Coaching Experience and Professional Expertise
Ms. Judy M. Ford is a nationally certified and internationally credentialed holistic life and transition coach for women; inspirational and motivational speaker/trainer; registered yoga teacher; health & wellness practitioner; writer; and author of the book, The Light in Your Pocket: Illuminate Your Life in 140-Characters or Less. Through her signature coaching programs, speaking services, writing projects, and yoga & wellness offerings, Judy works with women in the transition spaces of their lives – helping them successfully navigate stages of personal, professional, emotional, physical, relational, and spiritual transitions in ways that honor their essential truths, innate wisdom, natural sovereignty, and authentic power to support their progress forward along their evolutionary journeys. Grounded in a focus on and commitment to leveraging and maximizing individual strengths, Judy offers a comprehensive and holistic approach to personal and professional development that emphasizes healing, self-awareness, self-mastery, wellness, wholeness, body-mind-spirit alignment and integration, personal values, balance, inner power, authenticity, whole-life evolution, change, transformation, impact, and action.
Working with individual women, women leaders/emerging leaders, and women entrepreneurs, Judy helps her clients reclaim and redefine themselves, their lives, their work, and their living for themselves; and in ways that consciously and intentionally align with the impact, difference, and transformative effect they want have in the world – helping women create & live their lives … by design! Through the full complement of her service offerings, Judy illuminates the power of her own light as a ‘healer, wisdom-bearer, and space-creator for the revelation and experience of the soul’ – her purpose in and for the world. Since starting her coaching practice nearly 8 years ago, Judy has worked with a diverse portfolio of individual clients, women’s groups, conferences/meetings/seminars, professional trainings, leadership development programs, yoga studios, community centers, wellness festivals, and retreats. In addition, Judy has provided her services to the staff and/or membership of companies, organizations and/or associations across the country including: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Asian Law Alliance, Neighborhood Funders Group, Bank of America, The Center for Leadership and Public Values, the Louisiana Effective Leadership Program, Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy, Southeast Council on Foundations’ Advanced Leadership Institute, Grantmakers in Health, American Public Health Association, Maryland University of Integrative Health, and Oneness Festival.
Judy brings to her work over 20 years of experience and expertise as a leader, volunteer and mentor in health & wellness promotion, philanthropy and the nonprofit sectors. Through her service in senior leadership positions with national, regional and local grantmaking foundations, as well as national nonprofit service organizations, Judy also volunteered her time serving as chair, vice-chair and/or committee chair on the board of directors, steering committees, funding collaboratives, conference committees and/or working groups of national, regional and local nonprofit organizations and professional membership/leadership development associations. Judy’s honors and awards include: the 2013 ICF Advance Scholarship from the International Coach Federation; being invited to join the L.I.Q.U.I.D. Studios Experts Network; graduating from the 2005/2006 Emerging Leaders International Fellowship Program and becoming a Life Fellow of the Joint Centers for Leadership and Public Values at Duke University and the University of Cape Town South Africa; and, in 2013, being among 31 women leaders from across the United States selected to participate in the Standing in Our Power Transformative Leadership Institute for Women of Color Leaders.
Judy holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in anatomy and physiology, health education/health promotion and public health from Boston University, The University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins University. She received her coach training and certification as a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach through The Coaches Training Institute and is credentialed as an Associate Certified Coach with the International Coach Federation. Judy completed the Blue Heron Wellness Yoga Teacher Training Program (a Yoga Alliance Registered Yoga School); is an associate member of the Women Speakers Association; a member of the Holistic Entrepreneur Association International; a current member of Yoga Alliance; and maintains the Yoga Alliance RYT200 credential. In addition to her book, The Light in Your Pocket: Illuminate Your Life in 140-Characters or Less, Judy’s writing can also be found online at her blog on her website www.msjudymford.com; as well as Las Morenas de Espana, Black and Brown News (BBN), Huffington Post, and the Spirit in Action Blog.
In addition to her service work, Judy spends her time in close communion with her family; co-creating, supporting, and nurturing life-long friendships; and creating a bold, new world, individually and collectively, as part of a powerful community of visionary sister-women from across the country and around the world. Judy is a voracious reader (who still prefers books with pages – library books are even better!), a life-long journaler, creative poet (free verse and haiku), and an avid world traveler who is “intent on navigating this life successfully and on my own terms; while creating and living the most radiant, joyful, and fulfilling life experience possible…by my own design, as I support others in doing the same.”