I grew up in London in a two-parent family with one sibling, and my physical needs as a child were always met. I had food, clothes, a roof over my head, and a little money to go to school with. I was also lucky enough to receive nice presents at Christmas and birthdays. I always remember having a nagging feeling that I didn’t belong anywhere. Not at home. Not at school and not in any of my leisure time activities. At this time I began looking for acceptance from other people and ended up spending most of my time hanging around on the streets with older people, getting into minor trouble and experimenting with drugs and alcohol. Looking back at my childhood, I feel I was really lacking any real guidance, support and emotional care, especially around my teenage years. Growing up my parents always appeared to be busy, my dad always seemed to be at work, and my mum was working as a full-time child minder and was involved with lots of different community clubs and projects.
After finishing school I left with poor grades and having no idea what I was going to do for a career, I fell into the auto motor industry as a mechanic and completely forgot about this wonderful intuitive feeling I had on that school trip to France. I had forgotten that I could work in a job where I could bring joy to other peoples lives whilst teach them a new skill.10 years passed, bouncing between a number of different mechanic jobs and till finally I left the motor industry to become a watersports instructor.
Once I had completed all my watersports training, I spent the next 10 years working in tourism in Europe as a watersports instructor and centre manager. I loved the challenge of managing a team and providing training and support to allow each member to work towards their full potential in their chosen job position. Around the time of the first covid outbreak 2020, I was working in the Canary Islands when the centre had to close for many months because of covid. Not being able to work on the beach and being in lockdown in my flat, I began thinking of jobs that would give me a lifestyle where I could work for myself, serve my own customers, create my own schedule and give me the flexibility to travel and work at the same time. I spent a few weeks playing around with different online work ideas until I became interested in website development and decided to give it a try.
After some self learning, coding bootcamp an internship and a lot of practice and learning how a computer worked. I decided I was going to be a freelance website developer and build websites for small businesses in the outdoor activity industry. Having been in Spain for a number of years and still not taken the time to learn Spanish, I fumbled my way through the process of hiring an asesoria (Account/Business advice in Spain) and set myself up as a self-employed web developer. All my communication from this point with them was via email and translated with Google. I began to make plans about how my business would work, I built a website, setup social media pages, and various business tracking spreadsheets. I completed tutorial after tutorial, but never felt confident that I knew what I was doing. Months went by and still no customers. I began a sales outreach strategy and got no replies. I never could think what type of content to make to attract customers, so my social media platforms remained empty. Furthermore, I lost my confidence even more and felt like I had made a huge mistake. Self-doubt began to creep in, which made me lose all motivation and begin to procrastinate. Eventually, a family friend needed a website for his business and I jumped into the work excited to finally make some revenue for the business I just assumed would work, but what I found was I wasn’t excited about the work, I didn’t look forward to doing the job. I continue to do the project and took on another, and no matter how hard I tried I really dislike the work, I felt lonely and disconnected from people. This feeling of not being good enough made me insecure about my knowledge, so I just spent more and more time practicing in the security of my own world and did barely any work towards finding customers and running the business. I always wanted work that helped people directly, and really missed the human connection I got working in tourism. The more I tried to do something that didn’t feel right to me, the more depressed, lonely and withdrawn I began to feel. A year went by of me trying to force myself to do something that didn’t feel good internally, until eventually it got too much, and I needed to stop. This whole experience put strain on my physical and mental health and create problems in relationships because of my attitude towards life.
After my experience with the web development work, I reassessed my career, tried to learn from my mistakes and looked for new business and work opportunities. I still wanted to work for myself, but I needed something that would allow me to work directly with people. After talking with my partner, she suggested I look into personal development and business coaching and said as I have experience working as a coach in outdoor sports, it might be a good fit for me. After completing an online taster session with a coaching company in the UK, I felt like it was the perfect fit for me, and it gave me the opportunities I was looking for. You learn a lot in these in-depth coaching courses about how to coach, but also during the training you take time daily to do a deep reflection about yourself. On completion of my training, I began to reflect personally about how valuable coaching would have been for me at many times in my life. Both when I was I teenager needing emotional support and guidance, and again when I was struggling with my web development work.
I have started this coaching business for simple reasons, I want to see people do well. Find joy in the things they do. And work towards a goal the brings meaning and purpose to their life and the life’s of those around them.
