Welcome to My Page - I am delighted you are here.
I help people change their lives.
I've been a NLP Master Coach, Life Coach & EMDR therapist, with a thriving private practice in Kensington London since 2008.
I work with clients all over the world to change their lives and feel happier, freer, and more at peace.
Life Changes
Is my Life Coaching brand under which I've worked as a Life Coach with NLP since 2008.
Life Changes helps you change your life.
This could be a single goal, like riding a motorcycle around the world, or paraglide off the rift valley.
Or it could be creating a completely new future.
We identify what’s making you unhappy and change it.
Using the unconscious mind we design a compelling new vision for your future, and create an achievable action plan to make it happen.
In just a few sessions you will feel happier, empowered, positive and more in charge of your life and where you want it to go.
Brave Therapy
This is my brand under which I work as an NLP and EMDR therapist.
Through a unique blend of EMDR, Hypnotherapy and NLP, I help people recover from unconscious feelings of worthlessness, anger, frustration, shame and self-hate that are driving their lives.
You don’t need to know what the issue is.
Through a blend of Hypnosis, EMDR and IFS, we re-process the core identity wounds that created these feelings in the first place.
It’s a very different from psychotherapy.
The result is a new sense of self-acceptance, radical self-compassion and self-love.
In just a few sessions you will feel more energy, more at peace, more self-understanding, and more at ease with the world and the people around you.
You’ll be calm, centred and you’ll feel good about who you are.
Why Courage?
I called my Coaching Academy the Courage Coaching Academy because without courage no great coaching can take place.
The word Courage comes from the Latin word Cor – meaning HEART.
We say En-courage which means to give heart.
The heart is the seat of the emotions, where our truth resides.
We say to follow the heart. Heartfelt, and whole-heartedness.
It is within our hearts that we find our courage.
Great coaching and healing cannot happen without courage.
Life cannot be lived without courage.
It takes courage to go out into the world and claim something to be yours. To say I will have this. I will make this happen.
It takes courage to stand on the praecipe of something new.
It takes courage to go into the vulnerable and scared parts of ourselves and shine the light into the corners we would rather avoid.
It takes courage to confront our inner demons, and to find love for the vulnerable person inside.
Healing cannot take place without courage.
My Early Days
Culture, theatre, literature, and art were very important to me growing up.
My family were regulars at the national theatre and our apartment had a whole room devoted only to books.
Family gatherings were filled with actors and playwriters.
Parties were wild.
From an early age I was interested in the big life questions, such as who am I and what is the purpose and meaning of life.
I lived on my own since 17
At 17 I hitchhiked Morocco with a boyfriend.
The year before I went interrailing to Spain.
At 19 I moved to Brussels, studied French and worked.
I drank lots of coffee, smoked cigarettes and wrote poetry.
I spoke English, Swedish and French.
I returned to Sweden and enrolled in a course in philosophy at Uppsala University.
Intrapreneur in Laos
At 20 I got on a plane to Bangkok.
In Laos I set up a business as an intrapreneur.
The company had supplied the UN peace keeping mission in Cambodia during the elections after the Khmer Rouge.
I created an estate agency, matching houses, land and staff with foreign investors.
At that time Laos was still communist.
My clients were diamond miners, gold explorers, helicopter companies, and the UN.
We lived in a house by the Mekong, rode motorcycles everywhere and partied all the time.
Antiques and Tribal Arts Gallery Bangkok
After a few years I was now in a relationship with an English expat. He had proposed.
I convinced him to move to Bangkok.
There I started my second business.
A tribal arts and antiques gallery importing from Indonesia and Papua Neu Guinea.
This was 1996 and I was 24.
And I ran the gallery, managed the business, and made it successful.
It was beautiful, I was making money and had loads of fun.
My husband wanted to settle.
But I was not ready to shut the door on life.
I was too excited about the adventures ahead.
I loved my life too much and the possibilities the world offered.
I ended the relationship.
It was hard, but it was the right thing.
Fighting for what’s mine
My husband and his sister tried to steal my business.
They were very nasty.
They bullied, threatened and intimidated me.
They even threatened me with Thai jail.
I didn’t give in.
I stood up for myself.
I fought for what was mine.
Finally they released my shares.
Sailing to Madagascar
I was considering my next move.
I looked into studying art in New York or London.
