Vernice Jones

I am a professional and executive coach for global leaders with complex identities and backgrounds. I often work with nonprofit and for-profit, mission-driven clients interested in harnessing more of their inner and external complexity.

I created Sister Leader Circles in the early days of the global pandemic as I witnessed clients struggle to deal with their own grief and anxiety while taking care of the many others in their lives. The Circles – by design – host a diverse mix of client leaders, of national origin, of color, of faith, of ethnicity, of gender expression. The formation of the Circles was an effort to deepen the impact and possibility of executive coaching through community, coursework and collective intelligence.

I recently hosted a two-day retreat of these global leaders at my home in the Washington Metropolitan area in the US. The retreat focused on personal awareness, networking and leveraging the potential of this extraordinary group of leaders. What circle members continue to tell me is that their time together transforms not only their leadership, but their lives.

I am a holistic and relational coach who uses a developmental approach to work with global, for profit senior leaders and nonprofit social justice leaders. In the day-to-day challenges, I partner with the client to examine their typical patterns, navigate the dynamics of work/client/customer relationships and step into more of their capacity as a leader.

My work is shaped by an alchemy of life experience, adult development theory, complexity theory, trauma-informed somatic experiencing and phenomenology. 

At Cultivating Leadership, I provide coaching, facilitation, leadership development design and training. I am a core faculty member for the Growth Edge Coaching series of programs and serve on Cultivating Leadership’s TILT Foundation Board. I also co-designed  the Wisdom in Leadership series and Sister Leader Circles.

I am an executive coach and designer/facilitator of bespoke leadership development experiences. I am designated by the International Coaching Federation as a Master Certified Coach (MCC), and am a certified Organization & Relationship Systems Coach (ORSC). My developmental and integral body-mind approach helps leaders draw upon and harness more of their innate capacity for complexity. I am an experienced practitioner with the Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) and the Growth Edge Interview (GEI) – an assessment that helps leaders observe their own organizing sense-making patterns. I am also trained in Somatic Experiencing (SE), a research-based somatic approach to improve self awareness, and release tension which can manifest as physical symptoms like chronic pain or fatigue. 

I graduated from the University of Maryland with an undergraduate degree in Economics, hold a Masters degree in Finance and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. I live in the Washington Metropolitan area with my husband and two sons. 

I began an exploration of meditative practices in high school when my father insisted that the entire family attend meditation instruction. It was a radical move at the time. I recall it feeling like an exhilarating, adventurous experiment, and quickly integrated a regular although perfunctory meditation practice into my daily schedule.

That practice turned out to be life altering in a way I couldn’t have predicted. Meditation led to sensemaking and spiritual awareness, giving me an invitation to stand on the balcony of my experience. That simple introduction has fundamentally shaped the quality of experiences that give me so much joy today, from hiking the mountains at the foot of fjords in Norway, or the first time having a conversation in Mandarin in China or sitting on my deck watching hummingbirds with a cup of tea and a book of poems.

Although many of my clients have complex intersectionalities and origin stories, I am not a psychologist.