March 8th is International Women’s Day and the theme this year is Embracing Equity. If like me you were brought up with the fight for equality it may feel a little strange  to go to the campaign site for International Women’s Day and read that, ‘equal opportunities aren’t enough’.  Time to do a bit more thinking and get my head around the thought that the fight for equality without embracing the concept of equity can be exclusionary and think more about why the shift to equity is important to campaign for.  My starting place was to ask a few basic questions. What is the differen ..read more

“This book is to remind you what it’s like to feel free….” a sentence in the prologue to Freedom Seeker. Live More. Worry Less. Do what you love.  that really got me thinking. Just this one sentence evoked a whole raft of questions which are still going round in my head. What does it mean to be free? More importantly what does it mean to ME to feel free? When was the last time I felt truly free? That one I can answer, standing on top of a hill in Scotland at around 6.30am on my own watching the sun rise over the lochs below, surrounded by nothing but the sound of birdsong.  The other ..read more

Do you have a thing in you that keeps niggling to be heard? Something you would love to do, ‘if only’. Something you keep pushing to the back of your mind and finding ways to ignore it?  Whatever you do to suppress it somehow it keeps finding a way through all the barriers you are erecting? It’s a persistent little blighter that won’t leave you alone. Attaching itself to you like a limpet.  It may have been there for years waiting patiently to be heard. Maybe there have been times when its voice has reached a crescendo and yet, and yet, somehow you still managed to turn away, to pu ..read more

This is an unusual post for me I know but it may be one of the most important. I want to explain to you how and why I’m trying to support women in Afghanistan through supporting the work of the Linda Norgrove Foundation. For those of you who don’t me, for the last 8 years I’ve been working as a women’s personal development coach. Earlier in the year a colleague asked if I’d be prepared to input into a project with the Linda Norgrove Foundation. The focus of the project was to provide coaching to women  studying at University in Kabul. You can find out more about the Linda Norgrove Fo ..read more

I’m in the middle of a 2 week writing course at the moment and loving it.  It’s being run by Beth Kempton who is the author of amongst other things Freedom Seeker. Live More. Worry Less. Do what you love, a book I reviewed recently. At the start of each daily session Beth reads one or two short readings or poems. She calls these daily sparks, a practice designed to get you into writing mode.  After listening to the reading you are encouraged to engage in free writing for 5 minutes. Jotting down anything that comes to mind, wherever the readings have taken you. It’s a ritual designed ..read more

Several years ago I wrote a self-coaching guide to Quietening Your Inner Critic. It is one of the most common issues that comes up in my coaching work at one point or another and it was a very popular download. Over the last few weeks I’ve been revisiting some of the resources I have created and have been doing a bit of updating. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of an inner critic it is one of the names given to the negative, often self-deprecating thoughts that the majority of us experience at some point in our lives. For some people it crops up from time to time whereas for others it ..read more

Last night I was revisiting some of the blogs I’ve written over the last few years and came across this one. It is a post I had forgotten about but today it resonated. In my day to day life I meet many people who are working hard to make a positive contribution to their field of work, their community or to society.  Driven often by strong personal values of making a difference. It’s a tough place to be with many knock backs and periods of self-doubt and personal challenge.  If you are one of those people and have ‘entered the arena’ I suspect, like me, you will at some point hav ..read more

Goodness its been a while since I’ve written a post! So much has been happening and I’ve been working on different projects and, honestly, it has felt that over the course of the pandemic the airwaves have been full of people offering advice on maintaining wellbeing. However, there is something I want to share with you. Several years ago I completed Tara Mohr’s Playing Big Programme .  This is how she describes the  programme: a course for women who want to play bigger in their work and their lives. In this course, we cover topics like Quieting the Inner Critic, Discoverin ..read more

Throughout the Year 1: Thriving Not Surviving project we heard from lots of newly qualified Occupational Therapists (NQOTs) about the challenges they faced to their wellbeing in the first months of practice. One of the things which came through loud and clear was, ‘I keep beating myself up with negative thinking’ and ‘I often doubt my ability to do something.’ Thoughts like: “Are you sure that’s the right thing to say? Keep quiet” “That client can tell that I haven’t a clue what I’m doing” “Right now, my supervisor thinks I’m the worst NQOT they’ve ever seen” In coaching terms these kin ..read more

Words are important. They help us understand, breaking down the ethereal into tiny little syllables, then, using those building blocks to reassemble the concept in a way that we can all understand. In many ways, our Pocket Guides are just like that, breaking down things we may be struggling with into small, identifiable challenges so that solutions can be found. For this guide, we started by looking at language, asking what is Self-Compassion? According to the dictionary, it looks like this: SELF (noun) An individual’s character or behaviour COMPASSION (noun) Sympathetic consciousness of distr ..read more