I felt I wanted a step up, education and intellectually.
But first I wanted to learn to sail, so I joined a sailing course in Phuket.
I met a French captain who was sailing around the world.
He invited me to crew to Madagascar.
I said yes.
We spent a few weeks sailing the islands and preparing for the crossing.
Two weeks before we were meant to leave, I went ashore to check my emails at an internet café.
I had received an email from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London. They inviting me to join the MA in Contemporary Art.
This was 2000.
I had the biggest New Years party of all time in Bangkok.
Move to London to begin my MA with Sotheby’s
I was brand new in a big city.
I was 28.
The sale of my business paid for my MA and my life.
Sotheby’s provided an incredible platform for learning contemporary art.
But I was intellectually disappointed.
They were too enamoured with the YBA’s and spent little time on anything not British.
I explored the poetry of Paul Celan, whose fragmentation of verses illustrated the fragmentation of language in the face of trauma.
I sensed the suffocating overwhelm of Doris Salcedo’s mute sculptures and I recognised within myself this inability of words to capture the essence of heart shattering experiences.
I loved poetic art.
I loved Ana Mendieta’s lasting impressions, where the imprint of her is absence. I loved gaps between words, or silence between notes.
I wanted to find a way to give a voice to those who suffered in silence.
Master’s in arts Criticism City University
My intellectual curiosity and love of the poetic was not supported at Sotheby’s’.
So I pursued a second Masters with the City University.
I studied Freud, Jung, Adorno and the Frankfurt School, Sartre, Victor Frankl, Simone du Beauvoir, Foucault.
It deepened my understanding of critical theory, art-history and thought development in the 20th century.
I loved the opportunity to think deeply about important subjects.
I thrived.
East End Art Scene
At the same time, I worked with two incredible performance artists from Brazil and Spain.
I managed their European tours.
I lived in the East End by London Fields in a shared house.
I hung out in artists' studios and collectives, partying in squats and going to shows in abandoned buildings.
It was a really fun time.
Searching for my next move
But, I realised despite my investment in time and money, that the art world was not for me.
It was not enough.
I wanted a career with meaning.
I wanted to make a difference to people.
These were very hard years.
I felt unfulfilled and undervalued.
It was chipping away at my confidence.
I had had two successful businesses, made lots of money, been married all before the age of 30.
Yet now I felt powerless.
I was hitting my head against glass doors and walls and ceilings everywhere.
I thought about psychology, counselling, and psychotherapy.
It didn’t inspire me.
Discovering Life Coaching & NLP in 2006
In 2006, I went to a small talk on life coaching.
I didn’t have a clue what life coaching was at that time.
But I was amazed.
I immediately identified its transformative potential.
I loved the approach and thinking behind it.
The past is the past –the past doesn’t define you.
You don’t need therapy.
It felt so freeing!
You have the potential within you to change your life.
Without therapy or digging in the past.
With tools and shifts in your belief system you can make changes to your life.
You can create a life that makes you happy.
Your life could be your very own creative project.
I was inspired.
I knew I could make this something of my own.
Here was a job that involved practical, inspiring and thought-provoking conversations about what was important in life.
And I could start working within a few months.
Spring in Notting Hill
I took a notebook and sat outside a coffee shop on Portobello Road.
I wrote a long list of everything I wanted.
It took hours. it was a long list.
The list included
- A private practice with a black door and a gold plaque
- A profound sense of changing lives & and doing meaningful work.
- Testimonials from happy clients who said how much I had helped them.
- An amazing 19th-century apartment with wood floors, tall ceilings, chandeliers
- Riding a motorcycle across Africa
- Working with horses on a ranch and having a little white dog
I decided to make my life my own creative project.
I would become an inspiration to myself.
As if by a miracle, things started to move.
I found the means to do the Life Coach training.
I qualified with distinction.
I trained in NLP at Master Practitioner level.
Life Changes is born in 2008
In 2008 I opened Life Changes in Kensington.
I was seeing clients:
Laxmi gave up her job at NBC Universal and became a best-selling author.
Vanessa left her job in marketing and became an elite match maker in LA. She went on shark tank, scaled, and sold out to Match.com. She also found her soul mate, and got married and had a beautiful baby.
Gunn founded her own yoga company, ended the relationship with her jealous boyfriend and started teaching yoga retreats in Tuscany.
