Joanne Gaffney’s mission is supporting people to attain their goals. Through active listening she works with individuals to burst through barriers and into their purpose. Whether the barrier has been internal (to the person), external (from the environment) or a combination of both (illness, stress), she has helped people develop ways to improve their sense of competence and satisfaction in relation to their goals.
Joanne began her career in Nursing at Cornell University-The New York Hospital School of Nursing. A major illness is a transforming life event for both the patient and the patient’s family. The focus of her training was to care for patients and to teach them how to care for themselves. As team leader and charge nurse, she was able to support a team of auxiliary personnel to participate in this goal. She also supported the patient’s family to shift in ways that facilitated awareness and choice.
Shifting her emphasis to the internal components of motivation, Joanne trained at The Simmons School of Social Work. After her graduate degree, she worked for several years with the challenges facing the chronically mentally ill in acute care hospitals and in crisis management of the mentally ill in the Community. Her experience on the staff at Harvard Community Health Plan expanded her group and individual clinical skills as well as her understanding of our health care system.
Joanne moved to private practice so that she could continue to train and work in ways that supported her ability to creatively help couples and individuals in reaching their goals of greater life satisfaction. Joanne has trained for 8 years as a Rubenfeld Synergist, which is a somatic (bodily based) focus of intervention that supports clients to change fixed patterns of behavior from the perspective of how they inhabit and move in their bodies. This is a healing perspective which, in combination with her more traditional training, provides Joanne with a holistic approach to communication and fixed behavior patterns that truly allows her to “think outside the box” in a multilayered and complex way.
Recently as part of Gaffney-Livingstone Consulting, she has been an integral partner in the design of a new model of health-related behavior change and has participated
in the curriculum design and re-training of nurse health coaches within a corporate environment.
Joanne has given workshops on couples communication skills, provided consultation to staff in hospitals, has appeared on National Television as the “couples expert” and has contributed her work to the 30th year edition of The Ladies Home Journal : Can this Marriage be Saved?.
She has been a supervisor and a mentor to individuals and groups in both the medical model and healing model of prevention and treatment.
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