Today I use this expertise I’ve cultivated over 30 years to help position others to do the same and experience the highest success in their lives and businesses.

My first job in hospitality offered the opportunity to learn bartending and unparalleled service one-on-one from legendary cocktail industry pioneer Gary “Gaz” Regan, author of The Joy of Mixology and The Bartender’s Bible, among many other tomes. Attending and assisting at Gary’s iconic Cocktails in the Country industry intensives deepened my knowledge and service standards, and elevated my hospitality skills, along with talent the likes of PDT, Death & Co, and The Dead Rabbit founders, among countless industry figureheads.

Being published first at age 9 ignited a lifelong passion for writing, which has augmented professional success. Growing up with vibrant and effective folk remedies passed down through generations offered the holistic foundation by which I’ve led my life. Those bold roads that illuminated before me also led to practicing and teaching yoga and meditation as a Yoga Alliance-certified instructor; training in energy healing modalities like Health Kinesiology, now called Natural Bioenergetics™, and Emotion Code. Hospitality led me to a lifelong love of the study and service of wine, and I evolved as a Sommelier and Beverage Director, studying and testing with the Court of Master Sommeliers and Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET) in 2011. These roads enabled me to have a great fortune to run the very best James Beard Award and Wine Spectator Award-acclaimed restaurants, wine programs and boutique hotels from New York to Deer Valley, Utah and most recently, Palm Beach, Florida.

With the support and continuous mentorship of my Master Certified Coach Lyn T. Christian, Founder of SoulSalt, Inc, whom I hired as my first coach nearly 10 years ago, I integrated my years of hospitality expertise with a career shift to executive coaching. What formed from this integration is a unique offering that supports and develops individuals, operations, and businesses of all sizes to reach unparalleled levels of profitability, healthy culture, exceptional service, and longevity in the very top tier of their respective industries, from luxury spas to private clubs, single and multi-outlet restaurants, new coaches, beauty industry schools, entrepreneurs, leaders and founders, and individuals who embrace a holistic growth mindset.

Hospitality and Coaching Found Me

Working at the top food and wine establishments offered me the freedom I craved in my 20s and 30s, enabled me to move around the country, travel and make friends throughout the globe, with flexibility and a solid income.

Wanting more and not sure what that was or how to obtain it, I hired my first coach around age 40. This was an immense catalyst that helped me realize and access my dreams, and today I support individual and business clients to do the same: discover their purpose, overcome obstacles, heal old traumas and wounds, and establish wellness to increase vitality, falling in love with their lives. This culminates in deep fulfillment and success in life and work. I became a coach because of how it impacted me and my life, as a client.

Built on a foundation of yoga and holistic health, VCW embodies the simple principle that to do great things, to impact and serve the world in the most powerful ways using our unique gifts, we must root into our wellness. If we don’t have our health ~ physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual ~ we have nothing.

I Bet You Can Relate to My Story…

Burnout led me here. During a successful long-term career in wine and hospitality operations, I explored career reinvention with my coach and took a professional pause to heal. In the span of 15 months, I’d unexpectedly lost my beloved holistic health coach and mentor of 20 years, moved cross-country twice in three months due to a failed business partnership, and was faced with the sudden, shocking death of my dad a week before he was to move to a new state, a few doors away from me, for the first time since I was nine. I expected healing burnout to take 2-3 months; it took 2-3 years.

What I’ve learned is that disintegrating and rebirthing from burnout is alchemy. When everything is stripped away, the greatest truths emerge, greater than the sum of their individual parts. This reveals your purpose. There is a ‘spagyric process’ in herbalism in which the plant matter, after being extracted into tinctures and medicines, is burned. The ash, the nothingness, is added back to the solution, increasing its healing abilities due to significantly elevated bioactivity and bioavailability. Between the breakdown and the rebirth, we become goo, like the caterpillar on its way to becoming a butterfly. And to emerge, to fly, survive and thrive in the world at our most powerful, we must develop strength, resilience, muscle by fighting for the life we want to live and breaking out of the chrysalis. Sometimes it feels like chain sawing our way to success and enlightenment.

To access the inherent wisdom of this life-changing process and emerge at your best, aligned with your calling, you’ve got to build a team around you and do the deep inner work to heal – by cultivating unconditional self-love and gratitude for life; by excavating your patterns, relationships, childhood and adult wounds; training your thoughts and realizing they absolutely create your current reality every single day; and finding the sparkle in your soul that holds a mirror revealing that you are the Divine in human form. As Wayne Dyer said: “We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Use all of this information to discover your purpose and mine your gifts to make the world a better place for all beings. Lean into ancient wisdom. Listen to the rhythms and cycles of the earth. Align with the quantum universe at our fingertips. We truly are the only factor holding us back from all that we desire.

Today I’m enjoying the sweetness and fruits of the process on the other side, healed from burnout. I built a business honoring my past that’s rooted in what’s most important to me, mindfulness and body-mind-spirit wellness. This work helps others discover and further their dreams and goals, as I have been blessed in my life. I’m surrounded by my team of incredible, compassionate experts who have become dear friends and help me to be my very best, to continuously learn, grow, and expand my reach out into the world. They call me on my bs, point out my blind spots, and hold me to accountability and a loving, elevated standard that keeps me on track to reach and surpass my next goals.

Growing up in the woods of the Hudson River Valley of New York State, being outside in nature has always been my grounding force. Holistic health, learning to use herbs, homeopathy, studying yoga, meditation, pranayama and other modalities felt an intuitive extension of living in accordance with the seasons, cycles and rhythms of the natural world, of which we’re a part. This love of the outdoors led to backpacking, hiking and canyoneering trips through the canyons, rivers and peaks of the Mountain West. I fell in love with the high red rock desert and Rocky Mountains, where I lived for 18 years in Utah before finding my way to the ocean in Palm Beach County, Florida.

Today I coach individuals and businesses using a holistic approach, supporting clients to achieve their highest potential through asking the right skillful questions, believing in them, pointing out blind spots, and being an insightful sounding board and thinking partner as we lean into skillful strategies that yield transformational results, remarkably quickly.