Nan CRAWFORD ignites breakthroughs
Nan Crawford & her highly skilled team of coaches specialize in coaching visionary leaders to deliver high-stakes presentations, high-impact conversations and high-octane results. They helps clients leverage their strength and creativity so they inspire their audience to take meaningful action.
Nan Crawford
Nan Crawford is an engaging, insightful, and provocative speaker who consistently inspires business and nonprofit leaders to action. She brings a unique perspective honed over 20 years of working in business, leadership coaching, and theatre. Nan emboldens her audiences with energy and equips them with effective tools. Clients consistently break through challenges and exceed business goals.
A trailblazer in leveraging workplace wisdom drawn from the arts, Nan infuses creative energy into engaging talks and workshops on innovation and leadership. She is on the board of advisors for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Freestyle Love Supreme+, and has performed in NYC with FLS Academy. Industry giants like American Express, Autodesk, Microsoft, Fidelity Investments, Pfizer, as well as the Executive Education programs at Harvard, Columbia, Duke, & UC Berkeley, engage Nan when they need a speaker who gets audiences off their cellphones, on their feet, energized and focused.
Nan Crawford’s unique, theatre-based approach has been featured in Fast Company and Inc. magazines, and The New York Times has called her engaging style, filled with audience participation, “inspirational.”
Nan Crawford’s keen insights have helped cultivate workplace cultures of trust and respect, creativity and innovation. Her presentations consistently provide concrete tools that help visionary leaders deliver remarkable results. Even in the virtual realm, she has an uncanny ability to get audiences on their feet, more deeply experiencing the ideas at hand.
A veteran of coaching leaders in the boardroom, the C-Suite, and the executive team, Nan Crawford provides best practices ready for immediate implementation. Leveraging more than 20 years of experience, Nan shares mindsets, skill sets, and tool sets that increase the efficiency and effectiveness of her audiences. She has helped numerous clients define thought leadership platforms, prepare for interviews, and land executive and board roles for publicly traded companies.
Nan has worked with audiences of all makeups and sizes — from thousands of corporate executives to intimate roundtables of community activists. Over the decades, Nan’s keen insights have helped cultivate workplace cultures of trust and respect, creativity and innovation. Her presentations consistently provide concrete tools that help high-performance, visionary leaders deliver high-powered, remarkable results.
From Arianna Huffington to Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, Nan Crawford has shared the stage with giants and coached many of them to step onto a bigger stage. Clients including Dr. Andrew Weil, Lynne Twist, and Michael Pollan, as well as board members and CEOs of Fortune 500 Companies. She has delivered powerful keynotes and received rave reviews across the globe, from Australia to Finland and many countries in between. In addition to her plenary talks, Nan is an artful conference MC, weaving themes and connections between speakers and topics. She also frequently works with conference organizers to transcend the traditional monologue-driven approach to programming. She facilitates greater interactivity, connection, spontaneity, and cross-pollination that ensure concepts are more powerfully conveyed and reliably retained.
Nan Crawford is a cum laude graduate of The University of Texas, with a BFA in Theatre. She holds an MA in Organization Development & Transformation from the California Institute of Integral Studies and lives in Sonoma County, California.
OUR TEAM of COACHES, TRAINERS & DESIGNERS HAVE LED CLIENTS TO ACHIEVE EXTRAORDINARY RESULTS.
Nan Crawford & Co.’s team of highly skilled coaches & trainers often lead workshops with small groups and teams. During 1-2 day workshops, our clients benefit from deeper explorations, through a combination of experiential group learning, expert coaching, and peer feedback. Participants receive direct support to practice implementing the content with specific challenges, learning helpful new tools to help them achieve their goals. Our trainings also equip teams to achieve even more together as a cohesive group.
meet the team
Adam Venker
Adam Venker has nearly three decades of experience coaching and educating executives, artists and athletes.
Adam has helped countless individuals in formulating goals, facing limitations and overcoming obstacles to achieve success. As a coach and certified movement analyst, Adam is uniquely skilled at helping clients stand in their strength, expand their natural expressiveness, and communicate with conviction.
Adam leverages his unique background in communication, philosophy and theatre to help leaders take themselves and their teams to the next level.
