Coaching has been part of my life for much longer than I have been a coach.
My experience of being coached
My journey to coaching began in my early 20s, when I was in my first management position. I was struggling to create and maintain boundaries between work and home life, partly because of the nature of the bar industry and my lack of management experience.
Although I was probably too young to realise it at the time, I was fortunate to have been given the gift of a guardian angel in the form of a senior manager. I explained some of the issues I was having and he suggested that I might find coaching helpful.
The coach I worked with, Dave, went on to become my mentor and was invaluable to me, not only during the early stages of my career, but again in my 30s when I hit what felt like a roadblock in my life. I was struggling with the pressure of meeting that special someone, feelings of loneliness and a lack of direction.
Coaching gave me the space to work through those things and to understand what I actually wanted from my life. I will always be eternally grateful to Dave. Sadly, he passed away from cancer a few years ago, but the influence he had on my life has stayed with me.
My own experience of being coached has shaped how I see coaching today. It has helped me understand my values, work through creative blocks, recognise my strengths and think more clearly about the kind of life I want to build.
My path to becoming a coach
After many years of experiencing the value of coaching myself, I decided to train as a coach.
I started my training during the pandemic, studying over two years alongside my professional career. It was a combination of academic study, online learning, in-person sessions and assessments, as well as a minimum of 50 hours of real-life coaching case studies, which were assessed as part of the qualification.
I qualified as a life coach in 2021.
For me, it wasn’t about changing direction completely. Coaching felt like a natural extension of the experience I had already gained through my career, particularly supporting, developing and leading people, as well as my own experience of being coached.
My multi-hyphen life
I’ve never been particularly good at putting myself in one box. I have a professional career, run my own consultancy, coach, paint and have a whole host of interests outside those things too.
For me, a multi-hyphen life is about recognising that you can have different sides to yourself and that they don’t all have to fit neatly into one career or one definition of who you are.
That can be exciting, but it can also be complicated. How do you make time for the things that matter to you? Which interests do you pursue, and which do you let go? What happens when the path you thought you were going to follow no longer feels right?
I know what it’s like to wrestle with those questions. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy coaching people who are navigating change, exploring different possibilities or trying to create a life that has room for more than one thing.
I’m not interested in telling people what their life should look like. I’m interested in helping them work out what matters to them, and what a life that feels right for them might look like.