Terese Cooke Bottner is a communication and LifeWork coach for professionals and youth. She approaches behavioral development through transformational mindfulness based on her 25+ years of experience, education, research, and personal practices. As a corporate communication coach, she specializes in effective presentation performance, team gelling, and mindful leadership development. As a LifeWork coach, Terese focuses on preparing youth for life and work to enhance their economic, domestic and social stability. She helps all her clients develop mindful strategies and practices that build on their strengths and vision of success. Terese supports clients in improving self-awareness, achieving healthy relationships, and sustaining job success. She promotes clients’ intellectual expansion, emotional management practices, and skill building so clients can perform confidently as they navigate school, work, home, and community environments.
A certified Women’s Business Enterprise (WBE), Terese founded TCB Communications, LLC, in 2009 and its youth program LifeWork in 2019. Over the course of 10 years, TCB has served approximately 700 individuals and more than 15 local, national and international organizations. TCB is a Geminus Community Partner Grant Recipient and an approved service provider for Indiana’s Department of Child Services.
Since her college internship as an inner-city youth supervisor in Chicago, and her years working in elementary schools while raising her two sons, Terese has a long history of communication development and caring for youth. In 2012, Terese began volunteering with Future Founders to encourage entrepreneurial innovation in Chicago’s middle schools and high schools. Since 2015, Terese has been a supportive business partner and volunteer with the All Stars Project of Chicago’s Development School for Youth, working with teens from the city’s poorest neighborhoods and teaching them the performance of business to prepare them for success in their paid summer internships and beyond.
It is her mission to ensure youth are provided vocational and life support to grow, achieve, and communicate their best selves. From her days of growing up in Gary, Indiana, and recently working with teens in Chicago’s south and west side neighborhoods, Terese has witnessed the alarming need for “SOS” — safety, opportunity, and support — in poor and minority communities. She is passionate about early development of communication and vocational skills, and expanding America’s middle class through fair wages for workers, so all families and communities have the chance to thrive, not merely survive. Terese continues to cultivate solid partnerships with Northwest Indiana trade unions, businesses, community organizations, and legislators to build an opportunity bridge to success for her young LifeWork clients.
Terese earned a bachelor’s degree in Communications from Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN, and trained as an actor at Chicago’s Second City Training Center and Chicago’s Act One Studios. She has performed as a speaker, singer, and a stage and commercial actor. Terese is a certified facilitator of Core Strengths’ TotalSDI Program and also uses Gallup’s StrengthsFinder assessments to identify clients’ strengths, overdone strengths, and motives. She is a devoted practitioner of yoga and meditation, and a certified REIKI Master. Prior to coaching, Terese was a public relations specialist with the Chicago Board of Trade and an independent consultant for a variety of clients and industries providing services in public relations, marketing, sales, and recruiting.