TRAGEDY LAUNCHES NAOMI VLADECK ON A NEW CAREER—AND SPAWNS A BOOK

Published 1 year ago1y ago • Bookmarks: 380

June 25, 2023

By Barrett Seaman—

Earning good grades has come easily to Naomi Vladeck. Translating academic success into a purposeful life, however, has not come quite so easily. After years of schooling and itinerant jobs in and around the arts, however, Vladeck finally figured out that underneath all her uncertainty, she was a natural-born teacher with a talent for helping creative people—women in particular–disarm their resistance to change so they can accomplish their goals.

The latest result of this self-realization is a book, entitled Braving Creativity, to be published this summer by New Degree Press. Her hope is that it will serve as an anchor for her full time day job as a life coach with a special knack for helping women artists, actors and writers.

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It has been a winding road, to say the least. Though now a resident of Sleepy Hollow, Vladeck is originally from Rockland County. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Skidmore College with a degree in psychology and a focus in theater, but she did not see herself either as a therapist or as a committed actor. She was comfortable in the art world; her mother was an artist; her brother was a musician; her grandmother was an actor. The community in the arts is where, she says, “she found her people.”

After college, she joined avant garde theater director Anne Bogart, helping to help administer a summer theater program with the Japanese Suzuki Company of Toga. Deeply moved by the company’s performance of Electra that summer, she auditioned for a nine-month residency in their actor training program. “I don’t know why I felt the pull to do that,” she admits. “I just knew that I needed to be in my body in the way that they were in their body, and it’s an incredibly rigorous physical form.”

She went on to earn a Masters in Performance Studies at NYU, where she began to sense that the personal development of the artists around her was of greater interest than her current research. Once, while she and a friend were shopping at Whole Foods in Chelseaa, her friend asked her casually if she’d ever heard of coaching. ”You’d be really great at that.”. About that same time, her thesis professor pulled her aside in the lunch line and said, “Listen closely. You must teach.” The hints were clear, she recalls, “but I wasn’t ready to receive them just yet.”

Between 2003 and 2021, she racked up certificates and degrees from eight different programs related to the arts and coaching. She also taught personal essay writing and founded her own performance nonprofit. “I was still grappling with the fear of [being] an impostor,” she confesses. “I was afraid that if I committed fully to coaching, I’d find out I wasn’t good enough.” In hindsight, Vladeck thinks her fear about succeeding as a coach was connected to her childhood fear of change. She found ways to commit to this path in other ways, but never quite directly.

She never strayed far from the art world, however. She spent most of the next decade as a fundraiser for Dance Theater Workshop, then at Sarah Lawrence College, then co-founding the Rivertowns Artists Workshop, a venue for producing dance and theater work by local artists.

Then in 2015, something terrible happened that would change everything. It was, however, a shock she now credits for giving her the courage to take the risks she had feared she might never take. In September of that year, not long after she started another fundraising job at Lyndhurst, her husband Eric, her high school sweetheart, the father of her two children, died from alcoholism that had been worsening rapidly during the past two years..

Until then, she had been compartmentalizing her life, poking around the edges of a career in coaching. Stabilizing her children’s lives became a priority. The job at Lyndhurst was not a great fit, but it paid the bills. When COVID hit, however, she recognized that the time was right to screw up her courage and get serious about a career as a life coach. She went back to school, earning certification at the Creativity Coaching Association and NYU’s “Inner MBA” program. The training there “helped me unlock why certain relationships are so hard for me, because so much about leadership is about communication and fearless communication, and I have a lot of fear.”

Being stuck at home under the strictures of the pandemic allowed her to take care of her kids and build a stable of clients. Writing the book was “a leveraging tool” to attract clients but also a way to help “get super clear about what it is that I am really doing in my work as a coach. Who am I talking to? Am I talking to artists? Am I talking to any artists? Am I talking to artists at any time in their lives or at certain times in their lives? Am I talking to them about their creativity, or am I talking to them about change?”

As of this summer, she has a dozen clients—all women, although she has coached a male jazz musician. “When it comes to niche, I guess, I just really focus tightly around women, because that was my experience.” Her clients sign up for six months, which seems to be a time frame that “really works to set people free of whatever it is they came with to move forward on their own, and that’s the goal.”

Each client begins with a “deep dive” two-hour session, either in person, if possible, or by Zoom. She then meets with them three times a month, running through what Naomi has labeled her “Five Pillars,” all verbs that comprise her signature system: “Liberate, Navigate, Play, Empower and Flourish.” On Fridays, she holds what she called “action labs” for clients who can join in a group session. She has three retreats a year—so far all on Zoom but she hopes one next summer can be in-person.

(For those interested in learning more about her program, including fees, visit her web site, https://www.creativitymatterscoaching.com.)

In addition to her active clients, Naomi has an e-mail list of about 300 who receive weekly messages of coaching wisdom in language that is refreshingly devoid of the jargon that is common among many therapists. In her limited time devoted to coaching, she has accumulated some fans—some of whose testimonials appear in her book.

Performance artist Sarah Juli calls her “a gift” who uses “a toolbox of resources including journaling, guided self-reflection, readings, open dialogue and more that helped me identify some key areas of weakness in my artistic practice.”

“Naomi is a candle in the night on the creative journey” commented choreographer Caitlin Trainor. Lisa Fragner, VP, Animation Development, Disney Branded Television, called her book “a powerful meditation on the terror, ecstasy, healing, and rebirth essential to the creative process

If Braving Creativity does its job in attracting a new wave of clients, it will allow Vladeck to express more of her natural talent for teaching than she has had in the past.. “That’s my role in life,” she can now say. “I champion artists to face their fear of change.”

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