JoAn’s Story – the Middles Kid

A long time ago … JoAn Mann was born in the Bay area (CA) and moved at age 2 to be ‘back with the 5-generation pack’ in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (aka grandparents!) A middle child, in the Middle West who had studied in the middle of Mexico as a pre-teen, was part of the Dance Theater of the Hemispheres touring Midwest Dance Company (Ballet, Hindu, Flamenco & Medieval), was an exchange student in the middle of Austria, went to college the middle of Colorado’s front mountain range and received a scholarship to study in the middle of Europe (Regensburg, ‘West’ Germany).

She became a HS German teacher, then director of a Midwest University Career Development & Placement center, got an MBA, turned researcher-entrepreneur – did lots of people-related work with businesses and in universities in the US, Europe, Asia, also started and ran a compostible, sustainable organic frozen yogurt shop. She is an outdoor enthusiast, avid Grammie, mom and friend.  That’s her life that flows around her PREP Founder story.

At the root of her interest in Understanding People and personal resiliency, she had physical disabilities as a child and teenager. She knew what it was like to feel discounted, invisible and underestimated.  This led her to discover that it was not the curse others told her, but rather a secret to a special, deeply personal and amazing world of understanding ones gifts as well as others’.

Through good times and rough seas she learned how to be happy, more balanced in this unpredictable world.  When her family and friends suffered psychologically and physically with stressful work-life mis-matched careers/situations, she wanted to help and better understand how to handle this without the depression she’d personally experienced.  Her study with AT&T during its divestiture in the early 1980’s clarified this issue with what turned into identifying the PREP Resiliency factor.

She called her work People-Reading Effectiveness, PREP for short.  Her programs and processes were known as PREP to people she and her colleagues worked with. That program became JoAn’s first ‘baby’.  Her two sons ‘grew up’ with PREP – part of its ‘practical research’ team, for which JoAn is forever grateful!  Many of our current clients are actually now ‘second generation’ PREP people!   Guess that’s why JoAn refers to PREP clients as ‘family’.  Welcome all!