HGI Team > Margaret Sarkissian
“My roles as a coach and as a facilitator are quite similar; both allow me to help the client to grow and to thrive, and in many cases, to step into a much larger life. Many of us are “living small”. We hope and, at some level, we know that we are meant to be living a much bigger life that uses all of our gifts, encourages us to stretch beyond our comfort zone and challenges us to be more than we ever imagined for ourselves. My desire is to help my clients discover that vision or spark, imagine/create where this vision might lead them, and then support them on their journey of manifesting that new life.”
Margaret Sarkissian
M.A. (Education), CEC, CIEHP
Journeying to Wholeness
Areas of expertise
Margaret is trained as a counsellor, integrative healer, and certified executive coach, and brings that training and experience into almost all of her work. As a coach, she incorporates somatic techniques to heighten her client’s self-awareness, and to overcome major internal blocks or obstacles to achieving goals. As a healer, Margaret uses her coaching and counselling skills as the therapeutic dialogue that accompanies most healing treatments. As an educator/trainer, she uses all of her skills along with story-telling and lots of humour to keep the learning environment alive and fun.
Clients
Margaret has worked with professionals, parents, and other adults from many different walks of life who want to significantly change their lives, as well as with faculty, staff and students at the University of British Columbia, where she worked for 33 years. She finds that the best candidates for successful coaching are those who can commit to the four following pillars of change: a readiness to invest their time, energy, and resources to get the outcomes they desire; a full commitment to doing the work of coaching both in and between sessions; a willingness to let go of limiting or self-defeating behaviours that no longer serve them; and the courage to take some risks to try out new more growthful behaviours.
Professional Highlights
Margaret has worked as a coach, a counsellor, the director of two university academic programs, and as a senior human rights advisor dealing with complaints of discrimination, harassment, and bullying. Most of these roles have incorporated working closely with people on a one to one basis, as well as developing and facilitating scores of educational workshops and presentations with groups ranging from 10 to 500 people. Some of the workshops she has offered include coaching and communication skills; respect in the workplace; strategic planning; strengths-based team development; and social justice issues such as discrimination, diversity and inclusion. In addition, she is also a licensed facilitator for a four-session personal development course, Appreciative Living, which offers participants powerful and effective techniques to reduce stress and bring greater happiness into all parts of their lives.
Credentials
M.A. in Education (Counselling Psychology), UBC; Certified Executive Coach, Royal Roads University; and Certified Integrative Energy Healing Practitioner, Langara College.
Margaret is a lifelong learner, forever interested in psychology (especially positive psychology), spirituality, health, education, and more. She is very interested in both Western and Eastern spirituality, and currently is studying the work of Sri Aurobindo and Ken Wilber -- both prolific authors and inspiring teachers in the field of human consciousness.
As part of her energy healing program, Margaret worked at a number of detox centres in Vancouver, offering healing sessions to men and women in recovery from drug and alcohol addictions. For her final practicum, she took a pilgrimage to India and offered healing treatments to Tibetan nuns, who had come as refugees to India from Tibet, where they had been persecuted for their Buddhist faith. She graduated from the three-year foundational healing program at Langara in 2006, is now a student in the Advanced Integrative Healing Program at Langara and is in the process of opening her healing practice.