What Laura does

Coaching, grief education, and the occasional workshop

Here is what each one is, so you can work out which one you came for.

Schedule a free 30-minute call

Laura seated on a limestone boulder in her garden at golden hour

I do two things now and a third by request.

I coach people who are standing at a crossroads and cannot quite name what is missing. I work with people who are carrying a loss, both one to one and in groups. And a handful of times a year I speak or facilitate for organizations that want to get better at one of those two subjects.

Underneath all of it is the same conviction. You already hold your own answers. Most of the time what is in the way is a belief you formed so long ago that you no longer notice it. My job is to ask the questions that surface it, and then to hold you accountable, via micro steps, to whatever you decide to do about it.

Life coaching

For adults at a transition point. Retirement, an empty house, a death, or the quiet realization that you built the thing you set out to build and it did not feel the way you expected.

It starts with a free thirty-minute call where we do real coaching exercises rather than talk about coaching. If it fits, the work runs over eight weeks, and you leave every session with specific actions and someone who will hold you accountable.

I am certified through Nancy Levin's Levin Life Coach Academy, a two-year immersive training, and I coach in her Reinvention, Worthy, and Boundaries frameworks as well as group coaching.

How the eight weeks work

Laura laughing in a denim jacket while her dog nuzzles her cheek, petunias in the foreground
A pale lilac bloom open on the ground
Laura in black and white, seated on a garden wall looking away toward the trees

Grief education

For people living with a loss, particularly those who are past the first year and have found that everyone else moved on without them.

Individual support, small facilitated groups, grief walks, and workshops for organizations. A six-week series called Grief to Life is in development for people at least a year out.

I am a Certified Grief Educator through David Kessler and Grief.com, and I spent ten years before that as a volunteer facilitator with bereaved children at The WARM Place in Fort Worth.

Groups, walks, and workshops

Speaking and workshops

A handful a year. Nonprofits, churches, community organizations, leadership teams, and professional associations book me for grief literacy sessions, workshops on leading through change, and board visioning or retreat facilitation.

Topics and upcoming dates

Laura mid-session, microphone in one hand and notes raised in the other

What about the nonprofit work?

If somebody sent you here for board facilitation or strategic planning, you are in the right place, just not on the right page.

I spent eighteen years in philanthropy, running a community foundation and working as a program director at a private foundation. I still facilitate board retreats and visioning sessions, but only by referral, and I take a small number of them. It is not a service I market anymore, which is why it does not have a page of its own.

The full background lives on her nonprofit background, and current retreat and workshop availability is on the speaking page.

A yellow prickly pear bloom with a bee at its centre
A storm clearing over open country, distant hills on the horizon

Coaching isn't therapy

Therapy looks at your past and your present. Coaching looks forward at where you want to go, and adds someone who holds you accountable for getting there.

Both are useful and they are not interchangeable. If what you are carrying needs clinical care, coaching is not the right tool, and I will say so rather than take you on.

A two-lane highway bending away between desert hills

Not sure which one you need?

That is a good enough reason to take the free call. Thirty minutes, no cost, and we will work it out together.

From Laura’s camera

  • A field of Texas bluebonnets going out of focus toward the treeline
  • High afternoon clouds stacked over open country
  • A single yellow prickly pear bloom open against grey-green pads
  • A ridgeline going dark against a low sun
  • Ocotillo canes tipped with red flowers against a pale sky
  • A single white bloom open in soft light
  • Orange tubular blooms opening along a green stem
  • A near-full moon rising in a dusk-blue sky
  • A blue-violet bloom in close-up, petals curling back
  • A purple bearded iris caught in low side light
  • A rocky bluff standing over grassland under a sky full of cloud
  • A purple aster open against dry grass
  • Rain moving across open country
  • A sunset breaking under mackerel cloud over silhouetted hills
  • A single white daisy turned toward the light