About Emina
“Emina brilliantly helps us understand how to recognize, pay attention to, and learn from our emotions. Her captivating insights provide a pathways to a life of greater self understanding and personal fulfillment. “ Heather Backstrom, Management Coach
A native of former Yugoslavia, now Serbia, I completed medical school at the University of Belgrade. In 1991, I moved to Canada and then later to the United States. Dealing with loneliness and insecurity while adapting to my new homes, and nostalgia for my family and friends, I was emotionally hurting but nothing learned in medical schools was helping me ease my mind and sooth my heart. As I was making my way through emotional challenges, I discovered that we are highly knowledgeable society but in the area of emotions we are unskilled and uneducated.
Recognizing the importance of emotions, I studied numerous methods that address positive thinking or emotion management, personally testing each one of them. Influenced primarily by Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, Milton H. Erickson’s hypnotherapy, and ground-breaking research in the domain of heart science (Neurocardiology and HeartMath), I developed my own unique approach to strengthening emotional intelligence. My approach is innovative: emotions are messengers. Like mail personally delivered to you, emotions provide you with valuable information on how you relate to any given situation. By understanding the messages of your emotions, YOU become in charge of your life.
My teaching is empowering and liberating: it will free you from being a slave to your emotions. Once you learn their language, emotions will no longer own you but you will own them; you will become emotionally independent and in charge. Instead of reacting to life’s circumstances with random emotions, you will gain the ability to decipher your feelings and understand their messengers so that you can respond to any challenge fully engaged and with awareness and choice. Instead of reacting to your feelings you will learn how to respond to the situationthat elicited your feelings. .. and that means being truly in charge of your life!
My education and interests are broad; beside a medical degree, I earned a Coaching Certification from HeartMath, obtained a Diplomate in Logotherapy credential from the Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy, then Excellence Quest and Richard Bandler licensed me as a Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. I completed the Certified Coach Intensive Program by CoachVille and am currently in the process of obtaining her Professional Coach Certified license (PCC) from the International Coach Federation. My personal interests encompass hiking, ballroom dancing, power yoga, independent and foreign movies, and cooking.
Since starting my private practice as a coach in 2000, I have been helping people transform their dilemmas and traumas into clarity and empowerment. In addition to helping individuals in their personal growth, I also work with executives as a “thought partner” helping them bring their leadership and management skills to a new level. In my workshops, I help teams discover their strategic skills, improve their communication and thereby assist them in optimizing their collaboration and performance.
Believing that in emotional matters people are not ill but uneducated, and thus don’t need healing but guidance toward better understanding and better decision making, I dedicate my time to coaching, training and speaking about emotional literacy. Similar to how functional illiteracy limits our capacity to read, write, and utilize our mental resources, emotional illiteracy greatly restricts our power to express our unique personalities, communicate our desires and values effectively and achieve our true potential. Therefore, my most creative work is with children. I help teacher, parents and childrenachieve better communication, better decision making and ultimately reach better learning environment as well as higher collaboration.
My commitment is to challenge you to think differently about your feelings and to encourage you to reconcile your rational and emotional minds - so that you can discover the new possibilities within while enjoying the process.