BIO - My Personal Journey
It’s hard to give a definitive starting point to my journey after all it’s all just separate pieces of the bigger story all interlinked. What I will say is that, by and large things started to really shake up for me after the death of my father in 2010. My father was a kind of soulmate, someone who just got me! He had been so proud of my achievements at work and pursuing them even harder seemed like a good way to cherish the life that he’d been denied. As a result, grief never really got a chance to settle in me and do its job of healing.
By 2013, I was continuing my work as a successful Change Manager in a Global Publishing Company. I was the girl you went to when you wanted to get shit done. I was the girl you chose when you needed someone who wouldn’t give up but would invest buckets of heart and soul into all and everything. At the height of my last big programme of work, I was working some 13-16 hour days, not supporting myself with good food, good sleep or any other form of self-care. By January 2014, I was truly lost and burnt out. My body was showing clear signs of shutdown, my mental health was wrecked and I had no clear sense of what it was that was keeping me in the job. You’d think the last straw would be when I coughed up blood, but no, the day that finally brought me to my knees was when numbed by brain fog, I could not fathom how to operate my laptop. That was the day on my journey when everything changed.
After a period of 3 months off work, I decided to jack it all in and start again. Within 6 months, I was off travelling the world and slowing down everything to go on an inward journey of self-discovery. Who was I without a job? What did I really love when no one was around to influence me? What were my greatest fears and where did they come from? What was it about me that made some of my relationships just not work or feel good?
On my return, I got to work. I knew there was something here for me to explore about being a coach. By this stage my mum had been diagnosed with cancer and dreams seemed all that more precious. That was over 5 years ago now and with training, certification and well over 500 coaching hours under my belt, I still feel so passionate about being a coach.
Despite finding my true passion life had other plans for me, it wanted fast-track development for me, it wanted me to really believe in myself and for that to happen it was not going to give me an easy lesson. Life wanted me to really learn, really ground myself in me and really integrate love and so it brought me my very own diagnosis of breast cancer in 2017 and then in 2019 the death of my mother from cancer.
Dis-ease (disease) has played heavily in my life these last 10 years and yet I am proud to call it my teacher and not my foe. Cancer comes to transform us in so many ways and the journey through and beyond it can be awe-inspiring if we take the time to believe in our capacity to heal with love.
Coaching has supported me throughout it all and led me to some pretty exciting opportunities such as my work with Sanctus as an associate coach, a founding member and coach for Climate Change Coaches and now my qualification as a Sound Therapist practitioner. Life is full of twists and turns, straight lines but never full stops. The most important point in all of it is to love, accept and know ourselves because then all that remains is to enjoy it.
Much love and respect, Amanda