Adam holds a BA in English from the University of Colorado and a MA in Philosophy and Religion from the California Institute of Integral Studies. In addition to his decades of coaching, Adam has worked professionally as an actor, dancer, improviser and clown, taught at Berkeley Repertory’s School of Theatre, and served as the Director of Performance Training for Pacific Playback Theatre.
Adam clients include: Cisco, Del Monte, NPR, Netflix, The Thacher School, Rocketship Education, & Rosetta Net.
Bruce Cryer
Bruce Cryer has spent the past thirty years researching and teaching innovative approaches to maximizing health and human performance.
From 2000-2011, Bruce was President and CEO of HeartMath LLC. He was the key architect of programs that incorporate HeartMath’s innovative biomedical research into practical tools and strategies to enhance health, performance, creativity, innovation, and productivity for both the individual and the organization.
Prior to that, Bruce spent seven years as Vice President of Marketing for Biogenics. There he directed corporate communications, all sales and marketing plans, distribution networks, and public relations. He has consulted for several start up companies with a focus on developing successful sales and marketing launch campaigns.
He brings his extraordinary experience to his current role as Executive Coach and Strategic Consultant. Bruce has trained and coached executives and leaders of Fortune 500 companies, military, government, and educational organizations.
Bruce's clients include: Agilent, Cisco, Dropbox, Duke University Health Systems, Mayo Clinic, & NASA.
Byron Darden
Byron Darden is a keynote speaker, actor, and a senior consultant with a focus on leadership development and change management.
He has designed and led training programs globally for over a decade. Byron has a unique approach to executive coaching that is based on his experience as a championship level athlete and Olympic coach in the world of figure skating. In addition to his corporate clients, he has coached principals, teachers, and administrators in nationally recognized public school districts.
Byron's education and credentials include: Double Master Rated Coach, Professional Skaters Association (PSA); Certified Change Management Practitioner, Prosci; Mass Communications, Emerson College; & Essential Facilitation Certification, Interaction Associates.
Byron's clients include: American Express, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capital One, & General Electric.
Edwardyne Cowan
Edwardyne Cowan brings a unique combination of positive energy, sensitivity, and rigor to her coaching work to help clients build strong emotional connections with their audiences and respond in the moment to the unexpected.
Edwardyne coaches clients to find their authentic leadership presence by enhancing their communication behaviors through increased self-awareness, strategic and conscious decision making, practice, and positive reinforcement. An accomplished performer, she is also a member of Actors’ Equity Association, SAG-AFTRA, ASTD, and IMATA.
Edwardnye has led successful trainings for clients in many industries, particularly in financial services, packaging, and consumer goods.
Edwardnye's clients include: American Express, Citigroup, Exxon Mobile, Johnson & Johnson, Thomson Reuters, & Time Warner.
Greta Cowan
Since 1999 Greta has been coaching clients on The Four P's: connect with passion, lead with principles, find clarity of purpose, and leverage your full, authentic leadership presence. She helps leaders and teams make their vision of the future tangible and possible.
A certified leadership coach, Greta has worked nationwide and abroad with executives from both corporate and non-profit sectors. She brings a dynamic blend of humor, compassion, honesty, and rigor to her approach to coaching; helping leaders become more inspired and inspirational.
Greta has taught and lectured at Harvard Business School, Harvard University Executive Education, Darden Business School, and Columbia Business School under the auspices of the Executive Education and Executive MBA departments, and the Institute for Not-for-Profit Management.
Greta's clients include: American Express, Capital One, National Cancer Institute, Novartis, & The American Red Cross.
Rachel Rodriguez
Rachel Rodriguez has deep expertise in helping clients convey Leadership Presence and skillfully navigate Interpersonal Communication — whether in High-Stakes Presentations, Managing Difficult Conversations, EQ, Influencing, Managing Performance, Workplace Inclusion and Diversity.
Rachel has enjoyed in-depth experiences working with sales leaders, engineers, rising millennial leaders and seasoned executives. Her passion for collaboration and the latest findings in neuroscience informs her work in individual and team effectiveness.
Rachel has a Bachelor’s degree in Communication from UC Berkeley and a Masters in Organization Development from American University.
Rachel's clients include: Adobe, eBay, Google, LinkedIn, Salesforce, & Standford's Graduate School of Business.