What would you like people to know about you?
I’m a Devon girl originally (and have strong views on how to eat a cream tea) and a Yorkshire girl aspirationally. I’ve lived in and loved the New Forest too, and while I now live in North Essex, I consider all these places to be part of “home”.
I live with my husband and 2 fur babies, a scruffy lurcher called Chance and a cat crossed with a shark, called Freya. I’ve got 2 grown up step daughters who both live up north.
I drive a VW campervan called Zebedee and also have a motorbike which doesn’t get ridden very often these days.
Some of my favourite things are coffee, cake, horse riding on the New Forest or North Yorkshire Moors, river kayaking, campfires, fairy lights and being in my campervan.
What’s your background (Coaching and otherwise)
Before coaching, I had a 10-year career in HR, after falling into it by accident. I worked in a start-up, an SME and a big corporate. I was Head of HR for a Care Services organisation in Yorkshire and then worked in London as a HR Business Partner for a big global corporate. The last role gave me the opportunity to get involved in the development and running of the Leadership Development Programme which introduced me to coaching and ignited my love of personal development. In 2014 I realised that I wasn’t feeling fulfilled by my role and lifestyle and I decided to find a coach to work with to help me figure out what I wanted and how to make it happen. I got inspired to train to be a coach myself as it aligned with so many of the things that attracted me to HR and were deeply important to me.
I completed my Diploma in Transformational Coaching with the Animas Centre for Coaching and went on to do further training in Group Coaching, Youth Coaching, Existential Coaching, Wellbeing Coaching and Relationship Coaching.
In 2015 I decided to leave my job and take a leap of faith into the unknown. I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do and didn’t know if I wanted to be a Coach as my main gig, but I knew I loved it and wanted to carry on with it, even as a hobby. So, I set up my coaching practice as a hobby business, using my campervan as my coaching space and it turned into a successful part-time business which I realised I loved. I still run this part-time practice (but not from my campervan any more!)
In 2017 I joined the Animas Centre for Coaching as one of the core training team, delivering their Diploma in Transformational Coaching. And in 2018 I set up a small Coaching Supervision Practice. So now I spend all my working time in the world of coaching in some form, either coaching my own clients, teaching new coaches, or supervising experienced coaches.
For the last year or so I’ve been doing further training working with the survival strategies we develop in childhood and which can hold us back in adulthood. I’ve also been training in Clean Coaching approaches and techniques which work with the client’s metaphors and unconscious ways of making sense of the world.
What would you like people to know about your coaching?
It’s amazing how many of our problems disappear when we allow ourselves to be ourselves. I’d describe my coaching as a container where it’s safe and ok to explore the whole experience of being you. I love helping people to access their own wisdom and resources and I often use creative approaches to invite my clients to step out of their usual way of looking at things and get different perspectives. My coaching style is relaxed, calm, collaborative, slightly quirky and integrates a wide range of approaches and techniques.