Education, bio, tenets of coaching & business practices
The following are the tenets and specific practices I uphold within all aspects of my work including coaching, teaching, and mentoring. I am also a practice-in-progress and will continue to learn and unlearn which may require future changes and updates.
Credit & Attribution
As Kelly Diels says, “Footnotes are a feminist practice.” The following are the teachers I am currently learning from who have informed my tenets and specific practices in business.
Rachel Ricketts: www.rachelricketts.com
Ericka Hines: everylevelleads.com
Rachel Rodgers: helloseven.co/townhall-2
Kelly Diels: www.kellydiels.com
Hadassah Damien: www.ridefreefearlessmoney.com
Education & training
Certified Life Coach, ACTP – Institute for Life Coach Training, accredited by the International Coach Federation (ICF)
Master Practitioner of NLP and Hypnosis -The Association for Integrative Psychology
Master Practitioner of Mental Emotional Release™ Therapy – The Association for Integrative Psychology
Certified Master Practitioner of Integrative Wellness & Life Coaching, MILC – Integrative Wellness Academy
Certified BodyMap Coach Level 1 - Applied Neuroscience of Behavior, Performance, & Personal Transformation
Certified 200-Hour Yoga Teacher, RYT-200 - The Yoga Conservatory, accredited by the Yoga Alliance
Certified Journal to the Self Instructor, JTTS – Center for Journal Therapy
Graduate Work in Systems Counseling – Saybrook University
B.A. Social Work and Human Services – Western Washington University
Coaching and Training Organization, Association for Coaching
A note about my teachers
None of us are where we are because we paved our own path. I am the result of my family, friends, teachers, and mentors.
I have learned from authors, poets, and artists. I am moved by activists and grateful for our mystics. I have sat and listened to generational history and communed with my women ancestors - my mother, grandmothers, and aunties.
While I fulfill a certain role when I coach or teach I am only one part of co-created relationships with my fellow changemakers, system-buckers, creators, and risk-takers. They are my sisters, and fellow hand-holders in this life and work.
Formal bio
Andrea Leda is a sought-after professional coach, teacher, and mentor with over 10,000 hours of coaching experience since she began her practice in 2010. She is dedicated to helping each of us learn to trust our own innate value and worthiness so that we are brave enough to show up for the work we’re truly here to do.
By harnessing her deep and practical knowledge of powerful coaching techniques—including NLP, journal therapy, mental emotional release work, and BodyMAP coaching—Andrea equips women+ to feel empowered to love their small corner of the world and see it as enough. In her coaching work, she has been called "a force to be reckoned with and a brave woman who truly makes this world go round.”
In 2022, Andrea founded Braver Coach—a mission, a community, and an educational platform for women+ who are reimagining impact by moving beyond the goal-setting and achieving arena of traditional self-development and leaving ample space to navigate the intricate terrain of our shared human experience.
Tenets of coaching & ethical responsibility
My tenets for coaching are my values in action. This is the guiding philosophy I approach my entire body of work with including all programming, coaching tools, mentorship, community support, writing, and classes.
I believe coaching can create braver spaces in you and in the world
You are worth being brave with your life. While I cannot define “brave” for you, I believe being brave means speaking up and out for your values, supporting the collective whole, living as though your life truly mattered, and listening with your whole self to your body, your needs, your intuition, the land, and our collective humanity.
I believe braver coaching is a true empowerment tool
Braver coaching reminds you that you are your own domain and always have a choice, the very definition of empowerment.
I believe you are whole, creative, and resourceful
You do not need to be diagnosed, fixed, or healed because you are not broken.
I believe coaching is not a solution
This work is a pure creative space where you can explore all possible outcomes and remember that you have a choice. Our primary goal is to move you toward your choice.
I believe coaching is a space to be heard and seen, not to be perfect or “get it right”
Perfectionism is a conditioned response to risking belonging when the vulnerability of being our full human selves arises. Our coaching container is a space to make mistakes, feel challenged, and sit in the muck of the human experience.
I believe coaching should create a space for you to be the expert
You are a resilient and capable adult who knows herself better than I ever could. I welcome your self-knowledge and wisdom to be the center of our coaching relationship.
Ethical responsibility
Aware of the lack of accessibility to helping services, I am committed to the acknowledgment and necessity of equal access.
I dedicate a portion of my time to providing free resources and continuous outreach to underserved populations through my programming. I am committed to producing work in an ecological and sustainable way for my clients, my industry, and my community.
Aware that dogmatic methodology creates an unhealthy attachment to the “provider” and disempowers the client, I am committed to principle-based services which move people toward choice.
