Personal & Executive Coach
Consulting Psychologist & Psychoanalyst

The simplest answer is that I specialize in people.  I have had both deep and broad training and experience as a clinical and organizational psychologist and psychoanalyst. By the time I got my Ph.D. I had evaluated or treated nearly a thousand patients in a busy downtown Chicago hospital, not to mention in my private practice the following 25 years.  I have also had a great deal of experience working with all sorts of executives, leaders (corporate, civic, nonprofit, government) and organizations. But after all is said and done, I became a psychologist because I had a passion for understanding what makes people the way they are – starting with myself. 

My personal journey of growth took me through a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, then a 10+ year training to be a psychoanalyst.  A deep dive into meditation & mindfulness training, and a near spiritual vocation, had the strongest influence in bringing me closest to understanding myself — and humanity in general.  Growing up an Asian-American woman made me humble in witnessing, first-hand, the power of culture (and gender!) in shaping lives – and was the focus of my research, writing and profession for a long while.  Being deeply curious about people meant that I was curious — even riveted — by the world we occupy.  I moved beyond the primary interest of psychoanalysis, namely depth psychology and the inner life, because I wanted to understand the world’s institutions and systems — especially business – which is how I came to practice organizational and consulting psychology.  No survey of the world (or for that matter, of our inner lives or our relational lives) would be complete without seeing the ubiquity of conflict and the challenges of aligning divergent interests – so I had a long stop learning (and teaching) about negotiation and conflict management.

But my primary focus, where I feel the most fluent, is understanding the individual: what goes on in their minds, emotions, personalities, their relationships and how they conduct them; in their bodies and neurology, in how everything a person experiences is processed somatically and unconsciously through their nervous and biological systems and psychic unconscious. 

After so many years, I still find people inexhaustibly interesting and unique.  I find connecting with, and forming a partnership with each person to identify and work through their own particular brand of stuckness, and helping them connect to their own deep vitality, more and more rewarding. 

I also enjoy the variety of the different contexts and problems people bring, be it their organizations, their career or personal development, or specific issues such as culture adaptation or negotiation skills or relational stuckness.  Intellectually I could say I specialize in the nexus between psychology, organizations, culture and spirituality.

But in my coaching practice I specialize in individuals.  It is in joining them in each context and helping them move to a more liberated, flexible, joyful and vibrant state of being in the world, that I am ever honing my skills and finding reward.