Program Overview
What is Powered by Emotion?
Powered by Emotion is an innovative, ultra-simple and quickly effective training and support program that helps organizations, businesses and individuals to discover and achieve their purpose through the wisdom and techniques of the new science of emotion.
Founded on a wealth of theory and research that has its roots in Neuroscience, Humanistic Psychology, Emotion Focused Therapy and Emotion Focused Skills Training, Powered by Emotion facilitates transformation in professionals, and transformational relationships among professionals.
Improve competence, confidence, well-being and performance both in productivity and in interpersonal relationships among professionals, leaders, teams and clients.
The Emotion Revolution Is Here
You empower yourself and your organization when you learn the skills to navigate emotion, increase motivation and improve personal and professional relationships.
What makes Powered by Emotion different?
A simple three-step system, founded on a rigorous theory of the motivation and mechanism of change, and backed by research into the new science of emotion.
Using knowledge-sharing and practical activities, the Powered by Emotion training program establishes specific and clear concrete steps to help empower and create transformative change.
About The Core Program
Powered By Emotion’s
Training Program
Want to Increase Motivation? Ever think instead about what keeps people “motivated” to stay stuck?
Learn how to work with “competing motivations” and get free of the hurdles that stand in the way of achieving your goals.
From the study of the science behind emotions, we know that emotion is the power source and control centre of the brain. But ask yourself, are you at the wheel of this powerful machine? Or are you simply just a passenger?
Powered by Emotion uses the navigational system inherent in your Emotion Brain with three simple steps that redefine the motivation and mechanism of change.
This simple three-step transformative training program teaches you how to understand your own and others’ emotions and to redefine motivation. It provides the tools you need for you and your team to become the change you envision.
Shatter the myth that you and your team need to prescribe to other people’s recipes for how to achieve success. Learn to define your own process for change with a new understanding of yourself and your team – of who and where you are.
Powered by Emotion can help get you out of your own way, and open the path to the transformation you seek.
Motivation is the key to success, and your emotions are the key to motivation.
Dr. Joanne Dolhanty, PhD

Based on the work of Dr Joanne Dolhanty, PhD and Dr Leslie Greenberg, PhD, founder of the psychotherapy model “Emotion Focused Therapy”
Powered By Emotion was created in response to an overwhelming demand to bring Dr Joanne Dolhanty’s approach to psychotherapy and family healing out of the mental health world and into the lives of everyday people, organizations and businesses.
Drawing on her extensive background working with motivation and emotion, as well as with facilitating change through psychotherapy, Joanne guides participants through a simple and effective three-step system for getting motivated to make change.
Dr Joanne Dolhanty, PhD, is a clinical and consulting psychologist. She has conducted hundreds of workshops and trainings for organizations, professionals, families and individuals globally.
Helping Organizations & Individuals to Develop their Emotion-Wise Skill NET
Powered by Emotion is built around the concept of an Emotion-Wise Skill NET to structure and simplify the teaching and learning of emotion focused skills into 3 simple steps.
Each step is taught as a module which together form a NET of skills that show you how to Navigate Emotion, Enhance Motivation and Transform.
Step 1: Navigate Emotion: Navigate the confusing and often challenging world of emotions
We’ve often been taught to avoid, manage, and even fear our own and others’ emotions, especially in work or business environments. But neuroscience tell us that our emotions, when harnessed, are the most effective guidance system for our decisions. By understanding how to use this system, you can become fluent in your Emotion Brain and better navigate interpersonal conflict challenges outside and within your organization.
Step 2: Enhance Motivation: Enhance motivation to achieve cherished goals
Instead of trying to “motivate” you and your team, we will first explore what you are currently motivated to do. We will take a deep dive into your competing motivations and guide you through practical exercises to help you better understand what can drive your actions. Develop a deeper understanding of the relationship between emotion and motivation as well as how that emotion can empower your motivation.
