en*light Life

Our background is research. In a nutshell, we are two researchers that met at NASA doing research in the aviation and space psychology field. Over the years we achieved success in the human psychology, leadership, and organizational development fields. Lori is a world-renown researcher in the aviation community, who amongst her many publications has a training manual used by every major airline around the world.  Amber took her research skills to the corporate world as a business/corporate development analyst showing Fortune 500 companies how to grow, hire/develop and utilize top talent.

Why the Website?

Our blog, en*light Life developed from a shared vision to contribute more directly to our community by providing a space to coach others to reach their optimal potential by recommending and developing life enhancing products and services on our site.  The personal development books, products, and seminars reviewed on this site have been useful to us while achieving our own successes. And being researchers we’ve tried a lot! We hope you enjoy our reviews and site. For your convenience, we also add the product links to the products we recommend.  

Who are we?

Lori McDonnell, Co-Founder, Life Coach & Research Psychologist

Lori obtained her B.A. in Psychology (1991) and her M.A. in Human Factors & Industrial/Organizational Psychology (1995) from San Jose State University. Her focus was in training and career development, which aligns with her desire to help others discover, master, and manifest their true strengths.

Lori has spent the past 15 years conducting research at NASA on how teams communicate and work together to achieve common goals, and maximize performance. Her research includes a training manual that is utilized by most major airlines throughout the world. She has made a profound, positive impact within the aviation and space community, which earned her the NASA Ames Research Honor award in the year 2000. In addition, she has served as the President of the Association for Aviation Psychology, and has resided on several aviation and space technical review committees.

More recently, she has transitioned her passion for maximizing personal and team potential from the aviation and space community to the greater San Francisco Bay Area community. Her philanthropic decision to provide her expertise to the general public has been the heart en*Light Life’s Life Enhancement Services™ currently in development.

In addition, Lori is a certified Life Coach, and holds certifications in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programing). She is available for phone or in-person coaching sessions. For more information on Lori’s personal life coaching services, please send us an email

Amber Laurel, Co-Founder & Blog editor/writer

Amber obtained a BA of Psychology, and Minor in Communication from San Jose State University in 2002, and will obtain her Master of Science in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from San Jose State University in fall 2008. Amber’s research career began at NASA Ames Research Center, where she focused on organizational factors that lead to maximized safety and cohesion in aviation. A few years later, she transitioned into the corporate world and began utilizing her research and educational background to show some of the top Fortune 500 companies based in the SF Bay Area how to recover corporate loss, expand into new territories, create corporate “report cards”, and provides other business-related recommendations based on business analysis and research.

In addition, Amber sits on the board of A Single Light, a non-profit organization in the SF Bay Area that provides a free cancer resource database for those affected by cancer.

Amber is our blog editor, website maintenance, and main point of contact for general inquiries for our blog.  To contact her please email her at: amber@enlightlife.com