The Unexpected Path That Led Me to Wellbeing Coaching

If you had told me in January 2007 that a poster on the wall of my local village hall would change the direction of my life, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.

At the time, wellbeing coaching wasn’t part of some carefully thought-out career plan. In fact, I didn’t have much of a plan at all. I was at one of those points in life where everything looked fine from the outside, but inside it felt anything but.

I had a certain persona that I presented to the world, but it didn’t match how I felt underneath. Quite simply, I was a hot damn mess.

Then, one day at toddler group with my children, I noticed a poster advertising a local yoga class. Something about it caught my attention, and I remember thinking, ‘I think I want to go to that.’

Before I’d done anything about it, the poster disappeared. I was strangely disappointed. Then, sometime later, it reappeared.

So I went.

I knew absolutely nothing about yoga, and the class was unlike anything I’d experienced before. There was chanting, meditation, unusual movements and ways of breathing that felt completely foreign to me. I had, entirely by accident, found myself in a Kundalini yoga class.

I wasn’t convinced, but something made me go back.

The second time, I cried.

I couldn’t really explain why. I just remember having this overwhelming sense that there was something there for me; something I needed. So that Thursday evening class became a regular part of my life.

Looking back now, I think something had begun to shift.

Then came the raw food…

A few months later, I started eating raw food. Admittedly, that sounds like quite a leap from stumbling into a yoga class, but at the time the two felt connected.

It was an extreme way of eating, but it also gave me a sense of control during a period when other parts of my life felt anything but controlled.

My mum used to say that toddlers have two ways of exerting control over their lives: toileting and food. That always stayed with me. Years later, I could see that I had perhaps been doing my own adult version of exactly that — trying to create a sense of control through what I ate.

Changing my relationship with food made me curious about what was happening underneath it.

I began to realise how much emotion can become tied up in the things we eat, drink and rely upon. When you remove something you’ve been using as a crutch — whether that’s food, alcohol or something else entirely — you may suddenly find yourself face-to-face with the feelings it had been helping you avoid.

That curiosity was one of the things that eventually drew me to coaching.

I initially trained in raw food coaching, but before long I found myself far more fascinated by something bigger than food: our capacity as human beings to change.

What happens when we learn to respond to our emotions differently? When we recognise the habitual behaviours that keep us stuck? When we begin questioning the version of ourselves we’ve accepted as fixed and start considering who else we might become?

I found that possibility incredibly exciting. More than that, I experienced it myself. It gave me a sense of inner strength and agency that I hadn’t had before and ultimately changed the direction of my life.

I threw myself into training and learning, immersing myself further in the worlds of coaching and wellbeing. I set up a business called The Raw Bombshell, with the rather fabulous tagline ‘becoming the woman you’ve always dreamt of being’.

It was great fun. I met brilliant people, built a coaching practice and immersed myself in this new world.

Then life, as it tends to do, threw something at me that I hadn’t planned for.

The dreaded C-word

I often describe life as a seesaw.

On one side sit the challenges we face. On the other are the resources we have available to meet them. We can’t prevent every difficult thing from happening, so the question becomes whether we have enough on the other side of that seesaw to help us navigate it.

My biggest challenge came in the form of breast cancer.

A diagnosis like that brings up an enormous number of questions. Mine included all the predictable ones: How did this happen? Why me? How could this possibly have happened to me?

I was angry.

I was already immersed in the wellness world. I was doing all the things I believed I was supposed to be doing, so the diagnosis felt deeply unfair.

There was another layer to it too. Somewhere along the way, I had absorbed the belief that because I was a “wellness person”, I should somehow be capable of curing myself. There are plenty of stories in the wellness world that can make you feel that way.

But I couldn’t. The cancer spread, and when I began conventional treatment, I found myself dealing with an unexpected sense of failure alongside everything else.

It took time to unravel that. Eventually, I came to a much more integrated understanding of health. I followed the medical route while also using complementary therapies and modalities that supported me, rather than feeling that I had to choose one world or the other.

Throughout that period, I also had a coach. And coaching helped me change the question I was asking.

Instead of continually returning to ‘Why has this happened to me?‘ I began asking, ‘What can I do?’

There wasn’t much I could usefully do with ‘Why me?’ I had cancer. It had happened. I couldn’t reason my way backwards and make it not happen.

But ‘what can I do?‘ gave me a way forward.

I could learn how to manage what was happening. I could learn how to manage myself through it. I could consider what I needed, what was within my control and, eventually, what might come next.

That distinction has stayed with me ever since, and it’s still one of the reasons I believe so strongly in coaching.

Coaching cannot promise to change the circumstances in front of us. What it can do is help us find a way to meet them.

From coaching to 400 retreats

During and after treatment, I went deeper into coaching and began applying much of what I was learning to my own life.

I was fortunate not to have to work while I was going through treatment, and afterwards I slowly began rebuilding my coaching practice and online presence.

My language became somewhat more forceful during that period. I created programmes with names like Ditch the Bitch and Cut the Crap, centred around challenging the inner critic, recognising what was undermining us and removing some of the toxicity from our lives so we could begin reclaiming our health and wellbeing on our own terms.

Then came another chapter I could never have predicted back in that village hall.
I opened a retreat centre.

For almost a decade, I went on to run over 400 wellbeing coaching-based retreats and work with thousands of people. We explored confidence, balance, stress, emotional wellbeing, self-care, relationships with food and many of the other things that affect how we experience our lives.

Coaching ran through all of it.

During those years I had the privilege of coaching an enormous number of people, and I saw again and again what can happen when somebody is given the space, support and questions to begin seeing themselves and what is possible for them differently.

Eventually, that experience also became part of the foundation for what I do today: training other people to become Health and Wellbeing Coaches themselves.

Nearly twenty years later

Sometimes I think back to that little poster in the village hall.

It appeared. It disappeared. Then it appeared again.

When I finally decided to follow that small feeling of ‘I think I want to go to that‘, I had absolutely no idea where it would lead me. I certainly didn’t imagine that one Thursday evening in January 2007 would mark the beginning of a career spanning coaching, wellbeing, hundreds of retreats, and, eventually, training the next generation of wellbeing coaches.

Nearly twenty years later, I’m still coaching, and I’m still training people to coach.

And I’m still fascinated by people, by change and by what becomes possible when we stop assuming that the way things are now is the way they always have to be.

The questions that helped me through one of the hardest periods of my own life are still questions I return to:

What can I do?
What comes next?

And perhaps I’ve held onto something else from those early days too: a belief in serendipity.

Not in the sense that everything happens for a reason or that we should simply sit back and wait for life to unfold, but in paying attention to the things that spark something in us. The conversation that stays in your mind. The idea you can’t quite shake. The opportunity that makes you curious. Or, in my case, the poster on a village hall wall that made me think, I want to go to that.

We rarely know which decisions will turn out to matter.

I didn’t know that a yoga class would change the direction of my life. I didn’t know that changing the way I ate would make me question what was happening underneath my habits. I didn’t know how important having a coach would become when I faced cancer. And I certainly didn’t know that those experiences would eventually lead me to spend my career helping other people create change in their own lives.

I simply noticed something, followed the nudge and saw where it took me.

Looking back, I think that’s probably what I’ve been doing ever since.

And perhaps that’s one of the things my own journey has taught me about coaching, too.

We all arrive with different experiences that have shaped how we understand people, change, health and possibility.

If you’re curious about where your own experiences could take you, you can explore our Health & Wellbeing Coach Training and the different pathways to becoming a coach.