Case Studies

Mark leads a life that most people would envy, working as a successful model, travelling the world to exotic locations, surrounded by other beautiful people. However, he secretly yearned for a more passionate and purpose-driven existence.

His goal was to choose a new professional path to pursue. The challenge Mark faced was moving out of a comfort zone into unknown and less secure areas. His obstacles included being more decisive about what he wanted, ranking his priorities and making concrete commitments.

We worked together toward uncovering and identifying his most cherished and deeply held values and through the use of the core values expansion and focusing exercise, were able to successfully increase the amount of time and energy that he committed to fulfilling these values.

Mark and I worked intensely throughout our time together on identifying his core needs and decisively deciding upon a path that allowed him to pursue his deep-seeded passions and fulfill these needs. At the conclusion of Mark’s sessions, we had successfully designed an action plan for him to relocate from Toronto to Los Angeles where we carefully planned out all the details required to allow him to pursue what he felt was his true purpose: a career in acting.

Elizabeth is the typical busy teenager, juggling school and extra-curricular activities.
She felt overwhelmed with tasks that had to get done and lacked time to do the things that brought her real enjoyment. Elizabeth’s life was out of balance, resulting in her weight issues.

She came to me originally seeking to lose weight and I worked with her to explore the root causes of why she was so unhappy. The obstacles for her were devoting time to self-care and squeezing work-outs into her already jam packed schedule.

Through self-exploration exercises we identified her toxic negative self-image and extreme lack of self-esteem, which naturally led to a severe lack of self-confidence that was affecting her social and academic life. We worked together to design a program that increased her self-awareness through daily physical activities and proper nutritional habits, as well as positive self-talk and daily affirmation exercises. These exercises helped her achieve not only her weight loss goals but most importantly increased her self-esteem and self-confidence in the process, which also improved her social and academic experiences.

At the conclusion of our time spent together, Elizabeth not only looked better, but best of all, she felt like a better, stronger version of herself, as well as reported having much more energy. The transition was clear: she had a renewed spirit which positively affected every other area of her life.

Derik was a professional athlete who had a career ending injury after being drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs N.H.L hockey team. He found himself struggling to transition into the next chapter of his life and came to me to learn how to move forward and create new goals for himself and his future.

His biggest goal was to explore new aspirations outside of hockey. Some of the roadblocks were that he had a lack of experience and confidence in the other areas of his life that he simply hadn’t focused as much on in the past as he had his successful hockey career, including work and school, as well as a genuine lack of self-awareness outside of the hockey arena.

We worked on exploring other areas of interest in Derik’s life, including personal hobbies and values that he held deeply, by performing a mind-mapping activity. That particular exercise in self-exploration produced a visual aid to show areas of Derik’s strengths and weaknesses, resulting in his decision to go back to school and pursue a post-secondary degree in business.

Our work together uncovered talents and interests Derik had never realized he possessed outside of the rink and helped show him that a lot of his skills from hockey could also be applied to his career path. Derik is now successfully working in the medical management field and is pursuing many new interests that he discovered throughout the goal setting and growth process.

Sara recently graduated from university and is having difficulty deciding which career path to pursue. She is a very passionate individual who lacks purpose and needs to discover where to direct her energy and aspirations. Sara’s goal in working with me was to transition from university life into the next chapter of her life: a career path. The obstacles to overcome were identifying her skill-set and core values and then, learning how to apply those key characteristics to her job search.

Together we explored Sara’s genuine interests and uncovered the fact that they had nothing to do with her major in University. We did this exploration through the use of personal discovery exercises such as using a life-log to track the things throughout Sara’s day that she enjoyed doing the most.

What we discovered surprisingly was that she loved fitness and considered herself to be very spiritual and so, we created an action plan to explore different jobs within her realm of core beliefs and genuine interests. The result was a list of professions that would capitalize on her passion for spirituality through exercise.

Now Sara feels a true and deep sense of fulfillment as she is currently back in school, taking additional training towards her goal of pursuing a career in the health and wellness industry. She reports to be living her life with a more purpose-driven passion and clearly defined direction.

When Alex first came to me he was dealing with a lot of pressure, personally and professionally. He was exhausted mentally and physically and lacked sufficient energy to devote to his own personal needs.

His goal in working with me was to find more time for himself, explore new interests and bring more happiness and energy into his life. The obstacles we had to overcome to achieve his goal were learning to set boundaries at work and in his personal life.

We worked on identifying areas that were draining him and those that he found energizing using the energy meter exercise. We discovered that he wasn’t devoting enough time to things that made him happy, and he needed to carve out time to do things that would feed his energy source rather than depleting it. Thus, Alex traded overtime at work in twice a week for a work-out at a gym.

At the conclusion of our time together, Alex had learned how to set personal, professional and social boundaries, creating a greater level of balance in his life. He learned when to say no to bosses and friends and when to devote time to himself and as a result, boasted that he had a lot more energy and happiness in his life.

Sheri is a very outgoing and giving spirit. She spends most of her time doing for others and not enough time doing things that bring her joy and personal fulfillment.
Her personal goal was to spend more time performing acts of self-preservation. The roadblocks we had to overcome were her constant need to please everyone else in her life and discovering what activities brought her the most enjoyment.

We focused our time together on performing activities that helped Sheri re-connect with herself and what brought her a sense of joy. I assigned her exercises that were directed at increasing her energy and self-awareness, like measuring the percentage of time she devoted toward herself and the time she devoted to others throughout the day using the wheel of life exercise, and then increasing that percentage of Sheri-time by 25% of the time with one self-loving act a day, such scheduling a massage or getting her nails done.

The result was unexpected and celebrated by both Sheri and I. Our work together uncovered a lot of needs that were being unmet in Sheri’s life due to her lack of inner focus that we were able to address. We also discovered that Sheri really wanted to be self-employed and so we created an action plan for her to open her own home-based business. Sheri is now running a successful and fulfilling self-managed career from home and is spending more of her time focused on her most important priority: herself.

Daniella leads an extremely busy lifestyle, running a household and managing her husband’s business. She admits that she rarely carves out time for herself throughout her stressful days and as a result, doesn’t sleep well at night. Added to all this stress, she had the sole responsibility of planning her destination wedding with five hundred guests.

Daniella’s A-type personality makes it impossible for her to budget “me time,” and she asked me to help her manage her time and stress better as the big day approached. She wanted to learn how to implement balance and self-preservation measures.
The obstacles to achieving these goals were finding time for herself each day and becoming overwhelmed.

Through collaborative goal setting and careful consideration of her specific scheduling needs, we worked on her stress management skills and increased awareness of her healthy lifestyle choices. Daniella carved out a daily time commitment to one self-preservation act such as a work-out or planning a healthy meal. She not only looked fabulous on her big day, but she felt great having finally achieved a more balanced and healthy lifestyle.