Coaching to Connection

Guest Blog Post by Susan Cook and Sandy Weller, owners of Coaching to Connection

What we offer:

Women’s Awareness Workshops

Mid-life and beyond exploration workshop

One on one coaching and couples coaching

Informational group talks

We believe.

Each person has purpose and a calling– an impulse, a knowing that becomes layered over, betrayed, or lost and forgotten. Our passion in our work as coaches is to facilitate awakening, awareness, excavating a person’s knowing for the sake of living a more authentic and purpose-full life, with heart and soul.

Our primary focus is working with women who are moving into midlife at 45+ who are noticing they are beginning to have some fatigue and challenges with keeping up with daily demands, and wondering when they can “squeeze themselves” into their lives. Our other passion is working with people who are open to considering how they will live well into their 80’s and beyond– by helping them think outside the box about changing careers, retirement, and other big life changes for the second half of life.

We wanted to check out our assumptions about the kind of support women need today in the privacy and safety of other women. Susan began doing women’s awareness and empowerment workshops in the 1970’s and felt like women’s culture had come full circle and needed the same type of support now.

With that question in mind (what do women need now…) we began experimenting by creating and offering  women’s empowerment weekend small group workshops for women in Germany and in Oregon. Once we saw that these groups were helping women discover some important information about themselves while witnessing other women do the same, that we had hit on a common thread and need for women to explore their needs and have support for making transformative changes in their lives, we started developing more variations on the same theme– find your innermost truths and act on them.

Who we are: 

The earliest inklings of our business began when our name, Coaching to Connection, came into existence roughly in 2002.  Since then, until 2018, it has been mostly dormant waiting for time and energy to come to fruition as we were working in another business of training horseback riding instructors worldwide through Connected Riding.

Susan has formal training in counseling psychology and has run women’s groups as well has done one on one counseling in private practice. Sandy has more recently come into the coaching field by completing an intensive 2 year training in Systemic Integrative Coaching in Germany.

What makes us unique, from what we have heard from our clients, is our non traditional and creative exercises we use for people to explore more deeply in addition to talking “about” their thoughts. We enjoy making the awareness process provocative, fun, and slightly different from usual. We employ each participants creativity in looking at possibilities and making decisions, helping people out of the ruts of circular thinking and being.  Our passion, our binational teamwork, and our personalities make us good  and trusted facilitators.  What separates us from many other coaches, is our depth and non-traditional tool box of goodies.

In addition to the joy of actually running workshops, we love co-creating the material and exercises for each one. We research topics, and dig deeply from our own life experiences as we look to hit the mark for those in our workshops.

Our primary clientele, is women over 45 who are beginning to question what next in their lives…empty nest, menopause, other life challenges that remind them, they are giving a lot and losing parts of themselves. We help them reclaim those parts.

The additional part to our biz…Retirement coaching

We are steadily growing in recognition locally, and we see ourselves as the ‘go to” people for women’s workshops and coaching. We also are being known for our creative approach to retirement coaching.