About Sandy Davis

Sandy Davis is a "personal resilience guide" who came to this somewhat improbable calling via 14 years of full-time practice as a professional coach.  In his coaching work, Sandy specializes in helping senior business executives become more effective and more fulfilled in their leadership roles.

By paying particular attention to the dimension of personal resilience, he guides his clients so that they can successfully reconfigure their approach to both work and life.  Consistently, they are able to move from feeling overwhelmed and beleaguered to feeling revitalized and re-engaged.  They start to find more pleasure in their work, to make bigger and more satisfying contributions, and to have significantly more fun doing so.  Simultaneously, they learn to model personal resilience for the teams, business units, and organizations that they lead.

Currently, the primary focus of Sandy's work is teaching others (both inside and outside the business world) how to tune up their daily self-care structures and thereby increase their vitality and deepen their own personal resilience.  In doing this, Sandy brings to bear all of the various ways he has made his living, all of his long-standing personal experience with various self-care structures, and all of his training and experience as a professional coach.

Career and Education

Sandy’s multifaceted career has spanned education, the arts, and business in roughly equal measure.  He has made his living variously as an airplane pilot, a cabinetmaker, a freelance photographer, a school teacher working with dyslexic children, a musician, a software engineer, a technical instructor, a manager, a business executive, and a professional coach.  He brings this breadth of experience to his coaching and training.

Before becoming a full-time leadership coach, Sandy spent 14 years working successfully inside high-technology corporations, including nine years in director-level positions with global profit-and-loss responsibilities.  Shortly after he elected to leave corporate America, he returned as an external professional coach.  He became skilled at helping senior executives increase their capacities to thrive in stressful times, even as they face unrelenting challenges from both within and outside of their own organizations.

Sandy spent 11 years as a principal of ChangeWise® Inc., a management consulting firm in Boston that he co-founded in 1996.  In 2007, he chose to leave the Boston area and relocated home to the Mid-Coast of Maine.  At that time, he left ChangeWise, and incorporated his own Maine-based company, ZillyCo LLC (formerly ResilienceWorks LLC). 

Sandy holds a B.A. in Biology, cum laude in General Studies, from Harvard University, and completed graduate work in Clinical Psychology at Clark University.  He has been certified by the International Coach Federation as a Professional Certified Coach (PCC).  He is a member of the Global Resiliency Network, and was certified by the late Al Siebert, Ph.D., author of The Resiliency Advantage and Director of The Resiliency Center, as a Certified Resiliency Facilitator ("Resilitator").

Publications

Sandy has authored and self-published several ground-breaking instructional manuals on developing personal resilience.  Along the way, he coined the word "zillience" ––which denotes the highly coherent inner energy you need to develop in order to enhance your "re-zillience" (resilience).  By virtue of his own long-standing explorations, his writings, and his teachings, Sandy has become one of America’s foremost authorities on daily self-care structues.   He is uniquely qualified to teach others how to deepen their resilience and maximize their ability to thrive in stressful times.

Other Interests


Sandy is extremely proud of his 29-year-old daughter and his 27-year-old son.  His daughter is married and lives in Seattle where she is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Education.  For four years, his son was a motorsports engineer at the Skip Barber Racing School in Connecticut and then at Radical Ltd. in Sydney, Australia.  In July, 2011, he joined OracleRacing in Auckland, New Zealand, as a mechanical engineer.  He is designing and manufacturing parts for the Oracle-sponsored 72-foot catamaran that will defend the America's Cup in San Francisco Bay in 2013.

Outside of his family and his professional work, Sandy's interests include playing live music for traditional New England contra dances, and contra dancing, himself, whenever he has a chance.  In the early 70's, he was a founding member of Roaring Jelly, a well-known Greater Boston band that is still going strong 40 years later.  He was also a founding member of Common Ground, a band that performed widely in the 70's and 80's.  More recently, he founded and directed two other country dance bands:  The Berlin Country Dance Orchestra (still playing for dances 24 years later in Berlin, MA), and Oh, CONTRAire! (still playing for dances 10 years later in Westford, MA).  Sandy is currently a member of two Maine-based contradance bands:  Rock the Boat and Flowing Tide.  He is also a member of the staff of Maine Fiddle Camp.  He currently plays mostly wind instruments:  wooden flutes, penny whistles, and saxophone.  On most Wednesday nights, you can find him playing at a local weekly tune session that is now in its fourth year.

For exercise, Sandy enjoys rowing and cycling year ’round (both outdoors and indoors), as well as sailing whenever he can on the familiar waters of Muscongus Bay––a lovely bay on which he has sailed almost every summer of his entire life.