Step 3: Transform: Transform yourself and transform your relationships
Put your newfound skills of emotion literacy and your understanding of competing motivations to the test, as you embark on discovering your willingness to change and challenge old ways. Participate in a series of activities to help break old patterns and begin to put your newfound knowledge into practice. Positively shift significant and professional relationships as innovative information and practical skills are shared and gained through experiential activities.
Powered by Emotion
About Our Trainings
Powered by Emotion trainings cater to the needs of both the organization and its members. The core goal is to enhance individual and team well-being, and improve the overarching culture of the organization. The program provides skills for deep problem solving with meaningful and lasting solutions, resulting in increased efficiency and motivation, and decreased conflict and inefficiency.
Powered by Emotion is a training, guided practice and support program to develop and enhance mastery in utilizing emotion focused skills in four contexts:
- Training organizations, leaders and teams in the Powered by Emotion model, to facilitate competence and independence in utilizing the techniques
- Enhancing and supporting well-being and healthy culture in organizations, leadership and team functioning
- Training and supporting individuals in personal-professional growth, self-improvement, and personal and career decision-making and goal assessment and achievement
- Training trainers
Training in Powered by Emotion involves teaching the principles and techniques as a workshop or in ongoing training, on a group or individual basis. Powered by Emotion offers a new skill set to support individuals, teams and organizations through many of the challenges they face. There is a strong emphasis on experiential learning to produce practical change.
The three modules of the training are centered around the Emotion-Wise Skill NET of Navigating Emotion, Enhancing Motivation, and Transforming Self and Relationships.
Navigate Emotions
Develop core and advanced skills and techniques to build competence and confidence in recognizing, exploring and utilizing emotion.
Enhance Motivation
Understand motivation in terms of emotion-motivation. Develop and expand emotion focused skills to explore current motivation and enhance motivation-to-change.
Transform Relationships
Further identify and explore challenges to motivation-to-change in old patterns of relating. Further develop and elaborate emotion focused skills with exercises to facilitate transformation.
Powered by Emotion
For Organizations
Powered by Emotion trainings cater to the needs of both the organization and its members. The core goal is to enhance individual and team well-being, and improve the overarching culture of the organization. The program provides skills for deep problem solving with meaningful and lasting solutions, resulting in increased efficiency and motivation, and decreased conflict and inefficiency.
Professionals are highly trained and often manage multiple complex roles and demands in their jobs. But it’s no longer enough to excel in the “hard skills” of performing one’s daily duties. Dealing with people means that everyone brings their own emotional, motivational and interpersonal challenges to the table. Having to cope with this added layer of the job tends to be the tipping point away from wellness and into stress, exhaustion, frustration, fatigue and ultimately into reduced productivity.
To deal with these challenges, professionals require “soft skills” added to their communication and coping skill sets, to navigate the territory of emotion, motivation and interpersonal styles in the workplace.
This is where Powered by Emotion comes in. We specialize in the skills required to manage these challenges. We support individuals, teams and leaders by empowering them to navigate the behavioural, emotional, motivational and relational impasses of everyday life in their organization.
We have a simple structure for teaching and learning emotion and emotion skills that gives leaders and employees simple, practical tools that they can learn quickly and then implement immediately in the boardroom, the halls, the office, the meeting or the interview setting. We work to increase your group’s competence and confidence with the “soft skills” needed to enhance well-being and ultimately increase and improve performance and productivity.
Powered by Emotion brings to the organization this advanced skill set that until now has been the kept secret of the psychotherapy office, and translates it into a simple structure for employing the emotion data all around you as the currency of your success.
The Competing Motivations Workshop offered by “Powered by Emotion” provided excellent insight in terms of navigating challenging inter-personal business-related scenarios. The tools of validation, emotion recognition, and effective boundary setting are widely applicable to both professional and personal settings. In particular, they are well suited to improving peer-to-peer and employer-employee interactions.
– Sean Huberman, PhD, P. Eng.
