Services Offered

The Optimal You is passionate about helping individuals and teams become more emotionally intelligent and coach-like in their interactions. Clients have experienced that being more aware and skilled in these areas can lead to healthier relationships, higher levels of personal and professional satisfaction, greater productivity, increased success in implementing change, a positive shift in culture, more effective and respected leadership – the list is endless.

Here are some of the ways we can work together to achieve your goals:

Coaching
Facilitation
Assessments

Based on your objectives, The Optimal You can blend these three approaches to meet your needs. Are you interested in exploring how to do this? Contact me and we’ll engage in a meaningful conversation to determine what works best for you.

Coaching

Professional Coaching is a partnership between a qualified coach and an individual or team that supports the achievement of extraordinary results, based on goals set by the individual or team. A coach is like a strategic thought and accountability partner – someone who can help you explore assumptions, gain clarity, prioritize and work through challenges, confidentially and without bias or judgment. The Optimal You draws on a variety of tools and assessments to help clients gather insight on personal preferences as well as self/other perceptions about strengths and opportunities for development. Through the process of coaching, we work with clients to focus on the skills and actions needed to successfully produce their personally relevant results.

People who engage in a coaching relationship can expect to experience the following:

  • fresh perspectives on challenges and opportunities
  • enhanced thinking and decision making skills
  • improved interpersonal effectiveness
  • increased confidence in carrying out their chosen work and life roles

The design and duration of a coaching relationship varies based on each individual and team. It takes time for new habits, skills and changes to become integral to our way of being. Keeping this in mind, a minimum engagement of 6 months is recommended, recognizing that most coaching relationships last 8-12 months and may go longer as needed.

With a full commitment to enhancing their effectiveness, individuals and teams can also expect to see appreciable results in the areas of productivity and personal satisfaction with life and work.

Facilitation

The Optimal You supports individual and team development by providing engaging and interactive facilitation services in many areas essential for personal and organizational success. There are numerous benefits to working with a professional facilitator, including:

  • allowing participants to fully engage in discussions without worrying about keeping time or staying on track
  • creating a safe environment for everyone to participate in idea generation and share their points of view
  • having a neutral, objective party to manage tension filled or conflict situations
  • maintaining focus and guiding a decision making process

Whether it’s designing customized initiatives to meet your needs, or facilitating your existing workshops and programs, we can help you achieve your objectives. Our experience ranges from facilitating ½ day workshops and week long initiatives to delivering programs spanning 4-6 months in duration. Many clients also engage in follow up coaching to support truly integrating and solidifying their newly acquired skills and knowledge. A variety of tools and assessments, such as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, Emotional Intelligence EQ-i 2.0 and EQ-i 360, may be included depending on your needs.

The following are examples of initiatives The Optimal You has customized and/or facilitated for its clients:

  • Understanding Self and Others
  • Building Coaching Capacity
  • Team Building
  • Developing Effective Leaders
  • Enhancing Communications
  • Managing and Leading Through Change

In addition to the above, The Optimal You is a licensed associate for Powerful Professionals. Powerful Professionals focuses on “how-to” skill building for knowledge workers, including engineers, systems analysts, human resource professionals — anyone who delivers an expertise to others. This world-class workshop has been delivered to over 17,000 participants in 23 countries worldwide. A 360 feedback survey is available as a tool to support personal growth. Powerful Professionals is also available in French and Spanish.

The Optimal You offers individual and partner led facilitation. Please contact me to find out how we can work together to support you in achieving your goals.

Assessments

MBTI® – Myers-Briggs® Type Indicator

Understanding ourselves is key to developing healthy and effective relationships. Our personal preferences influence many things, including how we seek and utilize information, communicate with others, deal with conflict, manage stress, make decisions, organize ourselves and lead others.

The MBTI® assessment is one of the most popular and respected personality type tools in the world. It’s simple and powerful, and helps provide a common language and framework for understanding our strengths and appreciating and leveraging our differences. 89 of Fortune 100 companies use the MBTI® assessment to maximize individual and team effectiveness from entry to executive levels. Researched for over 50 years and used by millions each year, the MBTI® assessment is proven to provide effective results that positively impact our growth and development.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence refers to our ability to recognize and manage our own emotions as well as those of the people around us. It’s become recognized as a highly important factor for success, influencing productivity, efficiency, effective leadership, team collaboration and change management.

Whether we know it or not, our emotions impact our decisions. It happens naturally because of the way our brains work. Our experiences enter our body through the spinal cord and must travel through our limbic system (where emotions are generated) before they get to the part of our brain involved in rational thought. When we become more aware of our own emotional intelligence, we’re able to further develop our emotional and social skills so we can better express ourselves, develop and maintain relationships, and cope with challenges. An EQ-i 360 is also a helpful tool for personal development as it provides insight about how we’re perceived, giving us valuable information to work with as we look to close the gap between our intention and impact.

TKI® – Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument

It’s not possible for people to agree on everything, all the time. Actually, it wouldn’t be healthy or productive. We need to be able to express and discuss our ideas and opinions in a respectful way. The TKI® tool helps us understand our personal preference for approaching conflict in different scenarios, and provides detailed information on how to use each of the five conflict handling styles based what’s appropriate for the situation we’re dealing with.

The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI®) tool is the world’s best-selling tool for helping people to understand how different conflict-handling styles affect interpersonal and group dynamics. It can help improve productivity and performance, reduce stress, enhance leadership effectiveness and positively impact morale.

StressMap®

Our complex and changing environment is creating more stress than we are often prepared to deal with. A recent study found companies spend $300 billion annually for health care and missed workdays as a result of workplace stress. People report they feel less energetic, more irritable and get less sleep due to increased demands at work. The impacts of this are far reaching — from physical and psychological symptoms to having more accidents on the job, among other things.

Stress is a part of our life and comes in many forms. There are times it is a positive catalyst for creativity and growth. Other times, it can undermine our health and ability to function. The StressMap® tool helps you explore your sources of stress and how you respond to them. It also includes tips and strategies for positive coping mechanisms. The better equipped we are individually and organizationally to understand and manage stress, the healthier and more productive we will be.