When I was 19 years old my mum suffered from a heart attack and suddenly passed away. I saw her the night before she died and to this day it has been one of the biggest losses I’ve ever experienced.
Over the course of 6 years post her passing away I was swallowed up with feelings of guilt, loneliness, hopelessness and sadness. I knew that I needed to change the direction of my life and the way I perceived the world and my mums death forced me to finally grow up and take responsibility for my life and my actions.
I had spent most of my early 20’s with a negative lens; I would expect the worst, worry excessively and lacked confidence in myself and others. When I turned 24, I finally started to think about the future, the hope of a better lifestyle, career and happiness, I knew that in order for me to achieve that I needed to work on myself and reconsider my attitude to life.
My boyfriend suggested I read a book on confidence and it was the first of many books I have since read on NLP, coaching, psychology and personal growth. I realized that my mindset started to change; I was able to look at the brighter side of my experiences and I noticed my confidence started to grow.
I started to become more successful at work and I felt like I’d make more progress in 4 years than I ever had done before. I went on from managing up to 10 people to managing teams of up to 100 and I started to take on more tasks and responsibilities, even though I could see that I was experiencing success in my management role, I knew in my gut it wasn’t the right role for me.
The job was starting to exhaust me and was no longer bringing me the joy it used to.
So in 2013, I made the decision to enroll onto the Life Coaching Diploma and NLP course with The Coaching Academy. Not only has NLP and Coaching transformed my own life, it made me realize that I could help others to do the same so they could improve their lives too.
I slotted my course work and training days into weekends and free days. I practised my coaching on the week days after work and my partner helped me with work around home and travel so I could stay focused on my learning.
The knowledge I gained and the fact that the coaching work is so rewarding kept me motivated. The benefits of coaching kept me strong and the bonus was working with amazing like-minded people whilst practicing my coaching skills and attending accelerator days.
There have been numerous lessons that I've learned from my personal development journey to becoming a personal growth coach:
One of the key learning’s that I gained was realising that I can change my situation, the power to make a change lies within me. I have control of my decisions, mindset and focus.
My number one coaching question is what did you learn from that?
I achieved my qualification as personal performance coach in January 2015 and my niche is to work with people who in spite of adversity in their lives want to create something wonderful so they can live better, happier and more authentically.
The Coaching Academy was established in 1999, and is now the world's largest coaching school.
In that time we have trained over 14,000 people to become life coaches.
We are accredited by the International Coach Federation and the Association for Coaching, and we're rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot.
