About Jo, career coach
I wasn't always a career coach and artist.
For 20+ years, I held senior tax roles in FTSE 100 multi-nationals.
This is my story:
During my 20s, I enjoyed my career. I worked hard to qualify as a chartered accountant and secured promotion after promotion up the career ladder. I couldn’t believe my luck – how did I, the clever girl from the local comprehensive, find myself in a meeting with the Finance Director of a FTSE 100 company?
By my mid-30s, I had the sense I was looking for something but what? When I paused to feel the dissatisfied feeling inside, I thought I needed a new challenge. So I took on a series of new tax roles. As I look back, I see I was trying to prove to myself that I was good enough.
By 40 and now at BP, I was working long and hard. I still had a social life but it was scheduled in around work and business trips.
My six-figure-salary bought me lovely clothes and handbags, exotic holidays plus a gorgeous home in Guildford. I had it all, didn’t I? So why did I feel unhappy? I see now I was searching for meaning in my life.
My sense of being ‘at sea’ grew when I took on a challenging change management role. I felt out of my depth. My gut told me my success depended on my ability to develop my self-awareness as a leader. I enrolled on a leadership development programme with the ICAEW. A trigger came when in one exercise, I saw a theme running through my life: I saw bosses as ‘difficult’ and I realised this had started in my childhood with my mum who’d suffered from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). I started to cry and even though I was scared, decided to open what I then saw as the pandora’s box of my childhood.
I somehow knew that the key to my success as a leader and my overall happiness lay there. A second trigger was the realisation that part of me was missing and was not being fully expressed in my work or life. I loved developing people (this was only part of my then role), art & craft, colour and fun. I’d lost sight of these in all the work and busyness. You can see me talking about this here.
I looked inside and couldn't believe what I'd been telling myself in my head.
Around the same time, I took an intensive personal development course called the ‘More to Life Weekend’. It was a rollercoaster ride but when I got off, wobbly legs and all (literally!), the whole world looked different and I was freed-up. I entered counselling. I did further inner work. I unearthed unconscious beliefs that I was holding about myself. I was telling myself “I'm not good enough”. And to prove to myself that this wasn't in fact true, I was working very, very hard - pushing myself to achieve, achieve, achieve. This belief (and others) had been the under current to how I'd lived my life for years. And I'd not realised it!
It took a health scare for me to leave the world of tax.
It took a crisis for me to leave the tax world as I was worried about not having enough money. On the way to meet a friend after work, I suffered what the consultant called a ‘serious brain injury’ after blacking out, falling down and hitting my head on a London pavement. I could have died and it was my wake-up call. I spent 10 days in hospital recovering and having tests, 3 months at home resting, and a further 3 months getting over the post-trauma depression. As I look back, I reckon I’d been pushing myself too hard – doing, doing, doing – and my body finally said ‘no’!
There was moment as I laid in my hospital bed when I had a strange out-of-body experience. I saw all my learned ways of behaving playing out before me and I wondered why I was treating myself so badly. In that moment, I realised I had to change - it's my life and I only get one. As do you! I realised it was time to do what I wanted to do, not what was convenient to or expected by other people.
Nowadays, I love supporting mid-life professionals like you to re-think their lives.
What am I like to work with?
You can get a sense of that from my testimonials. Click here to read them.
My motivation as a coach comes from my belief that people are meant to shine, and I want to do my part to help you become your whole, best self whatever that looks like.
I value openness, trust, & fun.
Clients describe me as warm, gentle, challenging and a bit quirky.
These traits come out in my art. Take a look at 'Blue Jug'.
If you'd like to see more of my art, which is also available to buy, please visit my art website by clicking below:
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