Bio
Terese Cooke Bottner
Since founding TCB Communications, LLC, in 2009, Terese Cooke Bottner has coached hundreds of individuals and teams. Based on many years of experience, education, research, and personal practice, Terese guides clients to understand and dissolve their limiting beliefs, learn practices to calm their nervous system, feel more confidence and joy, improve relationships, define healthy boundaries, and awaken their spiritual identity in order to perform at their highest level and enjoy life to its fullest.
In 2019, Terese created LifeWork, a program designed to prepare at-risk youth for life and work by improving self-awareness, mindful communication, and vocational direction. She is a respected specialized services provider for Indiana’s Department of Child Services and a trusted contractor for Lake County Juvenile Probation. LifeWork clients are primarily teenagers, but she works with youth from both the public and private sector and range in age from 8–18.
Terese has a long history of youth development since her college internship working with Chicago’s underserved teens and her work as an elementary one-on-one aide for highly sensitive and behaviorally challenged youth. While building her own coaching business and raising her two sons, she began volunteering with Future Founders in 2012 to encourage entrepreneurial innovation in Chicago’s middle and high schools. From 2015–2020, Terese was a supportive business partner and volunteer with the All-Stars Project of Chicago’s Development School for Youth (DSY), working with teens from the city’s most challenged neighborhoods to teach the performance of business.
Terese teaches meditation and mindfulness to youth in residence at Lake County Juvenile Center. She serves as a member of the Transitional Services Workgroup for Indiana’s Youth Justice Oversight Committee to create state planning and policy for youth transitioning out of restrictive care facilities. She is a Certified Life Coach and a Certified Core Strengths Facilitator. TCB Communications is a Certified Women’s Business Enterprise (WBE) and a contracted Specialized Service Provider for Indiana’s Department of Child Services. She is an active Board Member for the Miller Beach Arts and Creative District (MBACD).
Terese is a devoted practitioner of yoga and meditation, and a mother of two creative, musical, and kind adult sons. She grew up in the Miller Beach neighborhood of Gary, Indiana and earned a B.A. degree in Public Relations from Purdue University. Prior to coaching, she worked as a public relations specialist at the Chicago Board of Trade and various PR firms. She trained as an actor at Chicago’s Second City Training Center and Chicago’s Act One Studios.
She studies and applies evidence-based practices in her coaching curriculum, including Internal Family Systems (IFS), Polyvagal Theory (PVT), Cognitive Behavior Theory (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Motivational Interviewing (MI), and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT).
