Working with business owners, experienced career professionals, and dual-career couples, Dr. Jan Hoistad’s aim is to empower her clients with effective skills in human interaction and communication along with tools to achieve their business goals and career development. She’s established her unique business guiding her clients to accelerate on their career path and to integrate their professional and personal goals, as they transition through choice points across their lives. She has helped numerous professionals, business owners, and teams achieve ambitious business outcomes, effective leadership and satisfying personal lives. She works across a wide variety of industries with professionals locally, nationally and around the globe.

From the beginning Dr. Jan’s been passionate about harnessing her clients individual uniqueness, creativity and aspirations to achieve their full work-life potential. Assisting clients to explore their learning style, understand and embrace personality characteristics, then applying these to work-life desires and outcomes across developmental stages is her super-power. Her early studies and applied research in the fields of psychology, art and education eventually led to an Master’s degree and a Ph.D. degree in Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology, now at Alliant International University. Dr. Jan is a Licensed Psychologist since 1979. She was an active participant and past president of Minnesota Women Psychologists (MWP) for many of the organization’s early years. MWP provided peer and professional support and coaching to women wishing to develop careers and businesses in psychology. Her work with career and entrepreneurial couples, as well as business partners, led her to develop the Big Picture Partnering™ coaching approach to both couple and business partner relationships. With certification as a neutral coach in Collaborative Law, she was an active professional in the Collaborative Law Institute of MN (CLI) while also pursuing many trainings, and working with a number of expert business coaches, through the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals (IACP), the International Association of Women Business Coaches (IAWBC) and others. Her extensive postdoctoral work in communications, organizational advancement, and leadership development, along with training in negotiation from Harvard’s Project on Negotiation (PON), mediation through Minnesota Dispute Resolution Services (MDR) and Certification in Exit Planning (CEP) through the Exit Planning Institute (EPI) all enhance the expertise she brings to her client’s challenges. She’s a member of the American Psychological Association (APA) and Society of Consulting Psychology (APA Division 13) as well as Minnesota Professionals for Psychology Applied to Work (MPPAW.)

Dr. Hoistad’s own early career aspirations were to teach and do applied research. Following this dream and her mentor who studied with Piaget at the Sorbonne in Paris, she taught in the psychology departments of San Francisco State and Sacramento State Universities, among other institutions, while living in the Bay Area. Her work in attachment research and early childhood development was carried out at UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco, and notably at Oakland Children’s Hospital under Dr. Rosamund Gardner. She also led research at the famed Neuva Day School and Learning Center for highly gifted students K-12, in Hillsborough, California. Hoping to expand this work, she then lived in North Carolina for a few years, worked in rural community mental health and consulted to various county organizations. Her path allowed her to experience the uniqueness of the coasts, as well as the contrasting urban West Coast and the rural Appalachian Mountains of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Upon returning to Minnesota, she served fulltime on the faculty of St. Olaf College for 3 years while also becoming a Licensed Psychologist and starting her own consulting business.

Although teaching had been a major goal, when it was time to pursue a tenure track, the entrepreneurial bug had bitten and Dr. Hoistad chose to continue developing her own business—as well as pursuing other business ventures—a career decision she has enjoyed ever since. Dr. Jan’s passionate about helping her clients achieve their goals. She’s also the author of many books and articles for professional couples and people in career and business transition which can be found in her blog and resource page.