How I Became a Creative Coach
Strap in, because it’s a long story.
I guess most things are.
I’ve been working in the TV industry for 15 years now. I studied business in undergrad originally, then I went to film school at USC for the Peter Stark Producing Program. I’ve always loved TV, and at the time it was my favourite kind of storytelling.
Looking back now, it’s clear that what I really wanted to do, was write. I think I just didn’t have the confidence to not just say what I wanted, but also write enough that I would improve my writing and feel confident showing it to people. So instead I became a producer and a story editor and producer. I’ve worked in TV drama and TV comedy most recently I story produced an amazing Comedy drama for BBC One. That’s a really brilliant murder mystery series.
I the last couple of years I was also diagnosed as a neuro divergent person. I wonder if your diagnosis but I definitely qualify for two of them.
One of the things that changee for me coming out of lockdown is I realised that I really needed to work from home in order not to burn out I think I used to just be really anxious all the time and now that I know what emotions I’m feeling and why I realise that I just need a lot of flexibility in my schedule and in my work locations.
One of my favourite things about my job as a TV and story producer is working with brilliant writers and creatives from all backgrounds telling different kinds of stories and one of the things I kept coming out for me and my job is that I felt like I was helping the writers manage their project and manage and I always make sure that they were feeling good about it but sometimes I wanted to be doing that but more And so when I heard about coaching I realise that it actually really fit the briefer a part of the job that I wanted to do more of and coincidentally a friend of mine had qualified as a therapist and needed to set up her practice but felt way too overwhelmed at the thought of launching herself and so I decided to help her and essentially coach her For a few months and then I knew that I really wanted to do this job a hell of a lot more
So I trained as a coach. I’ve got a few qualifications in life coaching and transformational life coaching in trauma and form coaching and ADHD coaching.
What I bring as a coach is 15 years of experience of working with creatives and storytellers and people from all walks of lives taken projects and ideas from a little seed all the way to something that exists on the page and exist on the screen. I love working with queer people queer voices with women with minorities . I bring warmth and enthusiasm and nerdiness enjoy and I love making space for other peoples emotions and helping them to get to where they wanna go.
One of the many amazing things about becoming a coach is the way that it’s transformed my relationship with myself and in the process of learning about how to help people transform their own lives it’s really help me transform mine as I’ve stepped into the power of my vulnerability and how I can use it to help other people with theirs it has really unlocked so many more layers of my creative drive and I’m going full speed with my poetry writing and submitting to lots of journals. I’m doing one illustration a day this year and I’m also working on a memoir. I understand firsthand what it’s like to have all of these feelings and all of these ideas all of these things that you wanna get done but it feels like you keep getting in your own way and I’ve learned so much in my personal life and my coaching practice about how to help people overcome their blocks and it would be my absolute honour to do it with so many more people.
Look I’ve I went to therapy for five years I’ve had a few different therapists. Some of them were amazing and the work that I did with them without a doubt change my life and my understanding of myself and my emotional landscape and I think at some point I realise that I felt like I was stagnating and standing still and sometimes going to therapy felt like it was holding me back and making me feel worse about myself then what I was looking for And that isn’t a reflection at all of the work that I was putting in or the work that a therapist was putting in, but I think that some point if you understand yourself well enough what you need to do is you need to help shift the way that your brain functions Because you’re admired in the old patterns rather than discussing the patterns over and over again and I think one of the things that I tend to do as an autistic person is to intellectualise and overthink and I think I was doing that for really long time in therapy and the thing I love about coaching is that it’s about The person that you know that you can be and that you want to become and then finding the tools and having the conversations that you need to have to get there and of course life being life things get in the way and it’s not always that easy but I have experienced firsthand through being coached how transformative it is to have someone who’s in your corner who you can be really honest about what you’re struggling with and who is going to help you step-by-step brick by brick build the life that you need and the life that you want.