Journalism Career
My background is as a journalist, social media producer and online news editor for among other places - the Huffington Post, Independent and BBC. I really loved having a job that I felt was valuable and where I could make a difference. Writing has always been a joy to me.
However in throwing myself into causes and issues that were important in the world, I had really neglected a lot of my own emotional housekeeping and hadn’t been examining what was important to me: what I wanted, where I could learn more about life, what good looked like for me.
I felt pretty much like I was battling on most of the time, me against the world, and I was becoming increasingly unhappy but unsure why - so I did that ineffective strategy a lot of us do when things aren’t working, which is continue doing it, but put even more time, attention and energy into it.
I just threw myself into what I thought was the key to happiness - pushing for more success, a bigger job, promotion, getting my own house, partner, thinking that would fix it.
Around 2015 although still high functioning I was beginning to feel really burnt out and started exploring personal development - I wanted to see if there was a way I could live that was more nourishing and sustainable (and, ahem, enjoyable). I had all my ducks in a row, and they were great ducks, but I felt low level dissatisfied and irritable a lot of the time, and I wasn’t sure why. And things weren’t getting better on their own. I was stuck.
And then after a number of weekend courses and retreats, this whole bunch of feelings that had gone to sleep somewhere along the way woke up. It was overwhelming, and I had no idea how to handle them, or how people even lived with all these feelings everywhere.
That was when I took a seven month deep dive experiential coaching programme (they say your first client is always yourself) in 2017 with teaching from David Hutchinson and Cynthia Freeman who trained with the Tony Robbins foundation, Jack Elias, a specialist in transpersonal hypnotherapy NLP (neurolinguistic programming) and Lynne Forrest, an expert in victim consciousness.
I realised that though I had all my ducks in a row, they weren't my ducks, and I had been trying to think myself into a shape and life that didn't fit me for quite a long time.
It’s really refreshing to be helping people with problems now, rather than just reporting on what the problems are. However I do love journalism and writing, and I’ve just finished my first book - ‘Give a f**k- an inventory of things to care about’ and is about how to engage with yourself, others, community and the wider world in a positive, restorative way that so not only are you able to get your own needs and desires met, but you also become more available and willing in relationships with others. I continue to write and coach and coach on writing, while living in Notting Hill with my Italian Greyhound Mo. Life is sweet!