Grahame an artist who had been stuck for years, began painting again.
Pre, who felt so intimidated by life she could barely open her mouth, wrote telling me she had found her voice. She could express herself!
My work mattered.
Nathan, a west end singer found his singing improve, and surprisingly, the atmosphere in his flat improved with everyone getting on better.
Domestic Violence
I volunteered for Refuge.
I learnt to do risk assessments and safety planning.
After three months of volunteering they hired me as a domestic violence worker.
I listened to thousands of stories of abuse, oppression and violence.
I learnt that two women per week are murdered by partners or exs.
On average they have reached out 35 times.
I worked days and nights.
I liaised with social services and police. I moved women and their children to different corners of the country.
I helped them with confidence, self-esteem and to rebuild their lives.
I was making a difference.
Becoming an accredited trainer of NLP, Hypnosis and Coaching
I had read everything there was on NLP but I wanted to learn more.
None of the NLP trainers inspired me.
The work I had done with women, and the thousands of clinical hours I had put in, I felt they couldn’t add value to my experience.
In 2011 I found a lady in South Africa, an INLPTA accredited trainer.
I got to spend six weeks in the mountains in McGregor, learning NLP.
I became a certified trainer of NLP, Hypnosis and Life Coaching.
Teaching NLP and Life Coaching groups
When I came back, I put together my first NLP Practitioner training.
I sent out an email to my clients.
Nine people came.
A friend lent me her apartment in Holland Park.
I taught NLP courses in people’s houses all around London.
I got my training accredited by the ABNLP.
I continued to work intensely with private clients and develop skills in healing, trauma, ptsd and anxiety.
I learnt Havening, EMDR, EFT, Shamanism, Reiki.
Riding a motorcycle across Africa
I still dreamt of travelling to Africa.
One morning I am having my morning coffee I get an email.
It’s an invitation to Africa.
In all this I stumbled on a blog. Jay had ridden from Canada, via South America, to Africa to India.
I send £3,000 to his bank account and bought a ticket to Nairobi.
It was the most amazing trip.
I descended off road into the Rift Valley.
Got lost in the Masai Mara as the sun set and the lions roaring in the distance.
I rode through a herd of wilder beast.
Rode alongside Giraffes and Zebras.
I made soul-friends.
That trip led to more.
Rajasthan on a motorcycle where I slept under the stars in the desert.
The Himalayas on a Royal Enfield.
Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan.
Jordan.
I was running NLP courses every two months in London.
I ran retreats in Thailand. I taught NLP and Coaching in India.
2017 Structural Changes
My business had just grown organically.
There was no corporate business plan, positioning strategy or marketing plan.
I just wanted to share these incredible tools and techniques with others.
But in 2017 I combined ICF recognised Life Coaching with ABNLP accredited NLP Practitioner and NLP Master Practitioner.
This became the Professional Coaching with NLP Programme.
My training was now accredited and recognised world-wide.
I got my programme Endorsed by the Institute of Leadership and Management. This was the most prestigious stamp of approval.
I added Metaphors, Archetypes, Storytelling and Hero’s Journey.
This meant my students could work at the core identity and destiny level.
There was no other training like this on the market.
Covid and the Pandemic
When the pandemic hit, I was in the middle of a training.
I rewrote the programme and put it online.
Amazingly we were able to complete.
Everyone qualified.
Mowgli
In 2020 Mowgli, my little white dog came into my life.
I saw him on a website. It was love at first sight.
How could I say no to those eyes.
We have travelled to Sweden. Greece.
Thailand and Portugal.
The Courage Coaching Academy
In 2020 I upgraded the e-learning platform and developed a beautiful members portal.
I have an app too.
I got my programme accredited by the ICF.
This took a whole year.
The training is now LIVE on Zoom three times per year.
I’ve had women joining from Washington DC, Karachi, Singapore.
All with a joint passion to come together to authentically empower each other.
Today, my students are changing lives all over the world.
The Future …
It would be my desire to expand my teachings to larger numbers of women worldwide.
To reach people who have a joint passion to come together authentically to empower each other.
To expand the network of Ambassadors for Change.
To spread the knowledge and skills of authentic empowerment – so that my students can work with hundreds if not thousands of other women and girls worldwide, and help them create their own lives.
Making their lives their own creative project.
Becoming an inspiration to themselves.
