Meet Jai Certified Parent Coach, Dr. Tiffanie Noonan

While in practice as a pediatrician, Dr. Tiffanie was finding it challenging to incorporate effective peaceful parenting approaches in her own life. She joined The Jai Institute in order to get the skills she felt she needed and ended up finding herself and creating a whole new life as a Parenting Coach in the process.

Graduation Date: 2013

Question 1: What inspired you to become a parenting coach through The Jai Institute?

When I joined The Jai Institute, I wasn't actually looking to become a parenting coach. I was working as a pediatrician. I was in practice and struggling with finding ways to get peaceful parenting principles to work in my own family. 

I had a two-and-a-half-year-old and a three-and-a-half-year-old at that time. I thought it would be a good way to get the peaceful parenting tools I needed and that I could share with the parents in my practice. Um, I did at, by the end of my training by October, 2010, some of them are full time parents.

Question 2: What obstacles or fears did you need to overcome to enroll in the training?

I was in my mid-thirties at the time and I was a physician. I was used to taking care of other people. I was used to taking care of my family and being responsible for everybody else, so actually saying yes to myself was something that I was not accustomed to doing. The only reason I found it in myself to say yes to going through the program, was because a couple of months earlier I had broken my wrist significantly and I had to have surgery. I had tried to go back to work within two days of them putting the metal plate in, which did not work out very well.  They sent me home from the office and told me I couldn’t work for at least a couple of weeks. I was sitting at home and I was unable to take care of my babies and I was unable to practice medicine and I had no idea who I was. Thankfully, there was just enough twinkle left in me to know there was something wrong with that. 

So, I made a commitment at that point that I would start saying yes to something for myself. When Jai came along, I was like, I get to do this. I knew it I needed to say yes to it for myself.

Question 3: What was the best part of the training you received?

I found myself again. That was totally unexpected. I didn't realize that I was missing. If we're talking about the actual technical aspects, the 10-week training in the beginning where I was coached and where I got to know my fellow colleagues, realizing we weren’t alone in our stories and that I wasn't crazy, was profound. It transformed my relationship with my children within weeks. I stopped yelling. And through the program I, very unexpectedly, found that I could create a life that I absolutely love, that I was truly excited and passionate about. I didn't even realize that I was just going through the motions until then. The process taught through the program works, so with that came the inspiration to bring this to more families. But my favorite part was finding Tiffanie again, and not just Dr. Noonan, the facade that I had been living for so long. 

Question 4: How has this program impacted you and your family?

When I enrolled in the program, I was the medical director of a pediatric practice that I had started in 2009. We were living in rural Georgia at the time. I'm from New Jersey. My husband is from New York and we had been living in rural Georgia so that I could have this opportunity to open this practice. When I started the practice, I had one baby. Nine months later I had two babies. Rural Georgia wasn't where we wanted to raise our children. It wasn't in alignment with our values. 

So we made the decision that we were going to move. At that time, because of the parenting coach training, I made the decision to not go back to clinical practice. Before Jai Institute and parenting coaching, my boys were spending about 60 hours a week in other people's care. I was dropping them off at the school around six-thirty or seven o'clock in the morning. I was picking them up in the evening, hoping to get there before the six o'clock cutoff when they need to be out. They were spending up to 12 hours a day, Monday through Friday, in school or daycare. I also worked Saturday mornings. I wasn't spending much time with them at all. 

We moved to Charleston, South Carolina, at the end of January, beginning of February, 2014, less than a year after enrolling in Jai. I did not seek a job at that time, I made the decision to go into my business full time. I took what was supposed to be nine months with my children. I wasn’t sending them to daycare or school. In that time, I made the decision to become a homeschooling mom. So, for the past six years I have been homeschooling my children while running my business and being able to create a life that we love. I can do this work from anywhere. We just got back from a little holiday in Myrtle beach without having to plan it around schedules. 

We spend a lot more time together. I have a beautifully connected relationship with my children that I could only have imagined when I had joined the Jai program. It's because it's real and it's human. None of us are perfect. It's just beautifully connected because we all get to be who we really are. It has transformed the way things were going in my household.

Question 5: Tell me about your business, how are you using what you learned?

I’ve had my business now for almost seven years, so it has been quite a long time since I've gone through the training. But the core concepts that I learned and the work that I did is still the work that I take my clients through for the first 10 to 12 weeks of us working together. As anyone knows, when you do this, you start to find out that a lot of the work is not related to the children. 

I work with one-on-one clients. We usually do 12 weeks, there's the 10-week program that I take them through, and then it takes a little longer. From there, they're usually no longer concerned about their children's behavior. Things are better with the kids, and sometimes we will then move on to continuing to have conversations about them creating their best life. My business is Epic Parenting, which stands for empowered, peaceful, inspired, and connected parenting. And I believe the way for people to create that epic parenting is to live an epic life and be epic themselves.

The core of the work that I do all starts with the process that I learned through the Jai Institute in those beginning weeks, that I have found transformational in how we look at all things. We’re looking at the stories that people created when they were children. They can really figure out why it is that they’re reacting this way with their children and be able to heal that, so that they are at peace and they're not as triggered by the things that their kids are doing. 

I use the work that I learned at Jai to transform family legacy, to stop patterns that have been going on for generations and empower the parents to say, we get to make this our story. We're going to change this and very consciously decide what is important to us and how we're going to live this life. It all starts with the basis of the work that I learned from Jai. 

Question 6: What are you most proud of accomplishing?

I'm proud of helping families transform and find peace, which is universal. It happens if people are willing to do the work. It’s about helping people identify the lives that they want and then finding the ability to create that. It's not about creating my family vision or what this is supposed to look like. Both men and women come into this with an idea that they're struggling with their child and in the end, they find their own peace. They find themselves in the process of the war. I used to joke, there was a time when I felt like all of my clients ended up quitting their jobs. I'm not, not encouraging that, but I'm not discouraging it. 

I had a client that I encouraged to return to her love of horses and go for a ride. It was in the spirit of doing something for herself. In the six years since we've worked together, she left the job that she was not fulfilled in at all. She’s a happier parent with her kids. They moved out into the country. She has bought horses. Her and her daughter are in horse competitions. One day she told me she was raising a cow in her garage for 4H. At that point I thought, maybe this has gone too far. I need to apologize to her husband for the garage cow. I’m only kidding. Her husband's happy because she's happy and she wasn't happy before. It's amazing that people find their happiness as the adults in this process. How else can we expect children to grow up happy?