About Me

Sonya Stoklosa — Executive Coach

I am a certified executive coach, entrepreneur, former Olympic Trials athlete and corporate executive — with twenty years of experience helping leaders drive success in their careers.

I hold a Master's degree in Sports Psychology — and I apply that science directly to your professional life. Think of it as the mental game of business: the same techniques that help elite athletes manage pressure, build confidence, and perform consistently are available to any driven professional ready to reach their next level — whether you're leading a large organization, running your own business, or somewhere in between.

With extensive experience working with people in technology, sales, finance, retail, legal, HR, medical, manufacturing and marketing, I bring a fresh perspective to my clients which helps them develop the skills required to positively impact performance.

I have coached over 500 executives and entrepreneurs since founding Executive Athlete. I was formerly a Vice President at Bank of New York/Mellon and draw upon my corporate experience to help clients resolve workplace issues and discover their true leadership capabilities and achieve results in challenging environments.

I deliver individual coaching with a passion for inspiring change through dynamic and challenging interactions. My style is positive, yet direct and focuses on measurable results. At the core, I work to help my clients recognize what types of change are necessary to break through to reach their goals quickly and with the least disruption to their lives and workplace.

Experience

Benefits of Coaching

In the simplest terms, coaching helps my clients figure out where they are, where they need to be, and helps bridge the gap between those two places. People hire me because they want help to clear a hurdle that's keeping them from doing something or to stop doing something that they have trouble avoiding.

More specifically, that might manifest as helping clients:

Coaching Philosophy

Understanding how your brain really works is the foundation of everything I do with clients. The theory is a bit intellectual, but it consistently leads to very practical and pragmatic strategies — and two powerful outcomes in particular:

In the simplest of terms, the hunter-gatherers didn't deal with much nuance. The hunter-gatherer wasn't trying to climb up an elaborate Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Their existence was singularly focused on survival and the proper identification of what was or wasn't a threat — and then whether to fight or flee.

Our brain is very good at this threat response and it would have to be otherwise our species would not have survived over millions of years. The problem with that is two-fold. First, modern history with more organized civil society and such things as the written language is at best 5000–6000 years old. That simply is not enough time for our bodies or our brains to have evolved and adapted much at all to "modern" circumstances. Second, if our brains are great at locking into a few basic survival lessons but not much else, then we're in trouble because today, most of our lives are filled with almost endless details that are dominated by exquisite nuance. Unfortunately, our brains aren't equipped to handle either of those very well.

When one of these nuanced threatening situations happens today, our brain wants to instantly identify it and immediately give orders to our body as to how to respond — fight or flee. There was no time for indecision when the tiger was chasing us in our hunter-gatherer history. The result is that our brain misidentifies lots of things and then misinforms us, sending the wrong signal to our bodies, which can't ignore the message. Our body then gives us the wrong directions on how to respond. Often times fighting or fleeing is not the best response to modern day "threats" such as a boss or spouse criticizing you. This misidentification and faulty response is at the root of much of what makes life so much more difficult for most people.

Much of my work with clients is based on the premise that if you understand how your brain really works, you might be able to change a lot of things in your life. Figuring out why you think and do what you do could be the start to finding a path that would actually be better for you — a methodology to break patterns in behavior that are unproductive and get a better understanding of why other people think and do what they do.

My Process

I partner with clients in a dynamic process to increase personal and professional potential. I help clients overcome their blind spots using a methodology developed over twenty years focused on understanding why clients are doing what they are doing, rather than just changing their actions.

I help clients reframe and then overcome their challenges through understanding and then redirecting the key stories that create patterns in their lives that compel them towards unproductive thoughts and behaviors.

My experience coaching all levels of individuals has led to the development of core theories about how people operate: what motivates them, what traps and thwarts them and what ultimately drives them to success.