My journey has given me the opportunity to work with people from a wide cross section of the community. It has given me the experience to see what is important to others through their eyes and with that, it enables me to understand you better.
I started my working career in banking and then moved into customer service.
I became pregnant with my oldest daughter when I was 25. My second daughter came along 19 months later.
I have never regretted having my children relatively young. As it was, my then husband was 10 years older than I was and we made the mutual decision to have kids early on in our relationship.
It is through him that I discovered that there was so much more that I wanted to do in life. I wanted to go back to school and study, to explore the world and do more than just work in a 9-5 job. I wanted to make a difference.
It was something that he couldn’t understand and it met with his disapproval.
I came to see that my marriage was holding me back. He didn’t want me to have goals and dreams. He didn’t want me to pursue anything that meant that it wasn’t in line with his line of thinking.
After I completed maternity leave, I didn’t go back to my old job. Instead I went back to school and studied IT. I had been out of the workforce for about 2 ½ years and in that time computers came into the workplace in a big way and I needed to become re-skilled to catch up.
Once qualified, I moved into administration and secretarial work.
It was at this point that my marriage fell apart and I became a single mother of 2 kids under 4. That was tough.
I was working full time, as well as trying to be mum and dad to my kids as my ex had decided that he was not going to be an active parent. But, I persisted. Over time it became easier.
Later, I completed a Certificate in Business and a Certificate in Workplace Management.
I was in my 30s when I decided to fulfil my lifelong goal of studying law. I also began working for Patent and Trademark Attorneys. While it was what I had always wanted to do, I recognized, within a few years, that law was not everything that I had hoped it would be.
My dream workplace had become an environment where I was bullied and discriminated against.
“Sometimes life gets in the way and we get stuck in a rut. We lose track of our goals.”
We get caught up in the business of life and before long we realize that we are not longer on track with what we really want to do.
That is what had happened to me. My goals of what I wanted to achieve got lost.
It was a Sunday morning in February 2006, over a cup of coffee, when I realized that I was done in law.
I’d had enough.
Everything that I had hoped for in law had been an illusion and I recognized that I was never going to make the positive impact that I’d hoped.
I wanted to make a difference to people with their own transformation and change. For me, it was about making a real impact in people’s lives to help them get back on track. Law was not going to be the vehicle for me to achieve that.
I decided then and there that I wanted to be my own boss.
And with that, I decided that counselling and coaching was what I wanted to do.
For years people had been telling me that I was great at assisting them with their problems, that I was a great listener and that I had helped them.
Now it was time to put that into practice.
The biggest problem was telling my father. He had had high aspirations for me and coaching did not fit into his ideas of me being a success. When I told him, it did not go down well.
To be fair, I had also begun to explore certain aspects of my spirituality, or woowoo as my American friends call it. I studied Reiki, Tarot, Hypnotherapy and Past Life Regression, all things that my father didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand.
Unfortunately for our relationship, it was something that he never really came to terms with.
But, it was the right thing for me to do. These were the things that my heart and soul could feel a connection to.
The first 6 months in my own business were tough. You know that saying, if you build it, they will come? Well they didn’t come. I didn’t get many clients for quite some time. I had to go back to work part time, in admin work to earn an income.
I didn’t give up though. I needed that time to work out exactly how I wanted to move forward and, I was able to put together courses and workshops in my spare time, whilst building up a client base.
In January 2008, I started my Diploma in Health Counselling and that gave me further qualifications to do the work that I wanted to do.
It hasn’t been easy.
Over time, my work has changed. From starting with Reiki and Hypnotherapy to moving into Counselling and Coaching.
The great thing is that it has given me the opportunity to explore so many avenues of working with people and seeing that spark of light in their own eyes. When you are privy to that, it makes your heart sing.
It all started with the realization that I wanted something more. That I didn’t want to settle for less than I could be.
