Welcome to the blog. I’m a certified life transformation coach with a PhD in management/sociology, incorporating work with yoga, forgiveness, narrative, and Reiki. I’m also a lifelong Southern California beach girl. In fact, I’ve had a number of former lives (computer teacher, Disneyland VIP tour guide, NICU respiratory therapist, stay-at-home mom of five, doctoral student, consumer sociologist, business school professor, customer experience consultant, teenage delinquent…the list goes on). Life is long and my journey, like most of us, has had a lot of twists and turns.
My passion now is helping people whose careers, professional pursuits, and life goals have changed to regain control over their own life narratives, and figure out their “next chapters” in order to transform their lives into ones that make sense in new circumstances. I’ve had a lot of personal experience in this and empathize with the struggle deeply–as well as knowing the rewards of successfully doing these transformations well.
Transformations of self over a lifetime are variously wonderful and painful, easy and incredibly difficult, almost imperceptible or cataclysmic. For my clients, I find that it can be transformative and powerful to come to a time of transition by guiding them in figuring out their own life story in order to discover what “next chapter” will work with their core values, identity, goals, and vision of “a life worth living.” It turns out that context, plot, dialog, narrative, story arc, etc. of your life after a number of decades on this planet are not that easy to figure out. You know that saying “Write what you know”? Well, there are just too many words and too many stories and too little time to know what to write when thinking of your own story. But like many things–the journey is worth it.
I have a number of academic publications, studying people and institutions in times of change. I use my background in consumer sociology and sociology of consumption to find actionable strategic insights to improve the customer experience. My three academic areas of study: 1. The marketization of institutions and public spaces (e.g. religion, health care, finance/credit, higher education, community) 2. Cultural change and personal identity (e.g. the datafication of society and the quantification of the individual; meeting Covid challenges; consumers leaving identity-salient institutions) 3. Marketing and identity for social enterprises (e.g. bringing services marketing principles to social enterprise for better chance of viability).
In my personal life, I joined the Great Resignation in December 2021, left my tenure track job in New York, and moved to Newfoundland to write and experience a mindful life full time and to be with the love of my life. We live by the sea in a tiny mostly-original 1911 house in a working fishing village. We spend our days writing together by our wood-fire stove; hiking, whale/puffin/iceberg watching and blueberry/cranberry picking; cooking and baking; and basically just being incredibly thankful that our checkered pasts have brought us together to this place and time. John is a Canada Research Chair in Social Enterprise, and is also an author and poet. We are currently writing a book from our ethnographic work about social entrepreneurs and identity transformation to help people who want to make their communities and world a better place.
In recent news, I have finally acquired a baby grand piano…more on that later
–BD
Beth DuFault Ph.D. 