Sunday, May 15, 2005
A day in the life of....
Recently I took voluntary redundancy so I could follow my dream and set up my own practice as a Life and Career Coach. I have been coaching people informally for a number of years on a paid and a pro-bono basis and now I want to see if I can turn coaching into a business.
My husband, Jeremy, decided he wanted to go to Regents Theological College and retrain with a view to becoming a minister, so I had to put my dreams on hold for a while to allow him to do that. It was a 3 year course and as you can imagine, being a pro-active person, I hate waiting for anything. So funnily enough, one year into the course I had enough of just living Jeremy's dream and wanted to live my own! Luckily, Jeremy supported me all the way. I stayed in work and did a coaching course with the life coaching academy - and got pregnant with my second child!
I did most of my coaching assignments while on maternity leave then went back to work in a Human Resources department of a big blue chip company and hoped that I might be able to use coaching in my day- job. It didn't work out, and I grew more and more unhappy particularly at work - until in the end I was at the point where I just wanted to resign my job! At this point I was still supporting my husband and it would have been financial suicide in my eyes to quit, nevertheless I felt I was hanging on at work by a thread. Thankfully, the company was going through a restructure by this point, and the possibility of voluntary severance was looming relatively large on the horizon. Even more fortunately from my perspective, I was given the opportunity to leave with a full 10 months salary - enough to pay off my debts or to start my own business!
In the end I decided to pay off all the high interest incurring debts, while keeping about 6 months money to live on / set up my business with. So here I am...
I did Robert Dilt's logical levels exercise about 5 or 6 years ago, to determine what my core mission was - in the end the only way I could describe it was that I wanted to be a physiotherapist for the mind, body, soul and spirit. I then looked at different ways I could achieve that - both in terms of normal career opportunities, freelance work and even through the church.
My husband, Jeremy, decided he wanted to go to Regents Theological College and retrain with a view to becoming a minister, so I had to put my dreams on hold for a while to allow him to do that. It was a 3 year course and as you can imagine, being a pro-active person, I hate waiting for anything. So funnily enough, one year into the course I had enough of just living Jeremy's dream and wanted to live my own! Luckily, Jeremy supported me all the way. I stayed in work and did a coaching course with the life coaching academy - and got pregnant with my second child!
I did most of my coaching assignments while on maternity leave then went back to work in a Human Resources department of a big blue chip company and hoped that I might be able to use coaching in my day- job. It didn't work out, and I grew more and more unhappy particularly at work - until in the end I was at the point where I just wanted to resign my job! At this point I was still supporting my husband and it would have been financial suicide in my eyes to quit, nevertheless I felt I was hanging on at work by a thread. Thankfully, the company was going through a restructure by this point, and the possibility of voluntary severance was looming relatively large on the horizon. Even more fortunately from my perspective, I was given the opportunity to leave with a full 10 months salary - enough to pay off my debts or to start my own business!
In the end I decided to pay off all the high interest incurring debts, while keeping about 6 months money to live on / set up my business with. So here I am...
# posted by Michelle @ 1:07 PM 
