Our Expertise
As experts in leadership, human development, behavioral change, and potential, we have worked with thousands of leaders and individuals from around the world, been featured in dozens of publications, spoken at professional conferences, and written several series of books on personality type and the brain based on our proprietary system, the Striving Styles®, as well as using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®.
Neuropsychology
While the brain is complicated, our approach to the mechanics of the mind and how it functions to shape our personality and behavior is not. Knowing how the brain is wired to naturally behave empowers achieve their true potential.
Executive Coaching
Our leadership coaching approach incorporates cutting-edge neuropsychological practices with skill-based development techniques that will empower new or experienced leaders to take their performance to the next level.
Behavioral Mastery
At home, at work, and everywhere in-between, an understanding of the drivers of human behavior is a key ingredient to success. With our approach, our clients continually utilize the unique advantages that come with behavioral mastery.
Potential Achievement
Our approach is rooted in self-awareness to ensure clients become who they are truly meant to be. We help them stop trying to be “average” with approval seeking behavior by recognizing the unique talents and abilities that make them exceptional
Organizational Transformation
Through a focus on addressing the “personality” of an organization, we specialize in working with businesses and leaders undergoing significant transition, dealing with dysfunction, or striving to reach the next stage of growth and performance.
Speaking
Forward-thinking, dynamic, and psychologically astute – our keynotes are engineered to inspire audiences to take action, improve the quality of life at work, home and in relationships. We touch the hearts and minds of our audience, facilitating growth.
Heather Dranitsaris-Hilliard
Behavioral Change Expert | Author | Speaker
A powerful and pragmatic expert in transformation, Heather has devoted her professional life to enabling organizations, leaders and individuals to achieve their potential. She is dedicated to empowering people with the tools, insights and roadmaps to break through limitations to achieving their visions and thriving in all aspects of their lives.
Always curious about what makes people perform, and why some people achieve their potential while others do not, Heather embarked on a journey to understand performance, motivation and behavioural change in the context of organizations.
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Over time, she blended her expertise in leadership and organizational dynamics with her own experiences as an entrepreneur, leader, partner, parent and member of multiple family systems. This serves as the foundation for the unique and powerful work she does today with senior leaders, business owners and professionals from a broad base of industries.
More than a facilitator or coach, Heather is a strategic thinker who can step in to ‘lead the leaders’ when necessary to bring about change more quickly.
Through the integration of a neuropsychological approach to developing leaders, blending systems-thinking with behavioral dynamics, Heather has spent the past 25 years guiding clients out of dysfunction, chaos, apathy, and more on the way to achieving higher levels of performance and realizing potential at the personal, team, leader and organizational level. She innately understands what an organization and its people need to transition. She has a proven track record in demonstrating her ability to not only give them guidance on what to do but to lead and provide hands-on support while they change behaviors and embed the infrastructure to transform how the organization functions and performs.
Successful entrepreneur, expert in the neuropsychology of potential, repeated author and keynote speaker.
Heather is the driving force behind Caliber Leadership Systems, a highly successful boutique organizational and leadership development consulting firm that has been repeatedly recognized in Profit Magazine (Fastest Growing Companies in Canada) and Business in Vancouver.
With her business partner, Heather is also the co-creator of the Striving Styles® Personality System (SSPS®) – a neuropsychological approach to discovering and developing your full potential. A powerful tool used widely by organizations, individuals and coaches, the Striving Styles® leverages the most up-to-date research on how different parts of the brain function and the role of emotions in development to help people understand why they behave the way they do and how to leverage their full brain to achieve their potential.
Heather is the co-author of the popular book on personality type, “Who Are You Meant to Be? – A groundbreaking, step-by-step approach to identifying and achieving your true potential“. To support the work she and her partner do with leaders, they wrote “So, You Think You Can Lead? – A Guide to Developing Your Leadership Authority and Potential”.
Recently they published “Power Past the Imposter Syndrome – A Brain-Building Framework for Changing Painful, Self-Limiting Beliefs & Habits of Mind” to accompany their program for helping individuals break free of the limitations of this pervasive syndrome. She is also the co-author of 40 books for use with the Striving Styles® Personality System which help individuals to understand themselves, their environment, their relationships as well as the impact of personality type.
Heather is also a highly recognized and sought-after speaker at professional, business, and entrepreneurial events. Audiences love her unusual, thought-provoking, and often cutting-edge concepts and insights, delivered with both humor and energy. She delivers her messages in way that both empowers her audience and leaves them feeling inspired to take action. A natural storyteller, Heather engages audiences with her illustrative and entertaining stories, drawn from a wealth of experiences including her own struggles, while providing them with the clarity they need to achieve their potential.
Anne Dranitsaris, Ph.D.
