Imagine a different kind of world...
Imagine a different kind of world...
A world where personal responsibility replaces blame. Where success and struggle are both things people create — and both things they can change. Where a coach's presence matters more than their framework. Soul Designs Coaching International exists to build that world, one honest return at a time.
About Lerae
About Lerae
Lerae Gidyk is an ICF Master Certified Coach, founder of Soul Designs Coaching International, creator of SourceWorks™, and a pioneering voice in the evolution of coaching as a deeply human and transformational practice.
Since 1999, Lerae has coached individuals, leaders, coaches, and mentor coaches across the world, bringing more than 15,000 hours of experience to her work in personal development, leadership, coach education, mentor coaching, and mastery-based learning. In 2006, she became one of Canada’s first Master Certified Coaches, at a time when fewer than ten coaches in the country held the MCC designation.
For close to three decades, Lerae has helped shape the coaching profession from the inside out. She has developed coaching models, contributed to early coach-client matching work, served in senior education and certification leadership roles, and supported generations of coaches in strengthening not only their skill, but their presence, integrity, and way of being.
Her work is often described as both cutting edge and deeply grounded. She is known for being candid, spacious, relational, and precise — a coach and educator willing to speak directly about what is being lost in the professionalization of coaching, while offering a clear and hopeful path back to what is most essential.
Lerae is the author of Soul Designs: Finding Your Way Home and the SourceWorks™ guide Reclaiming the Heart of Coaching. She is also co-host of The Therapist & The Coach, a podcast exploring the human terrain of relationship, presence, healing, coaching, therapy, and becoming.
What Lerae believes — and why it shapes everything here.
Coaching became an industry, and like most things that become industries, it started to optimize for the wrong things. For measurable outcomes. For scalable frameworks. For the appearance of transformation rather than the thing itself.
Lerae has spent 27 years pushing back on that — not loudly, but through the quality of what she builds and how she shows up in it.
Her conviction is simple: the most important variable in any coaching relationship is not the methodology. It is the coach. Their presence. Their honesty. The degree to which they have done their own work and keep doing it. A coach who has not examined their own conditioning, their hidden agendas, their need to be seen as insightful — that coach is not holding space for someone else's truth. They are projecting their own.
This belief is what Soul Designs coaching is built on. It is what SourceWorks™ is designed to develop in experienced coaches. It is why BAM insists on depth and community when the industry is offering quick, cheap, asynchronous alternatives.
And it is, she would say, the only thing worth protecting in this profession — the conviction that a human being, in the hands of a genuinely present coach, can find their own way home.
The Record
- Founder, Soul Designs Coaching International Ltd. — established 1999
- Concept Designer, FindACoach.com (original online coach-client matching platform) - 2000
- Mentor Coach - starting in 2000
- Coach Educator, Coach U - 2000-2023
- Master Certified Coach (MCC), International Coaching Federation — 2006
- Developer, COACH ME Model - 2010
- Co-creator, BAM (Become a Mentor Coach Certification Program) — with Carolyn Hamilton-Kuby, Morningstar Centre for Engagement - 2021
- Director of Education, Coaching Out of the Box / The International Coaching Group - 2022-2026
- Pilot Launch, SourceWorks™ — ICF Level 3 mastery-aligned coach education program - Feb 2026
- Co-lead, ICF Global Mentor Coaching Community of Practice — appointed 2026
- 15,000+ coaching hours across 43 countries
One organization. Two distinct paths.
Soul Designs
SourceWorks™
On a personal note
She is most fulfilled when immersed in nature, family, community, educating, and creating. Her life and work continue to reflect the same invitation she offers others: stop performing, return to what is real, and become more fully who you are.
