Chris Wucherer has extensive and diverse experience — more than 20 years in business and life coaching, personal and professional counseling, and family business consultation. She founded the Center for Work and Life in 2003 to better serve her growing client base and to express her vision for the helping arts.

The Center allows Chris to expand her business mission and services, and embodies the values and skills, which have made her practice so effectively transforming. The Center will allow her to tap into the wisdom and expertise of other professionals to provide an ever-broadening network of support and knowledge to individual clients, professionals, business executives, and organizations of all types and sizes.

Chris' vision is grandly expansive, yet startlingly simple: To help each person and business discover their essence and to develop their full potential. Her inherent wisdom, hard-earned clarity, and unwavering belief in her fellow humans allows her to "get to the core" of things quickly, to ask insightful (and sometimes, unsettling) questions, and to gently provoke discovery, determination to change, development of possibilities, and creation of new, true, and do-able strategies that can be applied again and again to achieve each and every goal. It is a process of empowerment, through re-discovery of power that was already there. Chris simply teaches the tools to help clients "mine their riches".

From her talents and experiences, Chris developed a personal philosophical framework to guide her coaching and psychotherapy work. Now, she is creating a system of supportive, step-by-step techniques to find, unlock, and re-energize that core essence. She calls the process "Essence Building". While the process is different for each individual or business, it generally includes the following steps, or behaviors:

• Getting clear
• Identifying/naming values
• Developing a dynamic vision, mission and purpose.
• Setting family, social, and business boundaries
• Eliminating tolerations. Choosing joy
• Allowing others their path/truth
• Living in balance
• Expanding into unlimited possibility

How does the Essence Building process work? Essence Building is an active, purposeful, and continual process, requiring thought, decision, action, evaluation, and reflection. It is greatly facilitated by an interactive relationship such as that created in coaching, or psychotherapy. The mentor/helper serves as a "sounding board", someone who can hear and reflect back verbalized thoughts and decisions, question and encourage positive actions, and assist evaluation and reflection. The coach/mentor acts as a “change agent” in Essence Building, holding the client accountable for their progress and celebrating with them their transformation.

Why does relationship synergize the change process? Humans are inherently social beings. We seek connection, affirmation, sometimes even completion with others. Our words, our stories are amplified in the telling. We are more daring, more courageous and adventuresome with a trusted other sharing our steps. Relationship somehow makes more manageable the potential risks of the journey, and reassures us that we have the power to cope with the unknown that lies ahead.

Chris is a member of the International Coach Federation (ICF), the professional association of personal and business coaches, which sets ethical standards and educational requirements for coaches worldwide.

She is a family business consultant and has presented to the Family Firm Institute (FFI), a program for family business advisors created in recognition of the special dynamics of family-owned enterprises.