Kim Geil

After watching her father be miserable for much of his working life, and seeing the effects his choices had on her and her family, Kim has chosen a different path. She spends her summers in Grand Teton National Park, WY, where she facilitates soft skills and leadership training for the 70+ guides at Exum Mountain Guides and helps run the office. The rest of the year she is based in Sacramento, CA, where she does training, facilitation, curriculum development, and more for multiple state agencies. She is the founder of Coaching Heights, a virtual coaching business that specializes in helping people learn how to optimize their lives so they can show up more consistently as their best selves. She also helps people make their jobs better, or figure out if it is time to leave their job and move on. She offers workshops, group coaching programs, and one-on-one coaching packages, so that she can help as many people as possible not have to go through what her father did. She is an International Coaching Federation certified coach, and a certified Optimize Coach - Class 1.

Kim has a B.A. in Sociology from Stanford University, and a PhD in Educational Psychology and Research on Teaching from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research focused on burnout and engagement among teachers and transformative professional development opportunities. She taught English in Japan, and also taught high school Japanese in the United States. She has been an admissions counselor for the University of Colorado at Boulder, and ran the Guide and Visitors Service at Stanford University, where she once had the pleasure of escorting Mikhail Gorbachev to the top of Hoover Tower. She loves taking walks, being in the mountains, and competes every year on a same-sex ballroom dance formation team.

With her background in education, and the work she does with mountain guides (these are not people who are good at sitting still and being talked at!), she knows how to engage an audience. People learn by being involved, and so all of her presentations are interactive. She is a master at getting people to feel comfortable sharing with each other and the group, and knows that this is where much of the learning and insight happens.