About Me

In my personal life, I have experienced many of the traumas with which life may challenge us. These include major surgery and long term convalescence, living alongside disability, death of a loved one, divorce and redundancy. Living through these experiences has for me been a major source of strength and transformation. I combine the professional skills I have learned with my experience of life in order to coach others.

I believe in the power of love and compassion, the value of enlightenment and contribution and the sincerity of openness, honesty and integrity. My own life has its foundations set in my desire for quality of life above standard of living.

Professionally, I am educated to Masters degree level (MA Oxon, Dip.M. LCH Dip.) and continue to further my education through personal and professional development courses and my own autonomous learning. I have an IIC (International Institute of Coaching) accredited Life Coaching Diploma and a particular interest in Transpersonal Coaching.

I coach from a psychospiritual perspective, embracing therapeutic, training and mentoring techniques from a knowledge and intuition base that spans both Eastern and Western Psychology. My main influences are leaders in the psychospiritual arena, such as Eckhart Tolle, Sri Aurobindo, John Welwood, Ken Wilbur, Marshall Rosenburg, Thich Nhat Hahn, Pema Chodron and Joanna Macy.

My coaching business is the fourth small business that I have run. In addition to this I have had experience of running a medium sized company jointly with my ex husband and I have worked for two major international corporations in industrial sales, marketing, and training functions. My experience in the education and training of others and in facilitating their personal and professional development spans 20 years. It also includes voluntary work for a family support group, a children’s rights organisation and a Transition Town initiative.

Simplifying Life – My downshifting story

For us, it all started in 1998 with the children being unhappy and stressed in school. I felt that their educational needs were not being met and decided to quit my job and sell my business in order to home educate them. That reduced our income to the point where we could no longer afford to pay the mortgage. Coincidentally, my husband’s job had changed slightly in nature which meant that he was free to spend some of his time working from home.

We quickly realised that we needed to completely reassess how we were living and how we were “earning a living”. What we really wanted to do was change our focus and prioritise our family life together. We had begun our downshifting journey. Having started to question the assumptions of compulsory mass schooling and finding many of them to be at odds with our personal values, we found ourselves questioning many other cultural beliefs and for us this was watershed time! Suddenly, it was almost as though we had too many choices. We knew we had to sell the house to stay afloat financially, but really we could now live anywhere, not being tied by schooling or work.

We decided in the end to move to the West Country to be nearer close family members. We also decided to use the opportunity to buy a much less expensive house. This left us with the freedom to earn less money between us and gave us both the opportunity to choose work that enabled us to do what we really enjoyed.

As with many couples, deciding to reassess our lives in an honest way meant facing some challenging relationship issues. A few years after our move to the West Country,we chose, quite amicably, to part company. I continued to downshift and our children are now quite grown up and are venturing into adulthood. Since remarrying in 2009, I now divide my time between my work, growing food, spending time with my partner, family and friends and helping out in our local Transition Town initiative, all of which I enjoy.

Am I the right coach for you? Please feel free to contact me to arrange a no-obligation, exploratory telephone conversation.