Coaching House

Empowering Professionals in the Workplace

A Team with Over 80 Years of Experience

With a cumulative experience of over 80 years, our team is uniquely qualified to support the holistic development of leaders from various backgrounds. We specialize in nurturing strong organizational cultures through our expertise in leadership development.

Marla Teyolia

Marla Teyolia, M.S., is a seasoned transformational coach and personal guide with over two decades of experience serving executives, activists, artists, and change-makers. With a profound understanding of holistic coaching, Marla empowers individuals and teams to fully assess their thought patterns, behaviors, and work strategies, making lasting impact in their both their personal and professional domains.

Marla’s magic is in ability to unlock individual power and voice while dismantling limiting mindsets. She specializes in executive presence development, enhances communication skills, navigating career growth , and orchestrating team expansion–all while identifying core values and preserving personal authenticity. She uses a Conversational Intelligence® (C-IQ) framework, leveraging neuroscience and language to cultivate the highest levels of trust, fueling growth, innovation, and the capacity for navigating difficult conversations. Drawing on decades of experience, Marla seamlessly integrates mindfulness, meditation, and yoga practices to aid clients in building resiliency while embodying their best selves to the workplace.
Marla’s journey started in the early 90’s, working in the field of domestic violence. Her initial experience involved facilitating women’s group at a shelter, witnessing survivors who had risked everything–homes, possessions, , and safety–to carve out new lives for themselves and their children. This formative experience reinforced her belief in sustainable transformation, achieved through comprehensive support that nurtures individuals while releasing limiting factors that hinder personal growth. Marla’s core belief: Transformation thrives when it becomes an integral part of one’s being, encompassing the holistic journey towards realizing one’s fullest potential.

Marla holds a Master of Science in Social Work from Columbia University, where she also served as a diversity trainer for incoming students. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley, graduating magna cum laude. Marla’s extensive clientele includes executives, teams, and individuals from renowned organization such as at Facebook, McDermott, Will & Emory, Columbia University, Bard College, Mount Holyoke College, Southern Methodist University, MTV, NYC Department of Education, C. Moore Media International Public Relations, and the Youth Development Institute, among numerous others. Marla is a Certified Empowerment Workshop Facilitator and a registered yoga teacher.

Crystal McCreary

Crystal McCreary has taught yoga and mindfulness since 2007. She is committed to creating and holding safe spaces for people to connect, heal, learn, and build resilience and equity in a world that often takes relentless hold of our bodies, minds, and hearts. Crystal supports organizations, individuals and groups through professional development workshops, trainings, yoga classes and lovingly curated yoga and wellness retreats internationally. Her programs feature embodied healing modalities including: yoga, mindfulness, breath work,restorative yoga and practices, discussion and reflection, ritual, and emphasize the importance of self-care and sustainability as the gateway to social justice and community healing in the world. All services are inclusive and adaptive, trauma-informed and accessible for all. She is registered with Yoga Alliance as an ERYT500 and RCYT.

Crystal serves on the Yoga Alliance Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility Advisory Committee for the upcoming revised Yoga Alliance teacher training standards. She also leads 100-hour kids yoga and mindfulness teacher trainings for Little Flower Yoga and Bent On Learning and facilitates trauma-informed yoga for court-involved youth in juvenile detention centers with Lineage Project. Crystal implements yoga programs in New York City Schools, youth development organizations, and in corporations committed to cultivating sustainable and compassionate work environments. She participates regularly as a curriculum consultant and lead teacher for research studies on yoga and mindfulness conducted by CUNY-Hunter’s public health department, and teaches public classes in New York City.

Crystal has been featured in Lauren Lipton’s Yoga Bodies Book, Mantra Yoga + Health magazine, Elephant Journal, Race & Yoga, the UC Berkeley online academic journal, Shondaland.com, and contributes regularly to numerous blogs and podcasts. She studied African and African American studies at Stanford University and acting as part of The American Conservatory Theater MFA program before arriving in New York in 2004. Crystal lives in New York City and occasionally moonlights as an actor on film or television. To learn more about Crystal visit www.crystalmccrearyyoga.com

Kavitha Rao

Kavitha is a mother, facilitator, trainer, mediator, consultant, and healer. As a daughter of immigrants to the US, she has always been curious about difference and how we make meaning through connection to land, community, and place.

Kavitha brings over 20 years experience in the non-profit sector focused on transformational leadership and facilitation, building community and authentic partnerships across difference, and using creativity and collective visioning to work towards reparations and healing. Her understanding of the possibility of change and healing is deeply influenced by her training in yoga therapy, cranio-sacral therapy, ayurveda, and mindfulness. She brings these tools to her leadership and facilitation work recognizing how important knowing ourselves and personal healing is in our efforts to heal our planet and build community.

Since 2006 she has worked with the Center for Whole Communities facilitating retreats and consulting with organizations to cultivate transformative leadership that weaves together and strengthens movements for justice and the environment. Prior to that she co-founded Common Fire, a nonprofit that created intentional communities grounded on justice, equity and sustainability. Kavitha is a member of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute team of facilitators, mediators and coaches; serves on the board for Soul Fire Farm; and is a core consultant to the Wildseed Community Farm and Healing Village.

Over the years Kavitha has partnered with and led trainings for dozens of institutions and organizations seeking to center equity in their work including The Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Omega Institute, the Yale School of Forestry, the Nature Conservancy, and the Good Work Institute. Her trainings span transformational leadership, cultural competency and humility, conscious communication, story-telling, nonviolence, consensus decision making, conflict transformation, facilitation and popular education, yoga, mindfulness, and more.

She offers deep gratitude for her many influences – the grassroots groups around the world that she has had the privilege to work with, her mentor Lillie Allen of Be Present, and her many colleagues, mutual-mentors, and teachers along the way.

Sandra Escamilla

Sandra Escamilla is a coach and master facilitator who has worked with executive leaders and organizations for over 20 years.  Her work with executive leaders is rooted in the notion that transformation begins with a willingness to reflect on your practice, the courage to abandon what does not serve you, and the ability to imagine and apply what does.   To that end, Sandra has supported hundreds of leaders to critically examine their work and adopt practices that help them to initiate individual, organizational and system level change towards a desired outcome.

Sandra specializes in working with leaders across different sectors, with sizable portfolios, and teams and who influence and set the culture of their agency and their field of practice.  A hallmark of her work is the customization of effective leadership models and practices to respond to the holistic needs of her clients and in an effort to cultivate their voice and empower them to take steps to manifest their most powerful and authentic self.  She intentionally integrates diversity, inclusion and equity practices into her work with leaders and supports them to make practice and policy changes that foster diverse, inclusive and equitable learning environments.

Her additional areas of expertise include-strategic planning, change management, theory of change/logic model development, team building and performance management. Sandra also incorporates neuroscience practices that bolster mind body connection and that remove barriers that block potential such as mindfulness and movement.

Sandra has held various leadership positions in NYC including as the Executive Vice President at Children’s Aid and as the Executive Director of the Youth Development Institute.   She also founded her own consultant firm, PUSH NYC where she led various NYC mayoral projects that required collaboration and leadership development of executive leaders in city government including commissioner and deputy commissioner level; and she created a leadership model that leaders in the NYC Department of Education adopted and implemented.

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