H E R E ’ S M Y S T O R Y

I’m Catherine.

Executive coach and mojo wing woman for mid-career professionals ready to reclaim their spark in their career (without setting fire to their lives).

Remember how buzzed you were to go to work in the early days of your career?

You deserve to have the SAME satisfaction now as you did then.

Even if you don’t know where the next path is going to lead you, we can work it out together.

I feel your pain. I’ve been there.

Let me tell you my story.

It was psycho killers that first inspired my early career ambitions.

In my teens, I was addicted to the novels of Jonathan Kellerman about a psychologist, Alex Delaware. Alex helped the police catch the baddies with his unique understanding of the human psyche. The notion that you could understand WHY people behaved in a certain way blew my mind.

I decided this was what I wanted to do.

But my father wasn’t having any of it. So being the good girl, I went 180 on my own ambitions and completed a Computer Science degree.

My 20’s were spent zooming up a massive learning curve in the early and exciting days of the tech industry. I took on a range of roles ending up in the management consulting world of KPMG.

Work was varied, complex, and interesting… but yet, I’d have dark days wondering if this was how the next 30 years of my career was going to be.

The 30’s were what I now refer to as my lost in the wilderness years. I was earning accolades, bonuses, and promotions whilst on the inside, quietly feeling ‘meh’. No matter what I accomplished professionally, it never felt quite enough.

I had no idea how to find a different path that didn’t compromise what I had already built. I knew I had great skills and experience. No way was I blowing this up to become a yoga teacher in Bali. I had financial commitments and I’d also learnt a bunch of things that I wanted to leverage.

A friend suggested exploring executive coaching as the next career. I knew nothing about this field. I signed up for a foundation weekend of coach training and that changed everything. I had at last found my calling. The similarities with my teenage ambitions and coaching were not lost on me.

I trained, certified as a coach and resigned from a brilliant corporate job, and started out on my own. My gung-ho choices to jump cold turkey into a new sector with a new skill had me broke and suffering with an ulcer within a year.

I had the faith, took the leap and ‘trusted’ it would work out.

I got crushed. The universe was not there for me with a safety blanket.

I spent several years cleaning up the mess I created, taking on side-hustles to pay the bills and bootstrap the coaching business. (By the way, side hustles have a role to play in career transitions – but taking on these as a clean-up operation is painful).

Now I have a thriving practice and love both the business side of things, and ‘doing’ the coaching work.

But I did not take the easy path, and my mission now is to help you make a transition without the mistakes I made.

I’ve done all the things I bet you wouldn’t do…

Completely misjudged the job market. I moved country in 2001 optimistically thinking I’d *just* land a job when I got to the UK. I’d always swanned from one job to another in South Africa. It took WAY longer than I expected and put massive strain on my marriage and my savings.
Resigned without a job lined up ‘trusting the universe’. In fairness, I was experiencing bullying in the workplace. So I resigned just believing a job to be around the corner. Then ran out of cash months later because I couldn’t find a new role.
Applied to state benefits to make ends meet (and was rejected). I was also waitressing in my mid 30s (it really was a rubbish job market back then) and even applied for state support (which never materialised).
Thought I had to COMPLETELY cut ties with corporate when I started my passion business. I leapt out of my well-paid corporate career to start my passion business. I thought there was no other way other than to jump freestyle. A year later, I’d run out of money, had high blood pressure and an ulcer!
Taken on a soul-sucking consulting gig to pay the bills whilst I bootstrapped my business. I took on work I hated to pay the bills whilst I built the coaching business.