About

Isabel here.

Poet, writer, passionate voice.

Dancer’s spirit in the body of a middle-age mom.

Message savant.

Ambitious woman with a strategic brain.

Intuitive guide committed to your living in alignment with the True Spirit of your Work.

Neo-shaman here to help you heal your relationship to money, marketing, and anything else that gets in the way of you sharing your work with the world.

My Story:

My reverence for the power of words came to me early. At age 3, my parents tell me I threw myself on the floor kicking and screaming and shouting “You used the wrong word! You used the wrong word!”

My passion in high school was dance: choreographing and performing (not to mention my dance partner Kirk who is still one my best friends 30 years later.) My teacher, Elvia Marta, taught Afro-Latin Jazz Blues, and showed me how to first challenge my body, then pour every ounce of passion into my performance. She showered every student, no matter how clumsy, slow, or lacking in natural talent with love.

At 19, my dance teacher in New York told me I had the chops to be a professional modern dancer. I injured myself, then quit dance altogether, rather than defy my father, and his assertion that “God didn’t give you the body of a dancer, but he did give you a brain, and I hope you’ll use that.”

I finished my degree in research psychology at Columbia, and took up acting, despite having neither training nor an ounce of knowledge about the industry.

Over the next eight years, I got my acting training (technique and career development), learned to feel and express my emotions, and was cast as a hippie-type at a regional theatre, a (soon-to-be-deceased) police officer in an indie film, and as a mud beggar at a Renaissance Faire, doing three shows a day spoofing Shakespeare and Greek tragedy in a mud pit with two men.

Since none of that brought in the big bucks, I supported myself doing teaching and curriculum-development at a psychotic test-prep company. Despite the severely dysfunctional office dynamics, I had fun hanging with the other young, Ivy League and artist types doing the work I was doing, debating the fine points of grammar, skirting copy right law replicating official test questions, and creating programs, including a program teaching writing to junior-high kids that some said was the best thing to ever come out of the R&D department.

In 1991, at the age of 26, my life fell apart.

After a blissful spring and summer falling in love, and shooting the indie film, I came back from a long planned trip to Europe to see my grandfather, to find my boyfriend had married someone in the nine weeks I was gone and the home I had grown up in had burned to the ground, along with the cat, the family photos, and all my childhood and college memorabilia, in the Oakland Hills fire. My parents subsequently separated, and the test prep company, through whom I’d made most of my money for the last five years, put all freelance work on hold for 4 months.

It brought me to my knees.

I cried daily. I could no longer pretend that everything was ok, or that my life was in any way on track. It cracked me wide open.

Thank goodness.

I got into therapy, where I cried more, and began questioning everything I believed about myself, my family, love, and the world, a process which healed me, sustained me, and helped me to find love and work (thank you, Eric).

I took up karate, four times a week, to build my strength of body and spirit, and to act out the profound anger I felt at being so profoundly abandoned and rejected. (I found it helpful to visualize my boyfriend’s head when I practiced knee kicks.)

I began to separate from the circle of friends who seemed unable to hear, understand or make room for the profound loss I was going through. Who seemed more interested in having someone to keep company on a Saturday night than on forging authentic connections with each other.

I let myself sink into oblivion. Spending my Saturdays watching Knight Rider and other useless TV, and walking alone through Central Park. Letting my life go empty as I slowly rebuilt a life for myself.

In 1993, I discovered the brand-new industry of coaching. By 1994, I decided I was a better coach than actress, and that coaching was more likely to bring me the money and satisfaction I was looking for.

As an early adopter of coaching, I got to hang with the big players in the coaching industry. I taught teleclasses for Coach U. I was a charter member of the PPCA (which was later absorbed by the ICF). Thomas Leonard tapped me to develop his work on distinctions and then commissioned me to write an original email series on the power of words to spur personal growth. I was tapped by author Laura Berman-Fortgang to head the committee to write the International Coach Federation’s official definition of coaching (which they have since mucked up a bit.) I was one of the first 40 people to be awarded the Master Coach certification.

Did I know anything about building a business? Only about as much as I knew about acting when I jumped into that!

Coming from the world of the starving artist, making money was never my focus. Just out of college, I lived on as little as $600 a month (and my rent was $450). Although I managed to build a full coaching practice in about two years, 1995 was the first year I grossed more than $20,000.

After years of disastrous romantic relationships, I met my now-husband Peter in 1995. We moved from New York City to Santa Fe, New Mexico, so he could study massage (he’s now a State Park Ranger.) We married and had our amazing son, Jasper (now 10). We moved into a somewhat bumpy co-housing community with kind neighbors, beautiful land, and a view up the “river” to the mountains. (We have water in the river 4 months a year, if we’re lucky.)

Back to business:

After moving to New Mexico, calamitous ups and down in my income robbed me of my confidence and my peace of mind. Only my sheer dog persistence and utter stubbornness (plus the fact that I was pretty much unemployable) kept me on the path of entrepreneurship.

With the right mentoring, my income crept up, and my confidence grew. I started creating original programs, like The Inspired Professional, and Work on Words, and building my reputation on those. I started teaching free teleclasses to bring in new clients. My income grew until it plateaued around $75,000.

In 2009, I discovered high-end coaching. I signed up for a high-end Mastermind group I couldn’t afford with Baeth Davis, doubled my revenues, co-lead another high-end Mastermind group, and led two of my own slightly more moderately priced Masterminds. I broke six-figures that year, and have maintained that income since.

As part of my breakthrough year, I stepped into being the Soundbite Shaman (my life purpose according to my hands can be read as either the Passionate Shaman, or the Pioneering Healer.) I began incorporating dance into my communication work, using movement to free my client’s writing voices and open them to the bigger, deeper, wilder words inside. I started to draw more on my intuition, share more of my wild side. I began writing poetry about my work, and sharing more of my personal journey on my blog.

I went from offering to help you “Work on Words” to offering to help you “Put the Mojo in Your Message” and “Express Your Wild Spirit.”

Although not a healer in the traditional sense, I became fascinated with healing myself, and then my clients, of the fears and doubts around money and marketing and message that kept me busy and scrambling for profit. I added a wide-range of skills to my toolkit including:

• Finding Your Niche
• Hand Analysis
• Belief Breakthrough work
• Money Breakthrough work

Today, I am a passionate student, observer, and voice on the interplay of business, human dynamics, and creative expression – truthfully, the only work I really care about is the work that helps you feed your soul, to fulfill your soul’s calling and that allows you to express yourself with the full force and power of your being in the world (I forget sometimes that not everyone thinks this way).

Like my clients, I want to prosper doing the work that fulfills me the most. I want to take the best of what I learned from the high-end models but put together something that fits me better. I don’t want to be selling people a dream, or inviting them to gamble their hard-earned money, though I do want to expand their sense of what is possible.

I have doubts. I get confused. I stumble and fall. I catch myself drifting off course from time to time. I keep creating and expressing myself as best I can.

And, I never give up.

I see all around me heartfelt examples of creativity in motion, of passionate business and of people succeeding in letting their bigger, wilder voices be heard.

I’d be honored to join you in intimate conversation about finding words for the beauty of what you offer and beginning the journey to live in alignment with that.