Areas of Expertise
Human Service Professionals
In a world that prioritizes funding cycles over human rhythms, predictability over the mystery of human change and one-size-fits-all approaches over meeting clients where they are, human service professionals across all contexts do the most complex, emotionally taxing and rewarding work there is.
I have been supporting and building the capacity of human service professionals for 25 years. I am passionate about helping individuals within teams know themselves, connect to their gifts, their power and their leadership, so that as individuals they are empowered, and their collective efforts generate excellent results.
Human Service Professionals also possess the greatest potential for prioritizing the job over our personal lives, ignoring our own needs and health, all of which lead to burnout and early career displacement.
When was the last time you invested in your own growth?
How would you define your personal leadership?
Are your actions in alignment with your beliefs and values?
Are growth and development a part of your organization’s culture? Or contingent upon whether your manager believes in it?
Can you see the connection between the way you push yourself to do more with less (as the system demands) and your own self-worth?
The system may be broken, but you don’t have to be.
What would it feel like to take charge of your growth instead?
Imagine investing in yourself in a way that not only transforms your perspectives and your life, but also offers you an expanded toolbox for working with your clients or team or program participants?
That’s what the Living Inside Out program for Practitioners can do for you.
With validated learning indicators built in, and foundations in personal growth and professional development within human service delivery, why wouldn’t you invest in yourself?
Whether you are in Winnipeg, Vanuatu or South Sudan, this program offers you the space to pause, reflect, recalibrate and rediscover the energy to do your incredibly valuable work.
LGBTQIA+
As a member of this community, I resonate strongly with the desire to work with professionals who understand our experiences of living in a world that continues to exalt heteronormativity.
As the parent of a Trans adolescent, and a practitioner who has worked in many of the 35 countries wherein it is still illegal to identify as anything other than cis-gendered and heterosexual, I am in a constant state of gratitude and appreciation for where I currently live.
And as such, I offer the Living Inside Out program virtually, globally, for anyone and everyone within our community seeking space to explore how to live as your most authentic self, and create the fullest, most delicious life you can imagine.
What do you really want? Do you believe you can have it?
What do your nattering inner roommates have to say?
How do they support you? How do they hold you back?
Identity trumps. We know this. And while it is perhaps not everything, our ability to navigate everything the external world requires of us, is dependent on our identity and how we feel in our bodies, minds, hearts and souls.
It’s not who we are that holds us back from what we want, it’s who we think we aren’t. And particularly for those of us within the LGBTQIA community, who we think we aren’t is a direct result of social conditioning.
And the impact of our social conditioning within families of origin and cultural contexts live on in the voices in our heads. In how we speak to ourselves, in the people we choose to be in relationship with. The battle that began decades ago against a system that refused us equality may be perpetuated inside your own head, impacting your self-worth and all you seek to achieve.
You didn’t come this far in your journey to settle for less than you deserve. Your relationship with yourself is the basis for everything you want. It’s an inside job, and most of us have a little healing to do, to create space to live fully as the beings we know ourselves to be. The Living Inside Out program is perfect for that purpose.
Neurodivergent Thinkers
As a member of this community, I am immensely grateful to Jenara Nerenberg for her revolutionary work “Divergent Mind; Thriving in a World That Wasn’t Designed for You.”
This book offers research, comparative experiences and language that has helped me to reframe my personal experience from one wherein I felt perpetually wrong in the world, to one wherein I value my intrinsic ways of thinking, seeing and navigating the world.
Did you know that historically, women have been left out of the research on Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and Sensory Processing Disorder?
Imagine the implications of that. Imagine the experiences of young girls and women whose ways of interpreting, understanding and moving through the world around them – including mainstream education – do not align with neuro-normative ways of thinking.
The impact?
Internalised beliefs of wrongness. Exclusion, isolation, seemingly unexplainable ways of being that the outside world could not withstand. Most importantly? Repeated damage to our self-worth.
Upon receiving her diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder at the age of 17, my adolescent daughter reflected that her ‘whole life now made sense, looking back’. Her repeated experiences of being unseen, disliked, dismissed within mainstream could suddenly be understood through the lens of other people’s expectations of neuro-normativity, rather than something wrong with her.
Reflect on your own experiences of navigating the world around you at various stages of your life.
Were there experiences where you felt you simply didn’t fit?
Have you had to compromise your way of thinking to maintain belonging? What did it cost you?
This book forces us to see the assumptions inherent in the conversation around neuro-normativity, and allows us the freedom to reframe ourselves, to accept ourselves for how we are, rather than explain ourselves for how we divert from expectations of how we ought to be.
Your goals and your life’s vision are specific to you, and no matter how they unfold and expand during our work together, your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, social conditioning and ways of knowing in the world will be revealed, including how your unique mind works. Invariably, this awareness also highlights self-worth and the ways in which your authentic way of being in the world has been valued, or belittled, or both.
The Living Inside Out program meets you where you are, helps you see yourself more clearly, define where you want to go, and helps transform your inner landscape along the way there.
Brain Surgery Survivors
Every day is a new day. And while that’s true for everyone, for survivors of brain surgery, it’s loaded with added nuance and layers of individual complexity.
From the many reasons for needing brain surgery, to the uniquely individual impacts of having it, to the complex processes of rehabilitation and recovery, every survivor’s experience is unique. What is shared however, is the uncommon experience of having surgery on the part of our anatomy that is entirely responsible for our daily functioning, our joy, our life’s vision.
I lived with a brain tumour for over ten years without knowing it. Caveat: I knew something wasn’t right. I experienced strange symptoms, but between the medical system’s desire for easy answers and my propensity to search within psychology, the tumour grew to an enormous size, eventually requiring a full craniotomy to remove it.
While I appear to be fully-functioning to the outside eye, I live with the impacts of having had such a large tumour displace my brain for so many years. The brain doesn’t just go ‘doyng’ back into place. Believe me, I asked. Having an invisible disability is challenging because the external world expects me to show up according to its standards.
Conversely, many brain surgery survivors - perhaps you are one of us - live with permanent visible disabilities, which can set up a different kind of challenging experience within an ableist society. What I know is, I have felt the most understood since my surgery by other people who have also had brain surgery and are in the process of figuring out what life looks and feels like now.
Nobody fully understands what’s going on in your head but you. Working with someone who understands that there really is no neuro-normativity, especially for brain surgery survivors, can help you understand who you are now, and expand what’s possible for you in the future. The Living Inside Out program prioritizes helping people living in very diverse circumstances.