Dori Klass, Co-Founder, World Class Parenting

Dori Klass has been a teacher, a healer and a visionary leader all of her life.  Honoring her interests in holistic health and wellness, theatre and the performing arts, athletics and physical fitness, and all things new and promising, she pursued a degree in the highly interdisciplinary and emerging field of Biomedical Engineering, which she earned from Duke University in 1982.  From there, she began a successful career in corporate America.

Dori loved the challenges of her 20-year run with a Fortune 50 health care company, worked hard, and savored every opportunity to learn and serve.  It was during this time that she earned an executive MBA, graduating with honors.

It was also during this time that Dori met the love of her life, her husband, Michael.  Now the proud mother of four boys, ranging in age from 11 to 26, each member of her family is a blessing in their own unique way.

As blessed as she felt, there came a time well into her career when Dori, who’s number one value is mastery, could no longer juggle all the responsibilities of her life and feel masterful at anything.  This created an integrity issue – to continue to work the hours she was working, to travel far and wide, and to pursue the life of an executive was to be out of alignment with her values.  She had a clear vision of what was needed for a family to function well and for each of its members to thrive and be healthy.  At this juncture in her life, she realized she was not fully honoring this vision and, as a result, she was putting her family, her health, and her career at risk.  Faced with a choice, she chose her family and her health.

Since 2002, motivated significantly by lessons learned from a devastating loss of a sibling at a young age and her own challenges in childhood, she has devoted her life to becoming the best parent she can possibly be.  This has set her on the path she’s on today.  She’s never looked back.

Dori’s story and what it took not only to make this decision but also to honor it and live into it is described in more detail in the soon to be released E-book, “Begin at the Beginning.”

In 2003, she joined the ranks of heart-centered entrepreneurs and began the process of becoming a professionally trained and certified co-active coach.  She also completed certification programs in organizational development, leadership, dream coaching, dream coach group leadership, and change management using MasterStream’s innovative Change Grid system.  She built and ran her business in a way that let her honor her commitments to her family and to her health first.

During this time, Dori developed her own personal leadership development/core discovery program, which she has delivered to a variety of groups, young and old, and piloted in a local high school, and an innovative values identification system, which she has incorporated into the discovery phase of every coaching engagement with every client, no matter what their background or situation.  Values work has consistently had a profound and positive impact on the lives of her clients.

Values identification is a powerful centering, integrity-building and decision-making tool.  Knowing your values is a source of great strength.  Coaching clients and loved ones to know, accept, honor and live into their core values on a day-to-day basis is the signature element of Dori’s work as a coach and values work is at the heart of what World Class Parenting does.  It is addressed in the second of the four cornerstone modules that comprise the World Class Parenting program.

In 2009, Dori became a Certified Family Coach through the Academy for Family Coach Training, which cemented her shift from executive, career and life coaching to parent, family and adolescent coaching.  In essence, her niche found her.  She is eager to serve parents who are ready and willing to do this profound work and who want to take a stand for their kids and for something bigger than themselves.

It takes courage, compassion and commitment to become a World Class Parent, qualities parents everywhere have in vast amounts. Dori wants parents, who are too often marginalized in modern society, to know just how competent and invaluable they are.  While she realizes that being a prepared, proactive and purposeful parent is not a guarantee that any of us will successfully launch happy and healthy children, she knows, first-hand, that it helps and that it can be the difference, in some cases, between a child’s life or death, and a families ability to thrive, together, or not.  Like Frank, Dori believes that purposeful parenting matters and that parental leadership matters.  These things can be learned and honed by just about anyone with a heart and soul and a willingness to stand in their commitment to the children they brought into this life or have chosen to raise as their own.

It is a privilege to work with parents who care this much and who know that their children are watching and learning every second that they are awake and in each others’ presence.

Dori resides with her husband and three of her four boys in Oro Valley, Arizona (the fourth and oldest is happily married and successfully launched!)

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