Young Adult Life Coach
707-502-2535
About Me
My coaching journey started in the wellness sector when I served as the Fitness Director at a small Air Force Base while active duty. I later pursued my passion for health and wellness by owning a Pilates and Yoga studio. However, it was during a challenging time for my teenage daughter, who struggled with self-esteem and self-worth, that I truly recognized the power of coaching. After exploring many avenues, we discovered that collaborating with a life coach who specialized in teens and young adults was especially effective in transforming her internal dialogue.
This personal experience inspired me to shift my career to merge all my life and work skills, allowing me to assist my clients in gaining new perspectives and fostering a change in mindset.
I trained in and use the Youth Coach Institute program. This program is designed to empower young minds focusing on two key goals: transforming the lives of youth by increasing access to evidence-based coaching and providing rigorous, research-based coaching practices. My approach is all about holding a safe and supportive space for my clients, where resilience and empowerment are at the heart of everything I do, ensuring that young individuals are well-equipped for success and well-being. That being said, I recognize that each client is unique and I have a diverse toolkit of creative to engage and support their progress.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Life Coaching?
Coaching is a non-directive, person-centered, growth-oriented support service to help functional clients achieve meaningful goals that matter to them. Coaching promotes self-concordance, pursuing goals aligned with personal values and interests. The coaching relationship serves as a structural support that offers three factors vital to promoting positive outcomes for youth: a one-on-one relationship with a caring adult, competency building, and time intensity.
The coaching approach emphasizes autonomy, voice, and choice.
Clients come to coaching with an interest in self-improvement or measurable progress. Through coaching, clients find insight and direction to identify practical means to reach their goals. The coach guides and supports the client’s planned, intentional, and purposeful action toward achievement from a place of openness, acceptance, and non-judgment.
Coaching clients are ready and willing to do the work inherent in the coaching process. They are committed to optimizing their internal and external resources to achieve the outcomes they seek.
What Is Youth Life Coaching?
As youth life coaches, we support tweens, teens, and emerging adults as they navigate life, relationships, school, and job commitments with a focus on enhancing well-being and reducing unnecessary distress. We help them gain clarity and make decisions that fit who they are, how they want to live, and who they want to be in the world. We enhance outcomes through these channels:
Resource Optimization
Helping youth identify and use the internal and external tools presently available to them to begin moving toward their goals. We support positive identity development in this process by helping our clients become more aware of their natural strengths, interests, values, skills, and talents. It’s easy to focus on what we believe we’re lacking or what we perceive as our weaknesses. Sometimes, we can use some help shifting our focus back to what we’re already good or great at and using those things to build the life we want.
Personal Development
We build our client’s sense of power to choose goals that matter to them, pursue those goals, and achieve them. We support youth as they prioritize managing their thoughts, emotions, behaviors, self-care, and other healthy habits to enhance their chances of achieving their goals in a balanced way that protects the person in the process.
Social Development
We facilitate social and emotional learning and related skill-building. Through this focus, our clients become more aware of the importance of positive social connections and relationships to success and well-being.
School and Work Development
This work is about goal orientation for fit in education, job paths, and prosocial groups aligned with our client’s goals. We coach our clients through the research and considerations necessary to begin to establish self-determined life direction, related planning, and action steps around long-term goals.
Why Does Life Coaching Work So Well For Teens And Emerging Adults?
Adolescents are in a sensitive stage of development. Their social cognition is developing rapidly, which means they’re much more sensitive to others’ judgments about them. They’re more self-conscious as they’re developing their identity and trying to decide where they fit in. They’re dealing with heightened emotions and sensitivity with hormone surges related to biological changes that are still very new for them. They’re wired to be more impulsive and engage in more risk-taking as they develop a willingness to separate from their family and create their own way.
A non-judgmental approach is healthy for all humans but is needed so much more in this developmentally vulnerable stage. The non-judgmental ear can make the difference between whether they reach out for help when they’re struggling or get the support and guidance they really need as they navigate toward healthy independence. The non-directive approach is a way to respect their need to develop their own voice, choice, and self-confidence.
Why Does An Evidence-Based Approach Matter?
Studies show that adolescent interventions, including personal and social skill-building practices, developed from a strong research base significantly enhance self-perceptions, school engagement, positive social behaviors, grades, and reduced problem behaviors. However, those lacking a research base show minimal effects.