Infusion Life Coaching - About Yolanda

	About Yolanda

Yolanda helps all kinds of people to design their second life. People change. What has worked before doesn’t necessarily work anymore. All sorts of growing is happening all of the time. We grow wiser, children grow up, houses and jobs do not fit anymore. Downsizing initiatives, redundancies, and reorganization in organizations necessitates redesign of our lives, perhaps sooner or at a different time than we would have preferred.

Yolanda is passionate about people and helping them to improve, change and succeed. She pays attention to the conscious and subconscious mind, and also on what people are not saying, as much as on what they are saying.

She is a trained executive, business, career, and life coach. She is also a certified NLP and time line therapy practitioner and is keeping up with current trends and developments in psychology and coaching. She specializes in helping people to re-ignite their spark for life by looking at the big picture, reframing their perspective, working on their motivation, and helping them set goals, strategies and actions to reach those goals.

Yolanda grew up in South Africa, lived in England, and moved to Atlanta four years ago. Even though she also trained in the USA, most of her coach training was done in England. She maintains a support base of fellow coaches and consultants on all three continents. She is passionate about life and likes to instill that passion and energy into her clients. There is always room for improvement and learning is an ongoing process.

Yolanda is the eternal student and earned her Master’s degree with a dissertation on Total Quality Management in Service Organizations. She is currently working on a PhD in Industrial and Organizational psychology. In South Africa she worked in a veterinary institute, an agricultural institute and a maritime institute. Yolanda is an active person who loves travelling, running, cycling, horseback riding, and working out. She is also an avid reader, art lover, wine taster, and gardener.

Having had to make so many transitions in her life, she understands the trauma and need for courage that change may bring. Her natural talents are to come alongside, manage, inspire, and cheer you on. You too, can give it a go!

	The Art of Coaching and Changing Habits:

Modern technology has enabled us to learn some secrets about the brain over the past 10 years which is very helpful when it comes to coaching. Our brains are like computers. It has working memory and long term memory. New research has revealed that the working memory has a limited capacity, only about four items, and in order to learn and process on a daily basis, it has to store items and processes in the long term memory. The brain hardwires what it can to make more space for more learning. That is why patterns of thinking get ingrained over time.

The art lies in helping you to gain new insight by thinking differently and thereby establishing new neural connections. To change habits is not easy and requires more than information and motivation. To maintain any change requires ongoing attention and a significant effort of the will. Any change in the environment sends out strong messages to the brain that something is not right. These messages attract our attention and block out rational thought. This results in fear and uncertainty. The prefrontal cortex fatigues easily, needs a lot of glucose and can only hold a limited number of ideas at any one time. In order to cope, the brain hardwires any activity that is repeated in order to free up resources.

Just think for a moment how overwhelmed one can be when you have just learned how to drive a car. To work the controls of the car takes so much effort that one can barely cope with noticing what is going on in the road. But the more one does it, the more comfortable one gets and soon one drives without thinking. To shake matters up one can go to other countries and drive on the other side of the road and suddenly you have to pay much more attention to what you are doing.

Forging new circuits is like cutting through a dense forest rather than following a trail. You have to go slowly and put in effort and attention for every yard of the journey. Even the way we work is hardwired – just think for a moment about how you conduct a meeting or how you manage others. Trying to change requires a lot of energy and attention and most people are not willing to do it. It is much easier to keep things the same and feel comfortable than to deliberately put steps in place to shake up the status quo. The principle of homeostasis teaches us that any complex system pushes back against a force trying to change it. The more a coach tries to change someone the more the person will push back. Therefore, I do not try to change my clients. What I do is to ask them questions, often uncomfortable questions to get them to think deeper and to come up with the solutions themselves, but most importantly to first gain new insight so that they can choose to make the changes rather than someone forcing them to change. Where we put our attention we create new connections.

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