MAKEPEACE
Integrated Wellbeing
Coaching & Councelling
a multidisplinary, holistic approach to help you
put your life together better
ABOUT ME
I Will Help For Your Better Health
ABOUT ME
My Coaching History
I have been life coach for more than 25 years, since the early 1990s, before it was a formally recognised profession in the self-development arena. And before the worldwide web and Google existed!
Because of my initial after-school training in secretarial and administration, my very successful 15-year career as a business analyst in the financial industry, working in various other corporates and my own experience of running a small business from home when I had my child, I found I was able to help others running small businesses to get more organised and operate more effectively. I also was involved with a newly-established non-profit organisation at that time, and through that connection also started coaching work with several of these organisations as well.
However, I became increasingly aware that the common denominator in the challenges all these small organisations faced was the mindset of the primary person running the business, and my focus increasingly shifted to helping that individual with their personal challenges, which in in turn helped the business to thrive. Consequently, I started studying tools that might help me to better assist them, and that is where my journey as a coach really accelerated.
I became fascinated with what affected a person’s perceptions of themselves and their capability, and how this might be changed for the better, so they could become more confident and better able to create a life, and therefore a business, that was more successful and satisfying for them. I studied NLP, hypnotherapy, somatics, psychodynamics, art therapy, CBT and read all sorts of personal development material, and as more information became available, did enormous amounts of research on the ever-expanding world wide web around subjects like neuroplasticity and perceptual shifts. And I increasingly found myself working with one foot in the coaching role and one foot in the counselling role, in an attempt to help my clients resolve their emotional baggage, so that it no longer had a negative impact on their self-perception and this their business success.
By the 2000s, both transformational life coaching and business coaching had become recognised worldwide as formal professions, and so I decided to obtain a formal qualification. So, in 2008, I enrolled at the South African College of Applied Psychology where, in 2010, I obtained my formal diploma. I also went on to study Transactional Analysis for several year with Karen Pratt of TA Matters, an international coach trainer, as I found this a particularly useful tool for mapping the personal challenges around self-worth and competence that I kept recognising my clients were experiencing. And, always keen to expand my knowledge, I continue to this day to read and explore various topics and tools that could impact on a person’s wellbeing, such as neuroscience, nutritional health, perceptual reframing, etc.
My coaching practice initially started in Cape Town, South Africa, where I was living at the time. I subsequently moved to Johannesburg in 2012, where I continued to practice. As a number of my client relocated internationally, I started working with them remotely, initially using Skype, so I became familiar with working with clients online. This stood me in good stead during the Covid pandemic, where I was able to continue working with people remotely, now using Zoom. Since relocating to the UK in 2021, I have found my practice has become almost entirely online, and thanks to many referrals from existing clients, I have now had the opportunity to work with people across 5 continents.
I continue to delight in seeing the positive impact coaching has on my clients lives and believe that this is one way in which I can contribute to making the world a better, happier place. This work gives meaning and purpose to my life…
My Personal History
I was born in Vancouver, Canada to parents who had emigrated from South Africa, and whose parents had in turn emigrated from the UK. I have lived through a period of enormous social change, saw the start of the swinging 60s and have been around long enough that the fashions of my youth have become vintage and back in fashion again! I started working before the introduction of computers into business, learned to type on a manual typewriter, was there when the first PC was launched and worked in the banking industry before ATMs existed. I grew up in a world where telephones were a luxury, and mobile phones were a science-fiction fantasy, and now live in a world where they are the norm. I have been privileged to see the advent of the world wide web, using the internet become a way of life and an essential business tool in my own life, and I am so grateful that information which was hard to obtain when I was a child has become easy to access within just a few minutes. I feel very lucky to now live in a world that has become increasingly connected and hopefully more tolerant, and it has confirmed for me that people all over the world are more alike than different, that our personal challenges remain similar, wherever we are…
Like everyone, I am a unique individual. But I am also a daughter, sister, wife, mother, and now grandmother. I have been single, married, divorced, a single-parent. I have been a corporate executive with a company car and expense account, a corporate wife, stay-at-home mom, a small business owner. At different times in my life, I have been really short of money, and also financially very comfortable. I have lived on 3 continents, in everything from a bedsit to a 6-bedroom house on an acre lot, and in a variety of circumstances and a number of different cities in three different countries. I have experienced both very good health and severe health problems as well as the challenges of caring for a dying mother and a very ill husband. I have organised weddings, funerals and innumerable social events, both in my personal and business life. I have experienced both a failed business and a very successful one. I have dealt with addiction issues, both with immediate family members and with my own eating disorder that started with anorexia in my late teens. I have been both very thin and very overweight, very fit and very unfit, and have faced many personal challenges in my life. In short, I have lived a rich and varied life, and it has taught me a great deal.
Above all, my life experiences have made me insatiably curious about what makes people do what they do, what their conscious and unconscious drivers and blocks are. I have worked very hard to clear the damage growing up in a deeply dysfunctional family created for me, and became deeply interested in what helps to heal and what can get in the way of personal contentment. I have been fascinated by family dynamics and explored many aspects of the human psyche since my late teens, when I first recognised I had problems that I needed to address. I have read voraciously and looked into many different approaches to psychosocial healing, both formal and informal. I have studied psychology formally at intervals, but ultimately decided that I was not completely comfortable with the imposed constraints that approach brings, although I did find that Transactional Analysis to be one of the best mapping tools for understanding human drivers and interaction, so opted to study this formally for several years.
