Welcome to my new brand, logo, and website! It was time for me to make some changes based on career transitions and the people who come to me for coaching. As always, I will be a strong advocate for women and women’s issues, yet I also enjoy coaching men, couples, and corporate individuals and teams. I’m excited to evolve as a professional and to see where my career takes me. I was nervous to make this shift. I’m not a huge lover of change, and if left to my own devices, I would probably stay in the comfort zone for years. Yet I preach stepping into our fears and challenging ourselves, so that’s exactly what I did as I rounded the corner into 2018.

When I hired a designer I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted my new logo to represent. It was easy to include “coach” and “psychologist” because that’s where my education and training stem from. However, I got stuck on a third word to describe me, so I asked the woman I had hired to help me with branding and she said, “leader.” Leader sounded arrogant to me, kind of braggy, and full of myself. Yet I kept coming back to that word and how it fit into my life and my profession.

Defining Leadership for Our Own Lives

And here’s what I came up with: we are all leaders. We all lead our own lives, our destiny, our future, our happiness, and everything in between. Yes, I lead trainings and speaking engagements, but that isn’t what I meant by leader. I meant that I lead my own life. I lead as a mother, wife, friend, sister, daughter, and professional. I can either lead with love and kindness or with aggression and unhappiness. Daily, I work to make sure I go with the former, but the latter certainly tugs at me during rough times.

My work is to help other people become the most effective leaders in their own lives. I want them to choose how they live, work, and love—to not be victims of their environment but instead be the cause of their own destiny. That work starts with my own leadership development and thus I took that word and planted it right on my logo (ok, the logo designer did that but I nicely asked her to!). So maybe you thought I was being arrogant, and that’s ok as long as I am living up to my own definition of what a leader truly is.

So here’s to being your own leader. Here’s to owning our lives and our happiness. Here’s to me confidently and publicly calling myself a leader and living up to all that it entails. And by the way, if you want some help becoming a leader of your own life, let me know. I’m here to help.

Let me know what you think of the new website!

Love,

Lisa Kaplin Psy. D. PCC