Our Above & Beyond philosophy

Y-connect believes the mindset, behaviour and skills of leaders and teams can be cultivated to go from meeting expectations to exceeding them.

Our Mission

We aim to offer training, facilitation and coaching solutions that empower business leaders and their teams to understand their purpose, and uncover new ways of doing their work and achieving their goals. We aim to improve the productivity of companies and individuals, decrease negativity, and boost morale, confidence and overall satisfaction.

Meet Yoke

Yoke van Dam is a catalyst for change, whether in a person, team or an entire company. She is a qualified behavioural change and leadership coach, public speaker, facilitator, trainer and sales consultant with more than 16 years’ experience.

Specialising in neurolinguistic programming, Yoke trains and coaches business leaders, executives, sales teams and individual staff members the tangible skills that can deliver the outcomes they want. She also presents keynotes in corporate and other settings to bring about positive change.

Her training specialties include sales, persuasion, presentation and emotional intelligence. She balances theory with practical solutions, and is highly adept at engaging her audience to be active participants in the development of these solutions so that they own them and want to make them work.

She has done several thousand hours of training and presentation to clients as diverse as sales executives, business leaders and owners, customer service agents, marketers, lawyers, engineers and accountants.

The industries she has covered range from automotive, retail, manufacturing and engineering to advertising, publishing, legal and academic.

Yoke has written for Entrepreneur magazine and contributes articles on emotional intelligence to the Female Entrepreneurship Collective. The video of her talk at Disrupt HR in Sandton, Johannesburg, in August 2018 became the most watched worldwide in the two weeks following the event. She is often interviewed on Mix FM and Radio Today.

Yoke's Background

After graduating from the University of Pretoria, Yoke spent 10 years in consultative sales at Oxford Publishers, Pearson and Entrepreneur magazine.

During this time, she worked tirelessly after hours and on weekends to develop her public speaking, training, leadership and coaching skills through Toastmasters. She also completed her practitioner’s qualification in neurolinguistic programming.

In 2014 she was headhunted to train the sales teams at Auto Trader, Commercial Trader, AutoFuzion, Bikes and Corporate Sales. She developed all the material and ran staff inductions with the team, also branching out into soft skills for accounts, corporate governance, marketing, customer support and the call centres. She led team-building and conflict-resolution workshops for various teams.

Yoke is an accredited Toastmasters International leadership trainer and has achieved the organisation’s highest accolade, the Distinguished Toastmaster award, which recognises superior achievement in both communication and leadership.

She founded Y-Connect in 2017.

Why You Should Work With Us

At Y-Connect we hold ourselves to the following values:

Excellence

We provide the best level of work that is possible for us with the time that is available. We also strive for excellence and always ask for feedback. We believe in having a Growth mindset, we are open to learning and always want to know how we can improve everything that we do.

Kindness & care

We deeply care for our clients. Whether they are the procurement department dealing with the order, the delegate attending a workshop or an individual attending a group coaching session. We strive to create a safe space where you and your team can grow and develop.

Accountability

We believe in accountability and offer accountability through all of the work that we do. If we have homework that we provide, we expect our clients to do it. And in doing so they will grow. Only by holding people to their own promises will any change take place.

Fun

We believe that work should be fun and can always guarantee that your delegates, or staff that attend a speaking engagement, training workshop, consulting or keynote will enjoy the session and take learnings away with them.