I get them because I was her.
For years, I was fine. Not "fine" like actually fine. Fine as in, “I’ll just keep going.” Fine like the emails still went out, the appointments still got kept, the smile still showed up. On the outside, I had it handled. On the inside, I was doing it all, quietly, on my own, and I didn't even know that's what I was doing.
In June 2009, my relationship ended. And true to form, I held it together - what I call going into “work mode,” the person who's calm in the storm. I took a week off here and there, felt quite in control, told myself I was doing the right thing. Logically, I thought I was doing okay. I could explain my choices to myself, but I couldn’t yet see how I was showing up through anyone else’s eyes.
Then in November 2009, I flew back to the UK to visit my parents. And it was on that trip that everything I'd been holding up so carefully started to give way.
I was in the back of the car, behind my dad, waiting for my mum. She got in with the foulest look on her face, snapping at him, and I remember thinking, almost lazily, “I don't know how Dad's put up with you all these years, you're a horrible person.” And in that same breath, I realised: I'd done the exact same thing to my ex. If she was a horrible person for it, so was I.
That was a tipping point. Not a dramatic collapse - just one unguarded thought in the back of a car that I couldn't un-think.
The day I returned to work after my trip, something happened at work, and I couldn't speak - I was trying too hard to stop the tears. And whatever I'd been holding together with sheer momentum finally started to come apart.
I got shorter in patience. More reactive. More defensive. Not just a chip on my shoulder - a full jacket potato of one. And it didn't stop there. Two years after my ex left, in 2011, I lost a $15k contract. My dog, Ben, crossed the rainbow bridge. My horse, Rocky - 17 hands of the gentlest soul - died from an injury he couldn't recover from. And by the end of 2011, I knew I was going to have to sell my home. I did, in 2012.
That's the bit people don't see in the “transformational coach” bio. The falling apart bit. The bit where nothing about it looked like a journey, it just looked like fucking life kicking the legs out from under me, one at a time.
Who I am now
The old version of me - the one who thought she had it all handled - was mostly running on ego. Judgemental. Black and white. Uninformed, though I'd never have admitted it.
The woman I am today sees people, and myself, with actual curiosity instead of judgement. When something irks me, I don't just react, I sit with it and look for what it's pointing at. My relationships - in every area of my life - are almost unrecognisable from what they once were. And when I hit an uncomfortable edge now - especially in my own business, where I hit plenty - my response isn't dread. It's “oh cool, another layer - (eyeroll), ha-ha, buckle up, here we go again.”
That shift - from ego to curiosity, from reacting to noticing - is what I now help other women find in themselves. This is also not the first time I have sat alongside people during some of the hardest and most volatile periods of their lives. Thirty-plus years of working with people at their hardest - high-risk of harm offenders, youth the education system had all but given up on, women rebuilding their lives from nothing - long before I ever turned that same lens on myself.
And I see the same pattern everywhere I go, in the women who come to me one-to-one, in the executives and leadership teams I work with inside corporate businesses, in every high-functioning woman running on empty behind a very convincing “I'm fine.”
The circumstances may be different, but the question beneath them is often the same:
How did I become so capable at holding everything together - and lose sight of myself in the process?
That is the work I now do. I help women see themselves through a different lens, so their reactions begin to make sense, judgement gives way to curiosity, and they can find their way back to the woman beneath everything they have learned to carry.
The turning point I didn’t see coming
It was Rocky, actually, who led me to the thing that changed everything. I picked up a magazine, found an article on equine-assisted learning, and fell down a rabbit hole I didn't know existed - horses, humans, and the space between us. I wasn't looking to heal myself. I was looking to add something to what I could offer professionally.
I got there in 2013/2014, during my FEEL certification, and it started a vulnerable, very humbling inner journey I had no idea was coming.
I remember becoming frozen with fear during one training exercise, terrified to say something vulnerable out loud, while equally knowing that if I wasn’t honest, the horse in front of me would call bullshit the second I tried to fake it. Then, later in that same training, something one of the instructors said hit so hard I welled up and found myself unable to stop the tears from coming. I had to leave the room. Fifteen minutes, on my own, no one came out after me. Just me, sitting on the floor while my carefully built defences cracked open.
That was the real beginning. Not the polished, Instagram version of a “journey” - a woman falling apart on a floor, by herself, and slowly starting to understand why.
The credentials bit
I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Community Justice Studies and trained and practised as a clinical counsellor, specialising in trauma, before moving more fully into transformational coaching. I’m also EAL (Equine Assisted Learning) and FEEL (Facilitated Equine Experiential Learning) certified, and the published author of Overwhelmed to Empowered: The No Bullshit Guide for Women Who Juggle It All.
I bring all of that training with me - the psychology, the plain-English brain science and the years spent alongside people during some of their hardest moments - but the work I do through It’s All Connected isn’t counselling. It’s coaching.
It’s for women who aren’t broken and don’t need fixing. They need someone who can see beyond “I’m fine,” help them understand what is really happening beneath their reactions, and show them a different way of seeing themselves.
I get them because I was her.