Behavioural Change Expert | Author | Speaker
Affectionately known as “The Oracle” or “Yoda” by clients, Anne brings a lifetime of study, experience and knowledge of evolutionary and developmental psychology to her personal and business practices. Her passion for enlightening and empowering people to live from their authentic selves drives her never-ending quest to understand the complexities of being human, integrating approaches from numerous fields of study of the body, mind and spirit.
Anne has come a long way from the days when her passion for holistic health and developmental psychology were considered “new age” or “flakey.” Her visionary nature placed her always ahead of her time, yet at the ready when what she had
already studied and applied in her practice became mainstream.
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Her ability to see deeply into a person’s personality organization and identify their barriers to authentic self-expression is enhanced by her ability to know exactly what someone needs to hear to break free of their limitations to growth.
More than a therapist or leadership coach, Anne’s holistic, psychological and spiritual insights are transformational –when working with leaders or in private practice with individuals and couples.
Anne is an expert in the neuropsychology of personality and its applications in leadership and personal development, as well as a seasoned entrepreneur with several businesses of her own. She helps clients in her private practice and in organizations build awareness of automatic habits of mind and the fears that create dysfunctional behavior and emotional suffering. Using a combination of brain-based, psychodynamic, cognitive and mindfulness approaches, Anne teaches clients to move beyond the limits of their fear patterns to build self-esteem and change emotionally driven behaviors that get in the way of satisfying relationships and careers. Using a number of approaches and tools, clients change self-defeating patterns behaviors and self-talk.
Successful entrepreneur, expert in the neuropsychology of development, prolific author and speaker on a wide-range of topics related to human evolution and potential.
Anne continues to partner with Heather with Caliber Leadership Systems and a few of her specialties include developing and facilitating leadership coaching programs that enhance leadership capabilities. She works with leaders locally and globally, providing both leadership coaching and facilitating high-performance leadership team development using Caliber’s Group Leadership Coaching model. Through the integration of a neuropsychological approach to developing leaders, Anne facilitates clients’ understanding of themselves, their self-protective personas and supports their growth from dysfunction and reactive behaviors to embracing the power of their authentic self to lead without apology.
With her business partner, Anne is also the co-creator of the Striving Styles® Personality System (SSPS®) – a neuropsychological approach to discovering and developing your full potential. A powerful tool used widely by organizations, individuals and coaches, the Striving Styles® leverages the most up-to-date research on how different parts of the brain function and the role of emotions in development to help people understand why they behave the way they do and how to leverage their full brain to achieve their potential.
Anne is the co-author of the popular book on personality type, “Who Are You Meant to Be? – A groundbreaking, step-by-step approach to identifying and achieving your true potential.” To support the work she and her partner do in their leadership coaching programs, they coauthored “So, You Think You Can Lead? – A Guide to Developing Your Leadership Authority and Potential. Recently they published “Power Past the Imposter Syndrome – A Brain-Building Framework for Changing Painful, Self-Limiting Beliefs & Habits of Mind” to accompany their program for helping individuals break free of the limitations of this pervasive syndrome.
She has also authored the Brain-based Behavioral Interview Guide and over 75 books for use with the Striving Styles® and MBTI®. These books help which help individuals to understand themselves, their environment, their relationships as well as the impact of personality type. Anne is currently working on a book on The Codependent Brain, for understanding and working through the barriers to living free of the limitations of codependence.
While writing is Anne’s preferred medium for expression, she spends considerable time speaking to leaders and employee groups on the topics of personality, leadership and mental health. She facilitates leadership coaching programs in organizations and online for groups of leaders. Over the past few years, Anne has offered a variety of online training programs, workshops, and facilitated learning sessions to garner a larger reach through this vehicle. Her YouTube videos are a testament to her capacity to speak on a variety of personal and professional subjects drawing from a wealth of stories to illustrate her own struggles and experiences with clients.
Neuropsychology
Neuropsychology, while the term sounds intimidating, simply means focusing on the relationship between how our brain is organized and how one’s behavior and psychological balance is impacted by fixed beliefs, inflated, or deflated ideas about the self, and automatic habitual patterns of thinking. It examines the automatic dysfunctional behaviors and reactions that arise from negative conditioning, trauma, unconscious beliefs, and habitual behaviors that protect the self at the expense of development.
While the brain is complicated, our approach to understanding how it functions in our personality, relationships and as leaders is not. Our approach to developing individuals and leaders starts with an assessment of brain functions and the emotional drivers of behavior.
Without understanding one’s own brain’s blueprint, we operate at a deficit, not being aware that we aren’t in the driver’s seat of our own emotions, behavior, and reactions. With our interpretation of the brain’s blueprint and coaching to build self-awareness and develop new, functional behaviors our clients are empowered to achieve their potential and live free of the fears and conditioning.
Executive & Leadership Coaching
Undeveloped leaders are left to rely on the strength of their personality to get employees to follow them. These same leaders can develop into high- performing leaders with our coaching approach that incorporates a neuropsychological and skill-based development approach. Or, they can continue to strive to be “good leaders” not really knowing what it takes to develop followership in their employees or how to create the environment that fosters high performance. Permissive leaders are the result of a lack of development and are increasingly common because of the notion that direction stifles innovation.
