Testimonials

Working with Nancy provided  a perfect blend of being cared for and challenged while remaking my life after a divorce.

Nancy guided me in the journey of reconnecting with myself and in redesigning my life and how to more fully meet my needs, how to have more fun with my children, have greater focus at work, find time for creativity and connection with friends. 

With Nancy's help and suggestions I took care of business, and discovered new ways of connecting with my children.  I laughed and cried and came away with greater self-confidence.

I highly recommend Nancy to help you through the next transition or stuck point in your life.

   Vicky Pillard

I am a:

• celebration coach and life coach
• teacher and passionate learner
• lover of music, dance, theater, film, and photography
• writer
• visionary, pioneer, and inventor
• mother and lover of all things living and part of this amazing planet
• vegetarian whole foods cook
• fascinated with meeting people, having conversations that matter, and deeply listening with calm, grounded presence.   
  

I see my life and work as a piece of art, and as a part of creation.  All that I have learned, all that has inspired me is part of who I am and what I bring to coaching you in celebrating your life.

My passion for building community began with my early childhood, growing up in small, rural New Hampshire towns, surrounded by  loving members of the religious communities my father ministered to.  After he left the ministry to pursue teaching, I felt a longing for the experience of community that I had known, and developed a passion for creating it, wherever I worked and lived.

A fascination with people’s unique self began with my own struggle to determine mine, as a twin.   As a teenager, I waited to dress after my sister each morning, to avoid wearing identical clothes, and people not knowing who I was, after a whole childhood of being confused with her.  This began a life long endeavor to be who I uniquely was in the world, and help others do the same.

Helping people successfully move through major life transitions, began in my first job as a nurse’s aide on a hospital physical rehabilitation unit, supporting people in learning how to walk and talk again.    Later as a newspaper reporter, I discovered a love of interviewing people and writing human interest stories about their lives. 

For years, I worked as a therapeutic recreation program director with elderly.  This work developed my love of creating celebrations and programs, as well as my understanding of how to create celebrations that meet the needs of the whole person: meeting physical, emotional, social, and spiritual needs.  It also fine tuned my love of interviewing people and being a deep listener, and increased my fascination with people’s life stories.

My claims investigator training for a medical malpractice insurance company in San Francisco, gave birth to a vision of creating an on-site arts program there.  As I spent whole days pouring through legal and medical aspects of claims, learning to investigate, I became personally aware of the imbalance of exclusively using the thinking side of my brain all day. 

As an investigator, I observed the need in my co-workers for a renewing experience in our everyday work life.  A statement by my smoking coworker, that he didn’t care about the effects of his addiction because the world would not survive much longer anyway, jolted me into a mission to create experiences that offer people hope and nurture their soul.  This birthed years of working to guide organizations in creating celebration that inspires and feeds the whole self.

 

My mission as a mother has been to create peace in the world by bringing up children that become the peace that the world needs.  As I birth this celebration coaching, this third baby, I bring to my coaching, the presence that I learned, that my children taught me, when their wisdom, wonder and beauty stopped my busyness.  I learned more deeply the value of daily ritual and creating celebrations with them that were unique, unforgettable, creative, and nurturing.

 

I bring the joy and challenge of coaching you to do what you love in your life, from my experience of guiding my own daughter and son to direct their own learning through being home schooled.  They taught me how to support the development of a unique person, and trust in the wisdom of stepping out of the way and just supporting it’s unfolding, trusting in the process of growing and becoming who you have always been.

 

Since 2000 I have been coaching individual clients, leading workshops, as well as being coached personally and professionally. 

My learning has been influenced by: the work of coach Cheryl Richardson; the Coaches Training Institute; the creative recovery work of Julia Cameron; Michael and Justine Toms work on doing what you love; the work on celebration and ritual by the Alternatives organization, ritual expert Meg Cox, family therapist William J. Doherty; and the national initiative of the Simplicity Forum called Take Back Your Time.

 

My formal education includes:

• B.A. in English Literature, minor studies in art and anthropology, Central Ct. State University.
• Post graduate courses in: counseling, personnel management , business communication and problem solving, organization transformation.

 

I am an active member of the following communities:

• The Western Massachusetts Coaching Alliance
• The Unitarian Universalist Society of Greater Springfield

 

I live in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts with my husband and 2 children.