What is your calling? How can you make a difference in the world?
- Are you where you want to be in life, at work, in your relationships?
- Are you searching for a job, a career or a vocation?
- Arer you in need of spiritual care?
You have the capacity to be and do more than you’ve ever imagined in your life and in your career.
With my support and experienced direction, you can cultivate your core talents and your unique calling.
Individual coaching is ideal if you are in career transition, seeking career counseling, or ready for life coaching to reexamine your personal direction or spiritual care at any stage and any age.
I have the gift of seeing people’s potential. After an initial consultation and appropriate occupational preference assessments, we look together for those professional options where your values, interests and abilities intersect in a planned series of private two-hour sessions.
I bring my decades of experience in employee relations, training and development, recruitment and performance management to offer you counseling, mentoring, training and dispute resolution services. Through a variety of certificate programs and seminars, you can redefine your leadership approach in closer alignment with your passions and personal mission.
I’m learning how to care about myself more and to find my special gifts — to do what I need to do to make myself happier. The result is that when I’m happy, others around me are happier.” —Shelley Welch, Niantic, CT
Virginia creates an atmosphere in which it feels comfortable exploring new ways of being in the world.” —Pamela Sorenson, Librarian, Laramie, WY
What I liked about working with Virginia was her gentleness, and that it wasn’t scary. I liked feeling at ease when exploring new things about myself. Virginia guided me, gently leading me through the dark passages into the light and peaceful side of myself.” —Viveka Wikburn, Teacher, Upsala, Sweden
Is your manager encouraging you to undertake leadership training?
When your coaching is sponsored by your employer, we draft a joint letter, together with your manager or human resources representative, establishing goals, action steps and progress reports toward completion.
Emerging and seasoned leaders seeking to achieve their strategic business goals come to work with me from a variety of stages. Are you
- Identified as a potential leader or manager in your organization?
- Not currently performing because of personal problems or new professional challenges, despite a solid track record?
- Experiencing difficulty in adapting to organizational change?
- In a leadership position and want to become a coach within your organization?
- Ready to improve risk-taking skills?
- Eager to learn intercultural skills and develop sensitivity to diversity?
Organizations find great value from my coaching work with their employees, who then can
- Focus on individual strengths as a building block to face limitations
- Bridge individual motivation with applications for performance management
- Integrate the link between personal and organizational goals to achieve personal integrity
- Clarify differences between people issues and structural or systemic issues
- Provide a broad view of the leading-edge consulting information through international networking and reading
- Support sensitivity to diversity, ethical behavior and social responsibility through monitoring and/or mentoring training programs
In the workplace, we haven’t learned how to deal with conflicts. I learned how to be a good listener, be a facilitator, and let people’s needs be heard. But I never realized how my personal changes could alter the dynamic at work. The people I work with can model these principles too.”—Krista Montefusco, Business Analyst, Accurecords
Redefining Leadership and New Pathways
Over the past three decades, I have developed career exploration and leadership programs to equip and empower individuals who see it as their mission to join others in creating a just, multiethnic, intercultural sustainable peace – in their community, or in an institutional, national or global setting. Read more about these programs as appropriate for your personal journey to recognize your greatness.
Seeking Life’s Purpose
Career and Life Direction: Visioning Your Life Path
Depending on where you are in your journey, I offer custom-designed career programs, including a Career Assessment Intensive, Career Discernment Intensive and Career Action Plan Intensive. Talk to me about how we can work together.
Women as Transformational Leaders
Claim your life passion, integrity, confidence, wellness, fulfillment and professional focus while leveraging your strength and mission to transform professional and organizational obstacles. Let’s talk about how we can work together.
Mission-Focused Leadership—Claiming Your Passion
Recognize your passion, mission, core gifts and talents through this program. Confirm your special calling and integrity. Learn to access your deepest hopes and dreams with confidence. Write a personal mission/passion statement. Let’s connect to see how we can work together.
New Tools for Emerging and Seasoned Leaders
Leadership Agility Approach
Not just a single competency, but a vital capacity that you can channel into everything you do. Through the Leadership Agility feedback approach, you progress through levels of competency — from Expert to Achiever to Catalyst – to lead organizational change, improve team performance and engage in pivotal conversations. I am certified in this approach, giving you the capacity to make wise decisions and take effective action amid complex and rapidly changing conditions.
Institute for Global Leadership
The Institute for Global Leadership provides confidential, compassionate and skilled guidance, consultation and training to help leaders and teams through change, challenges and crises. We recognize all human beings, institutions, nations and multilateral entities for their uniqueness, need and capacity for transformation. Learn more…
Reflective Leadership Certificate Program
Reflective leaders build personal time first in their lives, learn to listen more effectively, reflect on their roles and the latest business practices, and acquire new skills. They are practical idealists who facilitate trusting, supportive environments to address challenges while mindful of bottom line demands. Draw up your personal mission statement for your life, identify your gifts, skills, and practical experience, and gain an intuitive self-awareness. Learn more…
Integrative Leadership Program
Designed to develop intentional people in a world where challenges are personal, interpersonal and societal, this training enables Integrative Leaders to lead others effectively in an uncertain world. Learn more…
Reconciliation Leadership Certificate Program
Are you a practical idealist, prepared to incorporate a spiritual practice into your action life? For individuals, families and community leaders ready to gain leadership experience based on mission-focused service combined with an academic curriculum. Learn more…
For Life’s Many Stages
Labyrinth for Wisdom Figures
Are you in your wisdom years? This life review and goal-setting program, “Coming to the Center of the Labyrinth,” builds on my own life-changing experience with this program. Learn more…
Expressive Art
Express yourself using art supplies. There is no right or wrong way to use color and shape. Not an art class, but rather a time to learn how to use color and shape to let your feelings and vision speak. Learn more…
Visionary Children and Their Parents
Today’s children are global citizens in their innocence, generosity, sense of awe and wonder and in their curiosity, creativity and cooperative nature. They have much to teach us and need to be empowered by their parents to speak and be heard. Learn more…
More responses to working with Virginia Swain:
“Virginia’s an expert at helping people take their first definite steps to a new direction in their life by bringing their inner truths into their daily lives. Virginia helped me to validate and believe in what I was doing by facilitating and clarifying what I wasn’t totally sure about. —Jonas Himmelstrand, Konsult, Uppsala, Sweden
“Virginia connects with people at an essential level. She has an unusual gift of empathy, and can ‘tune-in’ to a person at a deeper level, thereby enabling her to offer very sensitive and specific insights. The work that Virginia did with me could be described as a process of re-empowerment. As external obstacles appear, individuals often become reactive and get caught up in the details of a given problem. Unfortunately, from that place it is difficult to see appropriate solutions. One of Virginia’s gifts is the ability to assist in achieving a higher level of awareness, from which more possibilities for coping strategies become apparent. It is my belief that people are the best source of solutions to their own problems. Virginia is one who can help people access their own inner wisdom and apply it effectively. This is a rare and special gift, which enables her to render rare and special service as a consultant.” —Walter Scott, Jr., late Chairman of Integral Consulting Group and co-founder of Scott, Woolf and Associates, Human Resource Development for Organizations, Palo Alto, CA
“In an accepting, caring, and creative environment, Virginia Swain helps her clients open to expanded possibilities for themselves, teaching them concrete tools to apply new self-awareness and responsibility, in themselves, their family and work life.”—Margaret Ledger, manager of technology competency development group