Gail Cassidy Biography

Who am I?


In essence, I am a writer, teacher, and coach with a basic philosophy: Success begins with the discovery of your passion and is enhanced with the mastery of great communication and interpersonal skills.

My passion is finding ways, through researching and developing training programs, to make life better for me and for my clients.

My love of training and program development started early in my career when I sought creative ways to teach high school English. I suspected that this was my niche when, while working for IBM Corporation, I received their prestigious “Outstanding Contribution” award for a self-paced training program used nationwide that I had developed. I was especially proud to have been the first female and youngest person to have received this award.

While my husband and I were raising our two children, I continued developing programs through my extensive involvement with my local community, where I had the opportunity of being president of seven organizations, positions which enabled me to continue finding easier and better ways to fulfill our mission statements. I also researched and collaborated on numerous education issues for our local school board.

Later, as an instructor and manager of instructors for an international training organization, I continued doing what I love--developing and teaching programs that enable people to maximize their potential.

In the mid-1990's I founded Tomlyn Publications, a home-based business dedicated to empowering clients to recognize the strengths in themselves and in others and mastering the skills to present themselves as they desire to be seen. I had already written and published
Discover Your Passion and its accompanying workbook for students. After starting my company, I authored five more books and 13 e-books and booklets plus seminars and workshops to utilize the information in the books.

One of the questions in my book,
Discover Your Passion, is "What do you do naturally and effortlessly?" What I have found I do naturally and effortlessly is create programs and teach; and as a result of that realization, I have steered my business down that path of helping entrepreneurs and small business owners to create seminars for their clients in order to master their niche and increase their client base and income.

For the past 18 years, I have had the opportunity to teach and coach many people toward the discovery of their passion, which has culminated in my latest endeavor, the completion of a book, entitled
The Validating Mentor and The Validating Mentor Workbook to help “at risk” kids maximize their potential. This mentoring program assists young people in crisis in their search for a direction in life, who need help to discover their personal gifts and talents and who need to learn how to use them. The book can also be used as a tool by coaches when mentoring their clients.

Over the years, I have narrowed my passion further. I have found that working with and helping "at risk" teens and young adults through the use of three of my books (
The Validating Mentor, Profit From Your Passion, and You Cannot NOT Communicate) provides them validation, direction, and communication skills. I've trained teachers from 15 prisons in NJ and worked in a Juvenile Detention Center--experiences leaving an indelible impression on me. I believe that the combination of validation, direction, and communication skills provides a solid base from which to grow for this group of kids who, like anyone else, wants to be successful in life.

Although I did not consciously plan to be where I am, that’s the road that I believe was meant for me to follow in life. That’s true satisfaction--doing what I love and knowing others are benefitting from what I do.