Meet the Igniting Your Mind team
Nicole Rouleau, M.S., ADHD-CE, CAIP
Founder | Neuroscience-Based Executive Function Certified Educator and Specialist
Nicole is the founder and owner of Igniting Your Mind and has spent more than 23 years working with children, teens, young adults, and families as a learning specialist, educator, and executive function coach. Her work is rooted in a simple but important understanding: executive functioning impacts far more than school. It influences how we manage emotions, tolerate frustration, solve problems, initiate tasks, follow through, build independence, and navigate everyday life.
Nicole specializes in helping individuals understand and strengthen the foundational skills that sit underneath successful executive functioning, including self-awareness, internal language, emotional regulation, inhibition, working memory, self-monitoring, and self-evaluation. Rather than relying solely on planners, reminders, organizational systems, or other external strategies, her approach focuses on helping individuals develop the internal skills they need to eventually manage their lives more independently.
Her work with parents and families is equally central to her approach. Nicole helps parents better understand what may be driving the behaviors they are seeing while examining how expectations, communication, boundaries, routines, and the home environment can support the development of executive functioning. She believes some of the most meaningful opportunities to build these skills happen during ordinary daily life, and parents can play an incredibly important role in helping children move from dependence toward greater ownership and independence.
This philosophy led Nicole to create Igniting Your Mind, where executive function coaching extends beyond managing assignments or improving organization. IYM works with individuals and families to build skills that transfer across school, home, relationships, college, work, and adulthood. Nicole also mentors and collaborates with the IYM coaching team to ensure this developmental, holistic approach remains central to the work.
In addition to her coaching work, Nicole provides professional development, educational consulting, parent education, and advocacy. She works with schools and educational teams to increase understanding of executive functioning and how it influences learning, behavior, emotional regulation, and student independence. She also supports families in understanding neuropsychological evaluations, preparing for school meetings, and identifying meaningful IEP and 504 supports and accommodations.
As a speaker and educator, Nicole is passionate about changing the way adults understand executive functioning. Her goal is to move the conversation beyond simply getting children to complete tasks and toward teaching the skills that allow them to understand themselves, advocate for what they need, navigate challenges, and ultimately become more capable and independent.
As a mother of three grown children, Nicole also understands that raising capable, independent children is rarely a straight line. Perspective, combined with more than two decades of professional experience, shapes an approach that is practical, collaborative, developmentally informed, and grounded in what actually has to work in everyday life.
Amy Brayley, M.Ed
Family & Parent Executive Function Specialist
Amy is an experienced educator with more than 30 years of work in teaching, educational consulting, and curriculum development. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood Education and a Master’s degree in Elementary Education, and spent 15 years teaching grades K–6 in public school settings, where she developed a strong foundation in childhood learning and development.
In addition to her classroom experience, Amy has spent the last 14 years as a homeschool educator, guiding her three children through individualized learning paths. This experience deepened her understanding of how executive functioning, learning styles, and developmental needs intersect in real-life learning environments. Her knowledge and direct experience with dyslexia, anxiety, OCD, and other learning issues has deepened her understanding of the effects these challenges can have on executive functioning. This experience has helped her become a stronger coach for families with elementary-aged children, teens, and college students.
What really sets Amy apart as a Family Executive Function Coach is her ability to understand the child, the learning environment, and the family system. Amy brings a rare ability to look beyond the behavior a family is struggling with and understand what may be driving it. With decades of experience across classrooms, homeschooling, tutoring, educational consulting, and family support, she helps parents identify where executive functioning skills are breaking down and how the home environment, expectations, routines, and parent responses can either support or unintentionally interfere with growth.
After her formal teaching years, while homeschooling her own children, Amy has worked as a consultant and tutor, supporting learners from infancy through high school. Her areas of focus include executive functioning, dyslexia, understanding a professional neuropsychological evaluation, IEP/504 services and accommodations, homeschooling with an IEP, developmental awareness, and individualized learning approaches. Her work is centered on meeting learners where they are and building support that aligns with their strengths and needs.
Amy believes executive functioning cannot be taught only in a coaching session or classroom. Children need opportunities to practice these skills in the places where real life happens. At home. Her family coaching helps parents create an environment where children can build self awareness, problem solving, independence, emotional regulation, responsibility, and confidence through everyday experiences.
Over the years, it has become clear to Amy that the family system, first and foremost, needs more focus and attention in our ever-changing, post-COVID, social media influenced world. This has led her to create her own unique coaching approach, which starts with a family’s core values to build a new roadmap for raising their family. These core values drive their daily living, family time, expectations, and parenting style. This whole-family perspective allows Amy to help parents understand not only what their child may need, but also what may need to change within the environment and family system to support greater growth and independence.
