Vitality is now more important than ever and I know this for one reason and one reason alone… I am struggling. If you have read any of my previous blogs you’ll know as a Life Coach I put a high value on supporting my clients to achieve vitality. To me, vitality is feeling of enough value to want to show up in my life and in the life of others. ‘Showing up’ is often the opposite of what we deliver when in a period of depression, where we fail to commit to self-care or, in the extreme, the basic daily functions for an ‘average’ human being such as getting out of bed, eating, washing, and taking ..read more

I am an uncomfortable Life Coach. Let me clarify, put me in a coaching room with a client and I am in my element and at flow, and I feel blessed to be in the career I am in and have the opportunity to support people to live a better life. I am also proud to be a Life Coach, and feel passionate about the positive impact coaching can have in the lives of those who work with coaches. So, why am I uncomfortable? The industry in which I work, often termed the ‘personal development’ industry is marred by smoke and mirrors. The coaching industry is not regulated, although bodies do exist which coache ..read more

Society is rightly focusing on supporting everyone to understand how challenging it is to experience or live with a mental health condition such as stress, anxiety, and depression. Great work is being done to raise awareness, remove stigma, and signpost support. Raised awareness has led to an increase in those identifying as experience a mental health challenge and removing stigma has opened the door to more people speaking. More and more organisations are launching to support those in need, many with services tailored to specific clients, from children, young adults, new mums, and men. As a L ..read more

Relationships are important to us. As humans we have evolved to understand building and maintaining strong relationships are pivotal to our survival and to meet our basic human needs. As cavemen we evolved as pack animals, knowing we are safer and stronger if we have a community which we are part of. We have multiple layers of relationships in our lives from our family, to friends, and to the loved ones we choose to spend our life. Outside of this circle are relationships with colleagues and also those we create with the strangers we meet. As a Life Coach, no coaching programme would be comple ..read more

Today’s article is inspired by two great men, one of whom was a client I worked with this week in my capacity as a Coach and the other was a previous manager of mine, the best leader I ever had. I start with the latter. In my former role as Head of Learning and Development, I was focused on ensuring my department were one of the best, if not the best, in the company. I was continually looking for ways to improve efficiency and the quality of our outputs. While in a performance review, discussing plans for my department, my manager, the COO, asked would I support other departments to be si ..read more

Last year, I delivered a talk to a group of 16-year olds beginning their sixth form education. While working with young adults is not a speciality (it was a favour to my partner, a teacher), I have delivered talks to this generation before, with little success. The talk aims to raise aspirations and have taken the approach of ‘selling’ these young adults a better future and what they can achieve if they apply themselves, I discovered that rarely works. Therefore, at the most recent talk, I decided to take a different approach, scare them! OK, not scare them and therefore impact their mental we ..read more

The world in which we live has changed and beyond that which I experienced in my younger years, and I’m only 36. As an introduction to a talk I delivered recently to sixth form students, I explored the difference between the world I lived in at 16, twenty years ago, and the one they find themselves in today. While I concede some of the following may have existed, I wasn’t aware of it. No Google and if I needed to know anything I had to go to the library or use the Encarta CD Rom I did not have a mobile phone I wasn’t on any form of online social media if I wanted to socialise my friends had t ..read more

Today’s article is brought to you by Marks and Spencer, in so much that my mid-afternoon snack purchase from their inspired today’s writing. I am currently intermittent fasting, if you’ve not heard of this before, type it into Google, but in brief, I eat between 12pm and 8pm, and outside of this ‘window’ I drink water. I also aim to eat healthy and nutritious foods to assist in a little weight loss, but no food is off limit, rules make me want to break them. I’m only 2-weeks in, but I am finding fasting beneficial for a variety of reasons, but more on that in another blog. This afternoon, I po ..read more

This article is close to my heart because the tools and techniques I’m going to share with you are exactly what I had to put into action just a few nights ago. Life and business have the potential to be overwhelming, particularly if you, like I, are susceptible to stress, anxiety, or depression. I’m great at keeping multiple plates spinning at any one time and rarely know how many I have on the go, this can mean one extra plate to spin, or one particularly unruly one can leave me feeling like everything else is in jeopardy. I’d arrived home for a long weekend, and just before getting into bed ..read more