Besides my business degree, my continuing education over the years has included work flow simplification, office efficiency and productivity, time management, Dale Carnegie, etc.  My creativity and helping education has been less formal but just as extensive. I organized home and corporate offices with my consulting business, Office Productivity Improvement. I worked with Resources for Personal Empowerment, an inspirational self-defense program designed to prevent victimization and to further the healing of survivors of trauma or abuse. I worked in the corporate world for more than three decades.  My Life Coach training, certification, and continued involvement is with Martha Beck Inc. Only a small number of applicants were accepted each year, and I was especially fortunate to be trained by Martha herself and her co-trainers, Kim Barber and Stacey Shively (all Ph.D.s).  Collectively, they have forty years of consulting, teaching, and coaching, with formal educations at Harvard, Columbia, and the David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah.  The elite training program was based on proven transformational learning, adult development, and leadership development - with a healthy dose of wit, fun, creativity, and motivation. Martha, Kim, and Stacey combined all the best of Western teaching and Eastern philosophy -- the new and the old. Martha and Polly - April 2005 By the end of 2005, I had received my Life Coach certification.  I have coached clients on a wide range of issues including relationships, career choice, life decisions, surviving trauma and abuse, grieving a significant loss, weight and health, and organizing.  My background along with my brain research is broad enough that I can help enhance work and life by using the objectivity of the brain mechanisms - along with the subjective needs of the individual.   While the basic brain mechanisms are pretty much the same across the board, the individual’s genes and experience-to-date play a role.  One size does not fit all, and I am able to gear each tool and technique to the individual, their personal style, and whichever goal they choose to address.  I’m a problem-solver; a main goal is always Resolution.  There’s a time for applying a temporary band-aid, then the problem should always be resolved as much as possible.  My skill in researching and my ability to think outside the box, especially when brainstorming, can offer many different solutions. Breaking projects down into smaller and smaller (and, if necessary, even smaller) organized pieces makes them manageable, and the O in O’Connor definitely stands for Organized!   My coaching is time-efficient and results-oriented. Above all, I am flexible, empathic, fight against over-complexity, and am nothing if not rational.    Trust:   I have always kept confidences confidential.  Always will.  I don’t discuss my clients with anyone.   Passion:   Helping people has been a lifelong passion.  Being able to apply actual brain science to helping individuals achieve their goals is so real, so productive, and it is very exciting.    Knowledge:  My clients are way too busy to research the brain, especially with new information continually gushing forth, and too busy to spend time deciding how best to apply the research to their daily life and work.  That’s my job, and I love to work with them on it. My neuro-research helps enormously whether I’m working with basic or more exotic goals of an individual, a group, or a company where people come to work in flip-flops with their dogs and sit around on the floor playing with toys to stimulate their creativity and imagination... or where corporate executives wear business suits.  I believe the actual, real, objective science with proven results, seen-on-brain-scans-by-neuroscientists, will help all work better, live better, feel better, BE better.  I use supporting research and illustrations in my training that persuades, encourages, and teaches us how to get the most out of our brains.   Cachet:   More and more individuals and corporations are using Life Coaches for many purposes, for many reasons, so having a Life Coach is not just acceptable, it’s very “in”.  Mainstream articles have been increasingly published about the brain, especially regarding the amygdala, insula, basal ganglia, anterior cingulate cortex, and prefrontal cortex, and their functional/behavioral applications: This is a new frontier, and we’re on the cutting edge.  It’s a “Neuro-Frontier.” Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D.