage folding cameras, antique beaded purses…and my baby teeth. While I missed out on the Tooth Fairy, somewhere collecting dust in my basement is a porcelain jar of my little pearly whites!
*I HATE TO EXERCISE! But I loooove to move. To dance to Michael Jackson. To bounce off a trampoline during recess time. To ride my horse into the sunset. To get into a slow, enchanting, stretchy flow that combines breath and body. To express through movement whatever my body needs to release. I became a Certified Spinning and Group Fitness Instructor to help people who, like me, dislike dieting and exercise, but want to find freedom through movement. To find wholeness, acceptance, love, and connection with their bodies.