AL B.
"Dori is intelligent, compelling and compassionate. She was my guide on a path that provided me with the insight and impetus in helping me realize the opportunity for a major change in my life and to take me from a place that I had been for far too long. I was encouraged to explore my past, examine the truth and reaffirm my values. Through this process, I was able to develop the confidence to make incredibly new and life-changing decisions that have brought me great joy and happiness."

Al came to coaching facing a decision about whether or not, how and on what terms to step down from his CEO position with a very successful, regional, printing company, one he’d co-founded and worked with for 26 years. In addition, Al used this coaching engagement to envision “What’s next?” for him and his family, given this decision to bring his term as CEO gracefully to the end of its arc.  Anchored in his values and in a desire to closely align with his wife and children and their interests, Al used the coaching process to make space for significant change.  Now, by various twists and turns, he has become the proud owner of a music store in the suburbs of Chicago and is committed to serving local youth, to supporting budding musicians, and to strengthening his local community through the creation of music events and centers located throughout the Chicagoland area.

LINDA B.
“I have worked with Dori for the last six months and they have involved the most compelling and thought provoking work that I have done to date. Working with Dori has allowed me to go courageously into my dreams with the compassion and intention that I have missed before. She has created a safe and courageous space for me to transition from observer to participant in my life and work, which has been inexplicably liberating.  I find myself literally leaping from one problem to the next and moving through each quickly, with clear observation, intention and action. This has allowed me extraordinary freedom to create a future self, committed to a belief that I am an integrated and valued part of life on this planet.”

Linda invited coaching into her life wanting to build her custom-designed jewelry business into a larger, viable and going concern. Her process began with coaching that empowered her to see and accept herself both as a compassionate, competent woman and as the master craftswoman and jewelry designer that she is.  A gifted artist and creative visionary, Linda’s work encourages her clients to tell the stories of their lives through the beautiful jewelry and wearable art they co-create. More self-confident and centered than ever before, Linda is now focused on moving forward and growing her business. She’s been cataloging her body of work, re-defining her ideal client base, and successfully pursuing new clients with whom to partner in this work that adds beauty to their lives and our world. For more information and to see some of Linda’s creations, please go to www.jewelryoftheempire.com

DON M.
“Dori is one of the most intuitive persons I have ever met or with whom I have worked. That quality combined with her uncanny ability to ‘see’ behind surface issues to the heart and bone of the matter are part of the many reasons Dori has been my coach for more than 4 years. She is completely committed to the indirect method of coaching; that is, she holds that questions are at the center of all coaching. Rarely, and only with my permission, does she offer advice or counsel. This trait is crucial to effective coaching and truly empowering to me as her client. In addition, Dori is completely open to trying any technique that is in service of moving me more deeply into action and/or learning. For example, I have been coached with my eyes closed, while lying constricted, then relaxed on the floor, and standing on a chair, to name only a few of the different perspectives Dori has enabled within me during various coaching sessions. Her signature coaching work, I believe, is with respect to her narrative technique used to mine core values in coaching work; she ‘invented’ the technique and it has proven to be one of the most impactful, important, and useful processes with which I am familiar. Finally – and I wish there were a more expressive word than this – Dori is such a giving coach. By that I mean, when she is coaching, she is completely in service of her client; she keeps extensive notes and remembers even the seemingly smallest of details, always and in all ways, to the full benefit of her client. I am delighted and honored to recommend Dori as coach cum laude to any client, executive, or other level. She is first ‘klass’ in every respect.”

Dr. Don Morrow reached across country borders to enter into a coaching relationship with Dori, a professional colleague, in February 2003.  He wanted to achieve several things: to practice partnering powerfully with another coach, to accelerate the development of his newly acquired co-active coaching skills, while exploring the power of integrating his male and her female perspectives on the work, to obtain insight into the corporate applications of coaching given Dori’s extensive background in commercial roles in corporate America, and to prepare for the coaching certification process, which he intended to invest in after completing his core and advanced coaching training.  As an expert on physical conditioning, performance enhancement and alternative/supplemental medicine and as an accomplished marathoner (25 to date) and athlete, with a special affinity for the games of hockey and squash, Don understood what it meant to have a goal, take action and achieve it.  Long-since certified as a professional, co-active coach and leadership graduate and already a tenured professor of Kinesiology, successfully published author and sought-after faculty member in the Bachelor of Health Sciences Program at the University of Western Ontario, where he’s been for over three decades, like so many of us in mid-life, Don was anticipating a number of significant personal and professional changes.  Coaching served him to more proactively and productively assess his options and navigate specific transitions while honoring his existing commitments and relationships.  Don always practices what he preaches. 

Through the coaching, Don accomplished all of the previously-mentioned goals and he learned that there were other things he wanted, such as: the ability to better express, know and understand his feelings and the underlying motivations that would enrich the process of achievement and his core relationships, to move from a more intellectual understanding of life and performance to a more full-on, feeling, conversational and participative approach to his life and work, and to be more relaxed and more accessible to others, less of a lone wolf and more collaborative in the process.  Like many accomplished professionals, Don’s work was about the subtleties of behavior change that enable us to create new leaps in performance, choose with more clarity and confidence, and feel better in the process. Recently, and also as a result of his coaching work, he rediscovered his passion for riding motorcycles.  One of his “homework assignments” was to buy his bike and send Dori a copy of the receipt as proof, which he did!  Now, he regularly exudes his riding jollification on his Honda Shadow Spirit 750 - he can be seen criss-crossing Middlesex County on any given day.

Don’s passion for personal leadership and for recovering the curious child within each of us, the one open to what’s possible when we are more fully engaged with ourselves and one another, informs his teaching and writing, his coaching and research, and his desire to impact personal performance, effectiveness and gender equality issues.  Always drawing upon sports, physical/athletic performance, and individual health and well-being as a metaphor for life and work in community, he is committed to being an active participant in raising the consciousness of our global society on the importance of elevating the status of women and children and encouraging the full expression, support and inclusion of men in new, more affirming and more productive ways. 
In this 4-year engagement, Don has dealt with the residual anger and other issues related to a long first marriage which had reached the end of its arc, Don redesigned his relationship with his three, now adult sons, Don married his wife and professional colleague, Jen, and Don and his new wife launched a successful coaching business and series of coaching research collaborations, all the while remaining effective in and maintaining their faculty positions.  Together and from different perspectives, they are committed to integrating their professional pursuits and passions both to do the real work of coaching and workshop development and to do the related and needed coaching research (he currently chairs the International Coach Federation’s Research and Education committee), among the many contributions they will bring to the coaching profession and to those who might benefit from more rigorously designed and delivered coaching interventions.  Please feel free to contact Don at www.possibilitieslifecoaching.com or at donmor@uwo.ca.