I have become convinced that the majority of self-limiting beliefs people suffer from are relics from their childhood. I have read and studied in this area extensively, and continue to remain open to learning about new approaches that can help people to achieve happier and more satisfying lives, that can liberate them from those limiting self-beliefs as effectively and efficiently as possible. I have become aware that people often lack the information they need to find other, more satisfying approaches to life, and that a simple piece of missing information can often shift a person’s perspective immensely, and provide the key to making what feels impossible become easy to achieve. And I also believe that our focus should be present-to-future, on creating a life that we want, rather than being restricted by our history.
My Personal History
I was born in Vancouver, Canada to parents who had emigrated from South Africa, and whose parents had in turn emigrated from the UK. I have lived through a period of enormous social change, saw the start of the swinging 60s and have been around long enough that the fashions of my youth have become vintage and back in fashion again! I started working before the introduction of computers into business, learned to type on a manual typewriter, was there when the first PC was launched and worked in the banking industry before ATMs existed. I grew up in a world where telephones were a luxury, and mobile phones were a science-fiction fantasy, and now live in a world where they are the norm. I have been privileged to see the advent of the world wide web, using the internet become a way of life and an essential business tool in my own life, and I am so grateful that information which was hard to obtain when I was a child has become easy to access within just a few minutes. I feel very lucky to now live in a world that has become increasingly connected and hopefully more tolerant, and it has confirmed for me that people all over the world are more alike than different, that our personal challenges remain similar, wherever we are…
Like everyone, I am a unique individual. But I am also a daughter, sister, wife, mother, and now grandmother. I have been single, married, divorced, a single-parent. I have been a corporate executive with a company car and expense account, a corporate wife, stay-at-home mom, a small business owner. At different times in my life, I have been really short of money, and also financially very comfortable. I have lived on 3 continents, in everything from a bedsit to a 6-bedroom house on an acre lot, and in a variety of circumstances and a number of different cities in three different countries. I have experienced both very good health and severe health problems as well as the challenges of caring for a dying mother and a very ill husband. I have organised weddings, funerals and innumerable social events, both in my personal and business life. I have experienced both a failed business and a very successful one. I have dealt with addiction issues, both with immediate family members and with my own eating disorder that started with anorexia in my late teens. I have been both very thin and very overweight, very fit and very unfit, and have faced many personal challenges in my life. In short, I have lived a rich and varied life, and it has taught me a great deal.
Above all, my life experiences have made me insatiably curious about what makes people do what they do, what their conscious and unconscious drivers and blocks are. I have worked very hard to clear the damage growing up in a deeply dysfunctional family created for me, and became deeply interested in what helps to heal and what can get in the way of personal contentment. I have been fascinated by family dynamics and explored many aspects of the human psyche since my late teens, when I first recognised I had problems that I needed to address. I have read voraciously and looked into many different approaches to psychosocial healing, both formal and informal. I have studied psychology formally at intervals, but ultimately decided that I was not completely comfortable with the imposed constraints that approach brings, although I did find that Transactional Analysis to be one of the best mapping tools for understanding human drivers and interaction, so opted to study this formally for several years.
I have become convinced that the majority of self-limiting beliefs people suffer from are relics from their childhood. I have read and studied in this area extensively, and continue to remain open to learning about new approaches that can help people to achieve happier and more satisfying lives, that can liberate them from those limiting self-beliefs as effectively and efficiently as possible. I have become aware that people often lack the information they need to find other, more satisfying approaches to life, and that a simple piece of missing information can often shift a person’s perspective immensely, and provide the key to making what feels impossible become easy to achieve. And I also believe that our focus should be present-to-future, on creating a life that we want, rather than being restricted by our history.
My Work History
My work history has been very varied. I started working in the local linen shop on Saturday mornings when I was 16, and also worked fulltime at the local dress shop during school holidays until I finished high school two years later. I took a 6-month gap after finishing school to travel internationally, then worked in the bank for 6 months, until I started secretarial college. After finishing college, I worked for several companies as a secretary and admin assistant, while also moonlighting as a waitress in a local restaurant to save extra money to furnish my first home. After a couple of years, when approached by my former boss, I returned to the financial industry, where I worked in various sectors for almost 20 years during the period of computerisation, moving up through the system to junior executive level, something very unusual for a woman of my age in those days. However, because of the ongoing pay-scale discrimination against women that was rife in the 1980s, I moved to IBM to work as a trainer, and continued to work for IBM as a contractor when my husband and I relocated to the UK at the end of that decade. When I fell pregnant, we returned to Cape Town, South Africa to be closer to our families, and after I had my child, I ran a small business from home. I briefly went back to the corporate world when my child was old enough to go to creche, but found myself preferring to have a more flexible work situation, so after a few years, opted to start running my own business from home again. Over the course of the next few years, as I started to help other small businesses, my coaching practice was born. Within a few years, my focus had shifted from the business aspect more to the personal transformation aspect, and has expanded from there.
Over my working career, I have been a sales clerk, an accounts clerk, a secretary, a bank teller, a business analyst, a computer programmer, a departmental manager, a senior manager, a trainer, a consultant, a contractor, a small business owner, a property developer, an image consultant, a coach in the small business and non-profit sector and, for the past 22 years, a coach in the personal transformation sector. I have been an employee, and employer, a contractor, a sole proprietor, a business partner. I have been hired, retrenched, and resigned and I’ve also interviewed, hired, retrenched and even fired employees myself. I’ve also run a personnel department for a small corporate, and attended board meetings in different companies in various roles from secretary to board member.
These many different roles have given me a great breadth of exposure, and useful insights into the business world, as well as personal experience of many different roles and levels of responsibility.