I found coaching in the summer of 2016. At the time, I was waitressing in a London nightclub with my sights firmly set on saving money to go to a hot yoga teacher training the following year and a new life as a yoga teacher. I don’t specifically remember when life coaching came into my consciousness, perhaps I read about it or a customer talked about it, but I do specifically remember telling a friend that I was going to become a yoga teacher then train as a life coach because it seemed like the perfect job for me.

I’ve always been fascinated by people and the fact everyone has a different way of viewing the world, different ambitions and completely unique stories.

I loved working in the London nightlife scene - thousands of hours of people watching is a fantastic training ground for a coach! – and noticed that while my colleagues would often complain when they had a tipsy customer talking about their problems, those were my favourite nights!

At 5am one morning, on my way home from work and planning my new life, I was Googling life coaching. An hour later, I glanced at my phone before going to sleep and an email had pinged into my inbox offering a last-minute place on the foundation module of a life coaching course.

Fate (or possibly Google tracking!) had struck… and I signed up straight away.

The module wasn’t for a few weeks and having worked flat out for months, in the time between signing up and the module date I had completely burnt out and plummeted into a full breakdown. It wasn’t my first, I’d lived with chronic depression since my late teens, but it was by far my worst. I desperately needed to make some major life changes and was determined to start by attending the coaching course.

Within an hour of the course starting I could feel a spark coming back and, for the first time in years, felt that I was exactly where I needed to be. The exercises and theories behind coaching made absolute sense to me and although I was very familiar with self-reflection having spent years in therapy and reading endless self help articles and books, coaching married up these ideas with the practicality of planning steps forward.

I signed up for the rest of the course the same day. Over the next few modules I could apply what I was learning about coaching to my life and shifts started to occur.

Amongst other things, I became aware of my values and how they shaped my choices, which I’d never realised before. I put a lot of effort into letting myself peacefully leave behind situations, people and thoughts that pulled me down and wore me out. And I found a new confidence that if I kept moving towards the things that inspired me and gave me a sense of purpose, that new steps forward would emerge. They did - and this is where they bought me!

My experiences have taught me to understand and respect that sometimes change happens quickly and is completely positive, but other times it is slow, frustrating and is impacted by other circumstances.

I completed my original goal of yoga teacher training in February 2021 and am happy to now offer both yoga classes and coaching programmes.

Particularly as I had found coaching at a point where I was struggling, it’s important to me to be able to offer coaching to people who needed it at a low point in their own lives and I volunteered as a referral coach with the homeless charity, St Mungo’s after completing my training. I now offer ‘karma coaching’ for clients who are unable to afford the full coaching programme fee.