Samantha leverages her keen intellect and deep care for others to teach clients how to live extraordinary lives. Originally heralding from scientific academia, Samantha precisely hones in on the source of her clients' paralysis and builds powerful solutions to get her clients the lives they want. Samantha teaches that the path to fulfillment comes from overcoming limiting thoughts, excuses, beliefs and character traits and designing new ones that work better.
Samantha earned a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering at MIT as a Howard Hughes Pre-Doctoral Fellow, and a BS in Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She then decided to aim her creativity, sense of scientific inquiry, love of humanity and structured engineering outlook to help people engineer better lives for themselves. As Vice President of Courses and Seminars, Samantha has built the Design Your Life Weekend into the Handel Group’s® flagship course offering. By her design, the Design Your Life Weekend is now a large-scale course that is held in six cities and annually impacts hundreds of participants. Samantha also leads the premier HG immersion course, the Life Coaching Intensive, which teaches mastery of the tools introduced in the Design Your Life Weekend. While scaling up both of these programs, Samantha has mindfully preserved a personalized, supportive experience for clients that is at the heart of HGLC coaching.
Harking back to her scientific and engineering roots, Samantha also coaches extensively within academia. Samantha teaches courses and seminars at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Scripps Research Institute, and the National Cancer Institute. She has been invited as a guest speaker at multiple conferences and programs, such as the Asian American Journalist Association Executive Leadership Workshop, FORWARD to Professorship Workshop, Alberta Innovates iGEM conference, the MIT Community Catalyst Leadership Program, and the AOE Women in Engineering conference.
Samantha has led seminars and coached executives at corporations such as BASF, DaVita Inc. and the US Government, to name a few.
In addition to all this, Samantha is a Senior Coach. She couples the analytical and problem-solving skills of a scientist and engineer with the care and insight of a coach and advisor to create a truly unique and impactful coaching style. Samantha has complemented her HGLC training with yoga, studies at a Buddhist monastery and mediation training. Samantha has volunteered in Thailand, Tanzania, rural France, and a Lakota Sioux reservation. From these experiences, she learned how to tailor messages to suit people of different cultural backgrounds. As a result, one of Samantha’s career goals is to bring the Handel Method® to other countries in culturally appropriate ways.
Samantha, originally from Urbana, Illinois, currently enjoys living amongst the diversity of Manhattan.
More about Samantha:
Samantha’s Blog: Frame Shift Coaching
Chronicle of Higher Education article about Samantha’s career transition from biological engineer to life coach: Read Article
Article about Samantha’s recent workshop at Scripps Research Institute: Read Article
Testimonials:
“I had to take a moment to share with you the incredible experience I had this past weekend at the Design Your Life Weekend (LCC) in Boston hosted by Samantha Sutton. I am sure you are already aware of her extraordinary talents, but I was amazed. I have to admit-I went into the weekend a bit skeptical that someone younger than me, who isn’t married with kids yet, could help me with my biggest challenges. Not only did Samantha nail me on my biggest goal (which I wasn’t even clear on myself), she continued to peel away many layers over the course of the weekend while she simultaneously did so for 8 other women.
Samantha is warm, caring, loving, funny, straight forward, and SMART!! I tried going to counselors in the past and after only a couple of sessions, I was left totally unimpressed and gave up. I have a background in HR, and have managed and trained teams of people for 20 years. I have been starving to meet someone and a methodology that would get right to the heart of things fast-focusing on the positive, vs. just dredging up the past and not focusing on living your best life. This was IT! This program was exactly what I have been looking for, and Samantha was the perfect person to facilitate the weekend.
I am excited to continue working with Samantha and the Handel group, and have very high hopes for amazing things to come.
Thank you for creating this great program!”
– Lynne Kennedy Crouse, HR Consultant/Mom
"I'd also like to thank Samantha for being so passionate and committed to helping people realize their dreams--it's infectious!"
– S. Leftwich, freelance writer
"I write with a glowing testimonial for my warm and friendly coach Samantha. Samantha worked with me during this past year, and she had a momentous influence on my life. I called Samantha at a difficult point in my life, when years of accumulated stress from motherhood and an academic career had taken their toll, leaving me drained, emotionally insecure and socially isolated.
Samantha was invaluable in helping me get back on track. Looking back, it is hard to believe how much I have changed. I only had 11 phone conversations with Samantha, but in these sessions we touched on the most important points. Samantha painstakingly worked with me through each specific step: how to talk with this or that person, how work through my negative thoughts about this and that, how to have a difficult conversation with a member of my team. For my particular situation, Samantha’s academic credentials were especially helpful, since she understood firsthand the types of conflicts that arise in academia. But more important than this background is her human side. Samantha had a full emotional presence at each one of our meetings that I would not have believed to be possible for someone I have never met. Moreover, she was never passive, and she went straight to the point. She asked pointed questions over and over again and she loved to argue, fighting all my harmful thought and emotional pattern with intellectual and emotional swords. She never let go until she got the message through, and in the end she won, and of course – I won!
In sum, Samantha has the skills, the brains and the passion to help someone go through a significant transformation. I enthusiastically recommend her as a highly effective coach."
- Jackie, Manhattan