When life demands more than you have to give, we help you change the game.
Most people reach a point where they need something to change. What they’ve been doing isn’t working the way it should. Maybe the pressure of leadership or the weight of caregiving feel overwhelming. Maybe stress and conflict exhaust you every day. Or maybe you feel like you’re sacrificing an important part of yourself chasing someone else’s goals.
If you want things to be different, you’re in the right place.
We help people not just get on track, but actually flourish through difficult seasons. We believe you can emerge from your most challenging transitions confident and ready for whatever comes next. The path forward requires a creative mindset, a clear strategy, powerful communication, and the ability to follow through. We have the frameworks, tools, and personal experience you need.
Caregiving. Career. Creativity.
When you enlist our help, you get the rich wisdom of 60 years of diverse career experience—from the C suite to front-line nonprofit work. We’ve managed global programs, raised over $500 million for charity, published ten books, and worked across industries from tech to healthcare to utilities and financial services.
We also bring deep and broad lived experience to the table. We have been primary caregivers for parents with dementia, siblings with chronic illness, and suicidally depressed children. We’ve navigated layoffs, career pivots, and toxic workplaces. We have done the hard work of healing difficult relationships and reclaiming our own creative lives.
Perhaps most important, we are committed to our own lifelong growth. We blend our personal history with the latest research in behavioral science and neuroscience, utilizing dozens of proven models and methodologies we have studied or developed ourselves.
We know you’re capable. We have the frameworks and tools. And we’re committed to making sure you get there.
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Our focus areas
1. Caregiver Coaching for Working Adults
People think that taking on a family caregiving role means you’ll have to sacrifice your job, health, or relationships. We know from personal experience that’s not true. We’ve not only led workshops and coached people through this, but we literally wrote the book and train other coaches on this. As authors of RELIT: How to Rekindle Yourself in the Darkness of Compassion Fatigue and creators of an ICF-accredited curriculum, we have trained over 100 professional coaches in our framework. We help you get into the right mindset to prioritize, strategize, communicate, and flourish through caregiving—without quitting your job, giving up your own health, or losing your most cherished relationships.
When you work one-on-one with us, you don’t just endure and survive your caregiving journey. You flourish through it, clear on your capabilities and boundaries, with an understanding of the possibility that life has for you on the other side.
You can also join one of our small-group cohorts, which mix one-on-one coaching with working group sessions tuned for taking action, solving problems, and building a resilient mindset.
2. Creative Integration & Author Coaching
A lot of people build career success at the expense of their creative side. Writing, painting, acting—whatever you’ve been keeping on hold is ready to come forward. We help you revive that creative spirit to bring more fulfillment and imagination to your life. We specialize in working with successful professionals who want to integrate creative passions into their lives—not as a replacement, but as a vital addition. Antoinette has a theatre background and is an award-winning and best-selling author and publisher. Peter is a member of the board of directors of the San Francisco Writers Conference and an award-winning and best-selling author and editor, with 10 books to his name. He also delivers self-publishing workshops and provides self-publishing advice and consulting.
If you’ve been meaning to make time for your creative passion, we guarantee your issue isn’t time management or discipline. If you’re looking for the one method that will get you unblocked, you’ll find disappointment after disappointment. When you’re done cycling through what the gurus are selling, come talk with us and find your true path to fulfilling your creative side.
3. Executive Coaching for Nonprofit Leaders
We help executive directors, board members, and senior leaders in nonprofits move beyond the “crisis of the day” toward a culture of ownership and fearless execution. From onboarding new CEOs to navigating complex mergers, we provide the strategy and presence required to lead organizations through their most critical high-stakes changes.
With over 30 years of combined experience in nonprofit leadership and corporate foundations, we’ve raised over $500 million, coordinated millions of volunteer hours, run major fundraising events of all kinds, and served on multiple nonprofit boards. We’ve coached and advised dozens of nonprofit C-suite leaders, onboarded three CEOs, and facilitated team and board offsites.
4. Business Advising
For the founder or solopreneur, your biggest obstacle to growth is usually looking back at you in the mirror. The things that help you get started aren’t what you need to get bigger. The things you need to grow aren’t what you need to scale. We help you be the leader your business needs through powerful communication, ruthless prioritization, healthy organizational culture, and a clear understanding of reality. We’ll get under the hood with you to evaluate everything—including yourself—to do what your business really needs… not what people feel it needs. So you can feel confident in the business, even when it’s time for you to take that long-awaited, much-needed vacation.
We have been startup founders, solopreneurs, global program managers, Fortune 100 SVPs, and C-suite leaders. We’ve been in industries as varied as healthcare and public utilities, tech startups and big banks. And unlike branded, cookie-cutter playbook methodologies, we bring a diversity of models, frameworks, and tools to any problem.
The Gray Bear Philosophy
Expanding Possibility.
Based in Eugene, Oregon, Gray Bear Advisors was founded on the belief that transitions—no matter how high the stakes—are invitations to expand. Great opportunity exists in times of transition.
We don’t believe in simply enduring a difficult season; we believe in using it as a catalyst to come out the other side more integrated and successful. We bring a real-world rigor to every engagement, backed by 1,500+ hours of professional coaching and a history of leading global programs to number-one rankings.
Ready to begin your next transition?
Let’s discuss how mindset, strategy, and clarity can expand your possibilities.