Imagine a world...
Imagine a world...
Where everyone understands that they create their own success, solutions, ease, happiness and opportunities. Where there is no blame because everyone understands that in the same way they create their own success and happiness, they also create and perpetuate their own problems and discontent.
At Soul Designs, we imagine this world every day. We strive to inspire personal and social responsibility while dramatically improving the lives of our clients and the result they can achieve.
About Lerae
About Lerae
Lerae Gidyk is an ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC), pioneer, and thought leader in the global coaching profession. Since 1999, she has been coaching in personal,
leadership, and mentor coaching, bringing a profound commitment to the embodiment of humanness in coaching — coaching not only as a skillset, but as a way of being.
She founded Soul Designs Coaching International that same year. In 2006, she became one of Canada's first Master Certified Coaches — at a time when fewer than ten coaches in the country held that designation. In the years that followed, she accumulated more than 15,000 coaching hours across 43 countries, developed the COACH ME model, co-founded FindACoach.com, and served as Director of Education at Coaching Out of the Box.
In 2020, she co-created BAM — the Become a Mentor Coach program — with Carolyn Hamilton-Kuby, because she was watching harm being done in the mentor coaching space and wanted to do something about it. In 2024, she created SourceWorks™, because she was watching experienced coaches drift away from the reason they became coaches in the first place. In 2025, she was appointed by the International Coaching Federation to co-lead the creation of the first global Mentor Coaching Community of Practice — the body the ICF now cites as part of its quality infrastructure for the profession's new standards.
Lerae is the creator of SourceWork™, an advanced master coach education program that supports experienced coaches in transcending technique to coach from a deeper,
source-based presence — coaching what cannot be taught. Through this pioneering work, she has become widely recognized as both the Architect of Source-Based Leadership™ and a Steward of Humanness in Coaching.
Lerae is shaping the future of coaching education, championing mentor coaching excellence, and inspiring the next generation of coaches to step into mastery. Her voice is known for being candid, bold, and deeply human, consistently inviting coaches and leaders to explore the edges of their own growth and contribute to the global evolution of consciousness through coaching.
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, not polemically, 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
- Master Certified Coach (MCC), International Coaching Federation — 2006. One of the first ten MCCs in Canada.
- 15,000+ coaching hours across 43 countries
- Founder, Soul Designs Coaching International Ltd. — established 1999
- Creator, SourceWorks™ — mastery-aligned coach education program
- Co-creator, BAM (Become a Mentor Coach) — with Carolyn Hamilton-Kuby, Morningstar Centre for Engagement
- Developer, COACH ME Model
- Co-founder, FindACoach.com
- Director of Education, Coaching Out of the Box / The International Coaching Group
- Faculty, Coach U
- Co-lead, ICF Global Mentor Coaching Community of Practice — appointed 2025
- Architect of Source-Based Leadership™
- Recognized as Steward of Humanness in Coaching
One organization. Two distinct paths.
Soul Designs
SourceWorks™
