About Me

For the last twenty years I have supported individuals and groups to make amazing changes and to improve the quality of their living through my work as a coach, trainer and writer. I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to run some brilliant workshops and retreats nationally and internationally, and I’ve helped thousands of people transform their lives. I have felt valued and rewarded for most of it. Over the years many people have told me that I was so lucky to be able to do what I do. They were right, I am.

Like many of the clients I see, behind the scenes of my public life there was a whole other drama. There was a huge secret that I carried. What you saw on the outside wasn't always reflected on the inside. Over the years I built up an increasingly successful career, first as a youth worker in Hackney in the eighties, and then in residential social work (I qualified as a Youth and Community Worker in 1989 with a six month baby in tow), and then into a corporate post working in Training and Development in a local authority. Like so many people, on the inside I felt like I was not good enough.

I set up Life Work In Progress (Training, Coaching and Personal Development) in 1995 and began working freelance. It was a courageous step. Everyone told me I could do it but no one pointed out how. Always one to push myself, I took the leap of faith, jumped in the water and have been learning how to succeed as a freelancer and creative artist for the last eleven years.

From the outside looking in, you wouldn’t have known that I was often living a life that was in chaos. Sometimes barely meeting my bill payments, procrastinating on things that would help my business, managing my time ineffectively and so it went on. I was so good at helping other people because I was so familiar with the things they brought to the training and the coaching. I had learned how to live in survival mode and before I knew it, I was camped out in the comfort zone, and had been for years.

Survival came at a huge cost to my sense of self in the world and my internal well-being. It ate away at my already low self-esteem. I felt like a fraud. I was constantly moving from one financial worry to another and never really feeling validated to do the things I really wanted to do.

Yes I was still confident in many areas of my life. But the low self-esteem was what I was left with when there wasn't a group to run and a task to complete for an organisation. My low self-esteem was what I went to bed with last thing at night and woke up with first thing in the morning.

The road to recovery moved into a new gear when I started working intensively with a life coach in the year 2000. After a turbulent period in my life where I was ready to give up my career I committed to telephone coaching sessions once a week for almost 18 months. It had a huge impact. It was clear that it was time for me to start doing things differently. This was no overnight success. It meant hard work, facing things that I didn't want to. I had to learn new skills and practices about being a business woman and entrepreneur. Acknowledging that even though I was a great ideas person and was great at running workshops this was not enough. I needed to have systems, structures and habits that would support my business to be effective and to succeed.

Along the way I learned how important it was to practice self-care, to nurture my creativity, which is so often the source of my productivity, and how important the smaller things in life are to my feeling fulfilled and good about myself regardless of what was going on around me. Now I was learning to put into practice what I had been coaching and training others to do for years. As a result I have witnessed and experienced first hand the huge difference coaching has made to my business and who I am in all the different areas of my life. Looking back, those difficulties were a blessing, and today I strive to use that experience with compassion, empathy and understanding in my work with others.