Whether leaders are new to their roles or have been working as leaders for many years, coaching helps leaders at all levels leverage leadership development and enhances the skills they need to maximize performance. Leadership coaching can have a huge impact on leaders who are struggling with the behaviour of direct reports or other aspect of their roles – especially areas such as delivering expectations, managing conflict, delegating authority, building bench strength, giving feedback, having difficult conversations, and holding employees accountable.
Behavioral Mastery
Mastery and goal orientation are key motivators for human development. We tend to use these words relative to the achievement of financial, career or status goals or in the mastery of skills. Behavior mastery is cultivated through cultivating self-awareness, impulse control, self-management, delaying gratification. Most don’t consider the importance of examining one’s behavior and setting goals for effective self-management. Instead, we tend to judge impulse or emotionally driven behavior in a way that isn’t helpful to development.
We help clients uncover unconscious fixed beliefs that cause anxiety, stress and impulsiveness. These are the beliefs that lead to dysfunctional permissive or autocratic behaviors in leaders who aren’t aware of the emotional drivers of their behavior. Building self-awareness and developing consciousness in leaders allows for the practice and experimentation with new behaviours which ultimately lead to behavioral mastery. This promotes the ability to assert oneself, influence the ideas and behaviors of others and lead authentically with increased effectiveness.
Potential Achievement
We know how challenging it is for many people to get a hold of what their true potential is. We are more conditioned to seek approval for conforming to the status quo than to develop a clear sense of what we are naturally like so that we can focus in areas that are aligned with innate interests, intrinsic need satisfiers, personality, and strengths. The first step for many of our clients, whether individuals or leaders, is to gain awareness of how they are
holding themselves back from releasing the power of their imagination; to envision who they are meant to be. The next step is to gain awareness of the self-protective thoughts and behaviors that form your resistance to developing out of the comfort of the status quo.
Many clients discover that they are striving to be average when they actually have unique talents and abilities they are neglecting. They are attached to seeking the approval of others instead of investing their energy in the nurturing of their unique abilities. We support individual clients and leaders through the challenges of breaking free of self-limiting thoughts and fears that get in the way of the natural progression to fulfilling innate abilities, gifts, and talents. In other words, we free lions who are trying to be pussycats so they can roar without fear of being judged for the natural power they possess.
Organizational Transformation
An organization has a personality with its own set of assumptions, values, and beliefs usually reflecting those of the senior leaders in the organization. These form the culture of the organization and employees are expected to espouse the same values and behave accordingly. Unfortunately, most of the time these values and beliefs are not articulated and if they are, they are rarely discussed. Nor are employees told how to align their behavior to conform to them. Organizational dysfunction arises from the unspoken beliefs and expectations and the intolerance of leaders with employees who have different values or ideas on what acceptable behavior is.
Our approach is to focus on the personality of the organization – on the underlying cultural norms that have become barriers to growth and help them transform by articulating their unconscious or unstated assumptions and beliefs about employees, what the organization needs, and what new leaders require to be successful. Our approach considers all aspects from the design of the organization (or function), the capabilities of the people, the drivers of performance, the change requirements as well as the systems, processes and practices essential to achieving the desired outcomes.
Our consulting firm, Caliber Leadership Systems, specializes in working with organizations and leaders undergoing a significant transition, dealing with dysfunction, or looking to get to the next stage of growth and performance. Our unique approach is inclusive of the neuropsychology of behavior in leaders and its impact on organizational development combined with a practical orientation to implementing systems processes that provide the structure for effective team and leadership functioning.
Speaking
We get personal about leadership and organizational development by addressing the needs of leaders and the business during stages of growth. Every business and person leading it has a unique potential that needs to be understood, nurtured, and developed and it is what is most unique about our approach to helping leaders and organizations achieve it. We have always integrated these two elements in speaking to audiences about personality styles, leadership or organizational dysfunction, and the stages of growth and resistance to our own evolutionary needs and appetites.
We are forward-thinking, dynamic and psychologically astute business people who see the gaps in current behavioral, leadership and organizational practices. We also see how emotions get in the way of growth and development and create keynotes and articles that get people thinking about how they might do things differently. We infuse our presentations with humor and passion for what we do. We tell tales from the front lines to inspire our audiences— our client success stories.
Audiences relate easily to our ideas and feel inspired to take action to develop and improve their work or life situations. We make our psychological and behavioral concepts come alive by illustrative and entertaining stories the audience can relate to. Our goal is to provide the audience with the clarity needed to achieve their potential using real-life examples. We offer and have delivered a wide range of courses, workshops, and keynotes to leaders, entrepreneurs, business & professional associations, employees, Human Resource professionals and women’s groups.
