I've been a certified Co-active Coach for 18 years.
I've been coaching 1-1 for 21 years. The Client Testimonials give a sense of how I work and the results that clients achieve
I was a Management & Personal Development/Empowerment trainer for 32 years
Experience and Qualifications
I have a degree in Psychology. My first job was as Prison Psychologist in a prison for men serving long-term sentences. A crazy job for a 21 year old and at the end of my probationary year I left - by mutual consent - and rebounded into working with IBM as a systems analyst, marketing analyst and press officer (another crazy job). Fortunately, in 1984 I started participating in workshops run by an organisarion called Self-Transformation Seminars. In 1986 I went, with my 9 year old daughter, to Sydney, to participate in a 6 month course called Being of Service. I was part of the team that ran the centre and who assisted on all the workshops I had already attended in the UK - learning many powerful support skills
I realised very early on that this was the sort of work I wanted to do but, as a single parent, working weekends and evenings was not appropriate for me
So, on my return to the UK, I launched myself as an Independent Management & Personal Development Consultant/Trainer/Facilitator and was forunate to quickly be taken on by the University of the West of England as an Associate Trainer, delivering a wide range of courses on their 2 year management development programme for Local Authority managers. I also worked for other clients in the private and not for profit sectors
Examples of Training Workshops
Management/Leadership Development programmes
Stress Management/Work-Life Balance/Creating Well-Being
Time & Workload Management
Coaching and Performance Management/Coaching and Mentoring Skills/Manager as Coach
Management of Change/Dealing with Change
Women's Development
Influencing/Negotiating/Conflict Management/Assertiveness Skills
Communication/Inter-Personal Skills
Team Development/Managing Project Teams
Personal Development/Personal Empowerment/Building Confidence and Self-Esteem
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This work contributed greatly to my own personal development, skills and knowledge base and made it possible for me to start doing 1-1 work before formally training as a coach
Throughout the 90s I also participated in trainings including a 2 year Counselling & Hypnotherapy course, a 2 year NLP (neurolinguist programming course), a Natural Nutrition course & a Women's Studies MA. I also trained as a mediator
By the early 2000s I had become more and more aware of the existence of life coaching as a career option. I had also met a number of coaches who had trained with the Co-Active Training Institute. I was consistently impressed by them, did a lot of research into other coach training organisations but eventually decided to train with CTI, starting in 2003. I was Certified in 2005 and soon after also became a licensed Fireworks Career Coach
From the mid-90s on, I discovered 'Secular' Buddhism, meaning that I work with the practices, philosophy, psychology and ethics of Buddhism, regarding it as a 'science of the mind', rather than as 'a religion'. I'm an experienced mindfulness practitioner and sometimes clients ask me to support them in developing their own practice
Exploring ‘eldership’
by
- Participating in an Elders Action Network course & other trainings
- Stepping into an elder role, since 2012, at Nature Culture Connection camps - including holding groups for both older and younger participants to provide an opportunity to listen to each other and to explore the concept and their relationship to it
- Setting up an ‘elders in training’ group in my local community to support each other and local younger people
- Creating, with others, an elders group to support the young people in Extinction Rebellion