Our Above & Beyond philosophy

We believe that all teams can be turned around to become collaborative, committed, and cohesive superstars of the organisations they serve. 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 speaking advisory and coaching solutions that empower business leaders and their teams to understand their purpose and to create meaningful workspaces for their teams. We aim to improve the staff engagement of your team, improve the productivity of the company and individuals, decrease negativity, and boost morale, confidence, and overall satisfaction.

Meet Yoke

Yoke van Dam has been called the Kintsugi queen™ because of her ability to join, repair, and transform teams and turn them into something quite wonderful.

She’s staked her hard-won reputation on the premise that all teams can be turned around to become collaborative, committed, and cohesive superstars of the organisations they serve.

As a qualified behavioral change coach with verifiable in-the-field experience (2000+ team members, 2 300+ hours training, and 350+ coaching hours), she would love to uncover the real issues holding your teams back. Through her hard-won experience (17 years) and tried and tested high-performance processes, she has seen even the most fissured and fractured teams join together and become strong and remarkable.

She works with leaders who want to effectively articulate and communicate their vision so that their teams buy into it and are prepared to follow them to hell and back to make sure that their vision is achieved, as well as new, untested leaders who need a strong foundational roadmap of how to work with and lead teams to successful outcomes.

She is passionate about the buying brain and became obsessed with persuasion, sales, and influence ever since she was selling pizza at the age of 15. She empowers leaders and teams to find their voice, step into their power, and speak in a way that people want to listen to them. Today, as a qualified behavioural change coach, she teaches leaders and sales professionals how to get people to buy into their ideas and to action them.

Her advisory, speaking, and coaching work empowers leaders and teams to create meaningful workspaces by tapping into their purpose and enhancing human connection. She empowers leaders and teams with confidence and influence to find their flow and develop a growth mindset. The specific areas she focuses on are Leadership development, Culture, Emotional intelligence, time management, Negotiation, Communication, and Presentation skills.

Her clients have been 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.

She is the founder of Y-Connect and a Professional member of the Professional Speakers Association of Southern Africa (PSASA).

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 is also a Professional member at the Professional Speakers Association of Southern Africa.

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.