Senior R&D Architect and Lead Engineer
Mapsted Corp
Powered by Emotion
For Individuals
The Powered by Emotion training program makes ground-breaking techniques accessible to everyone in a simple and digestible manner through our workshops and trainings. The program empowers individuals to reduce stress and feel more effective in their roles and in the challenges they face.
Competing Motivations: the difference between wanting it all and having it all
Powered by Emotion doesn’t just talk about emotion and its relationship with motivation. Rather, it guides you to experience it. The program will put you in the driver’s seat of your Emotion Brain by teaching you the skills to chart a course for change based on your own motivations.
Learn how to use this knowledge in your daily life to become the change you envision. Befriend the critical voices in your head instead of being beaten down by them. You take success with you everywhere, from your professional life to your personal, when you have the wisdom of understanding emotion.
Using knowledge sharing and practical activities the program establishes specific and clear concrete steps to help create transformative change. Every aspect of the program guides you to discover and utilize, rather than criticize and alter, the essence of your self.
By learning to navigate your feelings, no matter how painful they may be, you can learn to reorient your challenges and transform your self. Don’t know why you aren’t where you want to be personally or professionally? Your emotions are trying to tell you why. Tune in. Learn to speak Emotion.
This is Not for the Faint of Heart
When you engage in the program’s process, you will want to turn back. You will stop in your tracks, and tell yourself that change is overrated. That things are okay the way they are. But, that is the unique quality of the program — it is built on the assumption that you will be hesitant to unleash the power of your emotions to inspire transformative change, to understand that painful feelings guide you to where the problem is, and to accept that emotion fluency is the currency of success.
This model of emotional well-being has been life-changing for me- on every level. Implementing this in my life has opened up so many possibilities, healed relationships, and given me a happier, more fulfilled life. Joanne is an engaged and lively teacher and if you take her work to heart, it can positively affect every aspect of your life.
-Carole Ito
About The Founder
Dr. Joanne Dolhanty, PhD
Founder & Lead Facilitator

Dr. Joanne Dolhanty, PhD, is a clinical and consulting psychologist. She has conducted hundreds of workshops and trainings for organizations, professionals, families and individuals in countries around the globe.
She has spent the past 30 years providing treatment to complex clinical populations, developing new models of intervention, and training professionals. She has developed programs and passed on to the professionals she has trained a passion for instilling hope, enhancing motivation and facilitating change in clinical presentations that may have seemed otherwise hopeless. This included developing the application of Emotion Focused Therapy to Eating Disorders, considered to be one of the most difficult-to-treat populations due to the complex and deadly interaction of biological, social, and psychological factors that affect sufferers. Dr Dolhanty also pioneered the training of parents and families to adopt the central role of “recovery and emotion coach” to their eating disordered loved one, demonstrating beyond a doubt the benefits of empowering individuals and communities, rather than only professionals, with emotion focused training.
Dr Dolhanty’s emphasis has been on enhancing intrinsic capacity and developing expertise in communities, organizations, families, and individuals. With this as her lens, she developed Emotion-Focused Skills Training (EFST), a program that brought the benefits of Emotion-Focused Therapy, a psychotherapy model founded by Dr Leslie Greenberg, PhD, to non-clinical settings (such as families and schools) in a simplified format. EFST promotes transformations in difficult feelings, motivation, relationships and stubborn behaviour patterns via short-term experiential learning of emotion-focused skills.
Dr Dolhanty is the founder and developer of Powered by Emotion, created in response to the overwhelming demand to bring the success of her psychotherapy and family healing model, and its application in non-clinical community settings, to entrepreneurs, businesses and other organizations. Dr Dolhanty is known for her lively, warm, and engaging leadership and teaching style; for rendering complex concepts accessible to learning; for empowering others to discover their own inherent wisdom amid the plethora of complex information available; and for facilitating transformation and personal growth in those with whom she works.
Contact Us
Take advantage of this transformative three-step training program to help get you or your organization the skills to make the change you’re seeking. Please use the form below to get in touch with us.
Contact us today for more information or to book a training.