HI, I'M LOUISE
Fierce Coach
Loving Ally
I know what it means to feel lost, stuck and small whilst, at the same time, knowing you're capable of so much more. It's a frightening and maddening place to be. But in that stuckness is a gift: the gift of choice.
How you feel right now is an invitation to do life differently, and that's where the real magic of transformation begins.
The beginning of my story is not unique. It starts where so many of us began: with a little girl who did everything she could to be perfect.
In my case, being perfect meant never getting into trouble at school and getting a first class degree from a top university. It meant making myself indispensable at work, saying yes to more than my fair share of roles and responsibilities, and always - without fail - appearing put together (as someone with curly hair, it's the reason I still hate the wind).
By the time I was in my late twenties, it would have appeared to most people that I was on the right track and had everything I needed to make a success of my life.
Internally, my reality couldn't have looked more different.
After university, I spent most of my twenties feeling like a plastic bag being buffeted around in the wind. I hadn’t a clue who I was or what kind of life I wanted to live - I'd never dared to stop and ask myself.
By the time I was thirty-three, I was going through the motions of a life I didn't want, working in ways that felt incongruous to me, and constantly asking myself, "Is this it?"
I wanted so much more for myself and my career, but I didn't know what that 'more' looked like. I felt trapped by the decisions I'd made in my twenties and feared it was too late to start over.
The only thing I did know for sure is that I had every reason and all the privilege in the world to go out and create a life I loved. The only thing stopping me was me.
Coaching is like having a supportive container in which you get to expand yourself.
At first, you think you're just expanding into a bigger container than the one you find yourself in already.
Then, as you evolve and your awareness deepens, you come to find that there is no container at all - that your potential to expand has no limits - and suddenly you’re going after things you never would have dreamt of before you started as if it’s the most normal thing in the world.
Coaching gave me choices, possibilities and perspectives that I simply didn’t have before.
It is a huge, and I really mean HUGE, privilege to be able to think about what you want to do for a living and the kind of life you want to live. That privilege was not lost on me and I didn't hold it lightly. I knew I had to do something different in order to make this time count.
That something different was working with a coach.
Through my time with my coach, I came away with a level of clarity about who I was and what I bring to the world that I'd never experienced before.
What I really valued, how I wanted to work, where I was headed, my dream life - all these big questions so many of us ask ourselves I finally had my answers to.
Not only that but what surprised me the most was how strong I felt. Coaching connected me with a part of myself that feels infallible and full of knowing. From that place, I feel unstoppable which, for someone who felt so small for so long, is the best feeling in the world.
Whilst I was working with my coach, I was also learning to coach other people with the Co-Active Training Institute; one of the world's most rigorous coach training programmes.
Through my training, I could see the impact I was having on people. People like me who once told stories about how small they were. Now changed through insight, a shift in perspective and a deeper connection with their most powerful selves.
I was lucky enough to witness and be a part of those transformations and slowly but surely, and then all of a sudden, I knew, I deep-down-knew, that I had to share this in whatever capacity I could.
So here I am, extending my hand to you.
Are you done playing it small? Are you curious to know what it means to live your life in full bloom?
Come on in. It's time you found out.
"Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion."
Rumi