Hello, I’m Helen: a coach with over a decade’s experience in the charity sector. Eight of those years were spent as a senior manager in a large disability charity with an annual turnover of over £100 million. I’m originally a communications specialist, and I understand fully the range of challenges faced by the not for profit and public sectors, and the people who make those organisations work day-to-day.

I've managed communications in the fields of mental health, substance misuse, homelessness and disability, and have worked in research-led, campaigning organisations as well as providers of social care, whose primary source of income came from statutory government contracts.

I chose communications and marketing because they marry two of my passions: the unending power of great storytelling, and a deep-seated curiosity about how the human mind works: what motivates us, what connects with us, and what persuades us to support one cause, but not the other.

How I got into coaching

I understood that a change was needed in my own life when I began an ILM course in coaching and mentoring. At the time, my goal was to level up my line management and leadership skills, but it was swiftly apparent to me that I had in fact stumbled upon my next career step.

My twin passions for high-quality communication and endless curiosity for the human mind met and combined afresh: coaching showed me a new world, in which highly structured, expertly managed conversations could support motivated individuals to establish what was most important in their lives, determine what they needed to do to set the stage for success in those areas, and then consistently show up to do the things they needed to do to get there.

Even during my training, my clients were achieving things they’d never done before. Things like:

• making the case for a pay rise and getting it.

• successfully putting in a request for backpay after working unpaid overtime for months.

• moving from terror at the very idea of speaking up in a meeting, to independently proposing they present a new idea to a big group of people.

• going from consistently receiving negative feedback on their performance to feeling confident and getting their job done well. Flipping that negative feedback to positive, fast!
  

I saw first-hand the power that coaching can have to transform lives, and I found that coaching people lit me up like nothing ever had before.

I’m a working parent, and know all too well the challenge of attempting to do your best for your work, your family and yourself at the same time. For me, parenthood has led me to become so much more connected with purpose in my work. When my children were babies and preschoolers, it was important to me to work part-time, and to do my absolute best in a senior management role on three days a week. That was unquestionably difficult, and there were points when I really struggled, but through it all I learned the incredible power of pragmatic prioritisation, the laser focus that comes with having very limited time in which to do a lot of work, and the solid gold practice of priority setting.

In spite of all this, in the autumn of 2022 I found myself burned out, and experiencing the worst mental health crisis of my life. In time, I made a full recovery and returned to work ready to put new strategies in place, work hard and make a go of the career I’d been in for over ten years. I was able to keep myself well, get good work done and return to managing my wonderful team. I continued to make real impact and support others to do great work, but my focus had fundamentally changed, and I accepted that it was time to say goodbye to that phase of my working life, and establish myself in a new career entirely.

I'm now very happy to call myself a coach!

I’m a mother of two school-age children and live with them, my husband and our cat Pickle in South London. I’m passionate about the natural world and make an effort to spend a good chunk of time in nature every day. I’m endlessly fascinated by the infinite variety of the human mind, and am always reading at least five books at once: a mix of fiction and non-fiction that deepen my understanding of what drives us and thwarts us.

If you're curious about how my coaching could help you, I would be delighted to hear about the challenges you face on a free discovery call.

About me