In her own family, Amy enjoys having family adventures with her three older teens, husband, two dogs, and cat. They enjoy hiking, disc golf, soccer, and Broadway shows. She is in the last year of homeschooling her children as her youngest will finish this year.
Amy is also a passionate advocate for arts education. She directs the A.C.T. It Out Theater Group and leads youth in Shakespeare productions, using theater and performance as powerful tools for growth, expression, and confidence-building.
Nicole’s work at Igniting Your Mind focuses primarily on high school and college students as they navigate increasing expectations for independence. She understands that success at this stage requires much more than organization or a better planner. Students must learn to manage their time, initiate work, advocate for themselves, balance competing priorities, tolerate setbacks, and create structure when adults are no longer providing it for them.
Her coaching focuses on self awareness, self advocacy, problem solving, emotional regulation, accountability, and follow through. Nicole’s work also extends well beyond academics. She helps students understand how executive functioning impacts relationships, home and dorm life, daily routines, sleep, self care, medication management when applicable, and the many competing demands of adolescence and young adulthood. She also helps students recognize when they need additional support and learn how to access and follow through with resources such as therapy, campus services, or other trusted supports.
Nicole’s extensive educational background allows her to recognize when executive functioning challenges intersect with learning differences, ADHD, anxiety, autism spectrum differences, or academic skill gaps. With her strong background in math instruction, she also provides math tutoring when needed, weaving executive function skill building into the work. Math often places heavy demands on working memory, attention, sequencing, frustration tolerance, and persistence, allowing Nicole to strengthen both the academic skills and the executive functioning skills behind them.
Nicole’s goal is to help students become increasingly less dependent on coaching over time. Whether a challenge shows up in a classroom, dorm room, social situation, family relationship, or daily routine, she helps high school and college students build the internal skills, confidence, and self knowledge they need to take greater ownership of their lives and manage more independently.
Nicole Furman, M.S.
Executive Function, Math, and Reading Specialist
Vicki Rotker, M.S.
Executive Function & Communication Coach, Educational Consultant, Professional Development Trainer
Vicki is an experienced educator and executive function coach who has supported hundreds of students in developing the skills needed for both academic and personal success. She is the creator and instructor of Log On to Success, a course designed to help students better understand their learning styles while strengthening executive functioning skills.
As a certified teacher and Restorative Justice coach, Vicki works with learners from middle school through college. Her work focuses on helping individuals identify their strengths, build motivation, and develop personalized strategies that support learning, organization, and follow-through. Her approach blends structure with creativity, offering both clarity and encouragement.
In addition to her coaching work, Vicki serves as an educational consultant, collaborating with therapists, counselors, educators, and parents to design individualized support plans. She also works closely with families to help parents develop effective coaching strategies at home.
Vicki holds a Bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education and Middle School Math from the University of Delaware and a Master’s degree in Technology for Education from Johns Hopkins University. Over the course of her career, she has taught a wide range of subjects, including math, algebra, theater, and yearbook.
Outside of her work, Vicki enjoys yoga, spending time at the beach, long walks with friends, and being with her husband and three daughters.
Karen Alexander
Certified HS, College, and Adult Executive Function Coach
Karen brings together professional training and lived experience in her work as an Executive Function Coach. She is certified in Occupational Therapy and Executive Function Coaching, and as a parent of both a neurotypical and a neurodiverse child, she brings a personal understanding of the challenges individuals and families can face when executive functioning and neurodiversity impact everyday life.
Over the past decade, Karen has pursued extensive continuing education focused on executive functioning and neurodiversity. This work led her to transition her career toward coaching, with a particular interest in helping adults, young adults, and older students better understand how their executive functioning impacts the way they manage their lives.
Karen’s work extends far beyond organization and time management. She helps clients strengthen skills related to planning, prioritizing, task initiation, follow through, emotional regulation, routines, communication, and managing competing responsibilities. For adults, this may include navigating work, home responsibilities, relationships, parenting, self care, and the mental load that comes with trying to manage many areas of life at once.
She also works with high school and college students as they take on greater responsibility and independence. Her approach helps them develop the self awareness, accountability, and practical skills needed to manage academics while also navigating relationships, daily responsibilities, and life outside of school.
Her approach is practical, compassionate, and grounded in real-world application. Karen helps clients understand where executive functioning is creating barriers and develop strategies that fit their actual lives, with the goal of becoming more confident, capable, and independent over time.