Knowing that “guru-ism” is rampant in helping services, I am committed to coaching my clients home to themselves where they are not reliant on my processes to do the work. Our work is collaborative and co-creative and founded on mutuality.
Aware that as a white woman I can not operate outside the lens of white supremacy, I am committed to practicing anti-racism.
I am a white woman actively working to dismantle her own racism as created by covertly existing and blinding benefiting from a white supremacist society. You can read my specific commitments and the Anti-Racist Small Business Pledge I took here.
Aware that unnecessary harm is caused through negligence of helping providers and the space they provide, I am committed to the tenet, ‘do no harm’.
The space I provide promotes safe sharing through confidential communication, client-driven processes, permission, and the client’s right to end the work if/when it’s no longer serving you.
Aware that harm is caused by dishonest and manipulative language, I am committed to loving communication by listening, first.
I am dedicated to honoring my client’s experience and to only use my skills of questions and listening to meet a client where they’re at. I will only challenge if in service of the desired outcomes you’ve outlined in our work together.
Aware that harm is caused psychologically and physically when helpers operate outside their scope of practice, I am committed to stay in my lane and seek advisement as needed.
Through continued education and ongoing mentorship, I hold myself accountable to the integrity of being a professional coach. I seek support on a case-by-case basis as needed and am fully resourced to refer a client out if/when the need should arise.
Business ethos
1.
I uphold mutuality and informed consent of all my services because my community are whole, capable, and resourceful adults.
Business can be a container rife with scarcity, manipulation, and emotional triggers prompted to get your money or make a sale. As a service business in relationship with the people I work with and serve I understand the power of mutuality when deciding to work with someone and when they select my services.
2.
I conduct business in a way that values people above profit.
Money is a powerful resource, but can often be used to yield or maintain power over and at the cost of whole groups of people, especially Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color (BIWoC). While money is a valuable asset in business it is not the only one. How I make money matters and I do my best to approach how I make money as a business knowing it does have an impact on others.
3.
I do not engage in predatory marketing which uses people’s vulnerabilities against them.
Marketing when primed to fill numbers and check profit boxes can not also uphold mutuality. I do not engage in the marketing actions that do direct harm such as eliciting pain points, scarcity tactics, arbitrary price increases, and buying personal data for the exploitive use of people’s private information.
4.
I measure my success through the individuals I serve and the success of our relationship relative to their goal for hiring me.
Dominate culture perpetuates hierarchical, expert-driven, and appropriated “Guru-ism” to uphold the power of one over many. This can appear like social media fame, celebrity-like self-development characters, and correlating influential numbers such as likes and follows as success. While I appreciate the many integral leaders in my industry, I also recognize that this work needs ripples created from sitting with the people I am serving. Scaling a business is not always a sign of positive impact but rather perpetuating capitalistic “norms”. There is no business too small but if our focus is on “more”, “scaled”, and “bigger” then we’re quick to overlook the very people we claim to be in service to.
5.
I do not borrow, steal, or appropriate practices that do not belong to me in the name of “healing or helping others”, and “growing my business.”
I am explicitly naming this as an invitation and encouragement for my colleagues to do the same, especially white and white-passing coaches because the life coaching industry today is rampant with spiritual bypassing, cultural appropriation, and toxic positivity.
If you need help identifying the ways you may be upholding such practices I recommend the book Do Better by Rachel Ricketts.
Business practices
I believe business can be a powerful tool when it’s used for true empowerment and to support the highest good of not only an individual but our shared collective.
I hire women+ and fellow LGBTQI+ individuals to support my business (ie. assistant, editor, photographer, graphic designer, and more) and pay for their labor. I do not support trade for services because it devalues contributions as not valuable.
When I am looking for a coach or support in my life and business I often source from within my own network and community first and pay the full price for their services.
I believe payment plans are a form of accessibility and do not charge a fee for payment plans (h/t Kelly Diels).
As a self-employed queer woman who is the primary income provider for her family, I charge appropriate prices that reflect my education, skills, experience, and commitments to our future, and values.
I know that success requires ongoing education and access to support so my monthly newsletter is a free resource.
Aware that the coaching industry is an unregulated industry with inflated pricing, I regularly evaluate pricing accessibility in my business, host community classes for donations, and offer courses on a sliding scale.
When I co-create an event, class, or workshop I equally profit share with my collaborators.
As a white woman with power and privilege, I do my best to pay it forward as best I can through A Braver Cause.
Note: Making donations is not in itself enough to end oppressive systems specifically held against BIWoC. I am explicitly naming this as a resource for others.
In June 2020 I signed the Anti-Racist Small Business Pledge, you can take the pledge here. To read my specific commitments click here.
Aware that access to coaching can be cost-prohibitive I give away 20+ hours of coaching away per year in my coaching projects.