My Story

Every coaching site has a story that goes: everything fell apart, I found the answer, and now I teach it. This isn't that story. For one thing, I still have the corporate job.

A woman with curly red hair wearing a maroon top and a long red skirt, standing with her hand on her hip against a blue painted brick wall, looking to her left.

The capable years

I spent fifteen years in corporate change and transformation, ending up at Director level, working on programmes affecting thousands of people across three continents. When a big organisation changes something — a merger, a move, a restructure — my job is to work out who's really carrying the weight of it, and to get those people through it.

I was good at it. I'm still good at it.

I was also the woman this site is written for. The one who could absorb anything — the extra project, the difficult stakeholder, the restructure, the move to another continent. Absorbing it was the job, and being the one who could was the identity.

2020

There were injuries. A hospital stay after a Half Ironman. I marked them all as read. In 2020 it stopped asking, and I burned out.

The standard story here is that I hit rock bottom and emerged transformed. What actually happened was slower and less cinematic: I spent a long time getting well. And while I got well, I did the thing I do at work — I stepped back and looked at how my own life was actually set up. Who was asking what of me. What I got praised for. What happened on the rare occasions I said no.

What I found was simple, and not flattering to anyone: my life was set up to ask for more than one person could give, and I'd been making up the difference with my own health. I wasn't overworking because of who I am. I was overworking because everything around me rewarded it — and nothing warned me what it would cost.

What I did with that

I retrained. Coaching first, in 2021 — iDiscover 360 and Co-Active, later ICF-credentialed — then a burnout-specific qualification, then 500 hours of yoga teacher training, because the thinking work turned out to be half of it. The other half lives in the body.

Then I started working with women who were where I'd been: still delivering, with nothing left over. I ran a free women's circle through the winter to test whether what I'd built actually held — five women, every fortnight, three months, near-perfect attendance. It held. And I host Successful AF, a podcast about what success actually costs, and what a version worth having might look like.

Work With Me
A woman with glasses doing a plank yoga pose on a mat in a sunlit room with large windows and potted plants.

Where this ends

It doesn't, yet — and that's the honest part. I still have the corporate job. I still meet this problem on an ordinary Tuesday, which means what I'm offering you isn't a memory of it. I'm not going to sell you the view from the other side. I can offer you something more useful: what actually works, tested in real time, by someone still in it with you.

Also true: I've swum a Channel relay, performed improvised comedy, studied in Chile, and been to 52 countries. The capability was never the problem.