I spent more than a decade in senior NHS leadership. Years of holding things together in places where the pressure was real. Those years taught me a great deal about systems, more about people, and most of all about what happens to a person when the role they carry begins to ask more of them than they recognise in themselves.

I was often the only one who looked like me in the room. Building authority in places that were not built with you in mind is not something you read about. It’s something you feel, daily. This is a small part of my story, but it taught me early what it takes to stay true to yourself.

I also know the in-between from the inside. You can do everything right. Follow the path that was laid out for you, meet the expectations, build the life that looks, from the outside, like the one you were meant to want. And still arrive at a quiet realisation that something has shifted. That the person who got here is not the same person you are now, or the one you want to continue being. I have sat in that uncertainty myself.

I did not have anywhere to take it at the time, and I have never forgotten what that absence felt like.

So let me tell you what this work actually is.

It is not therapy. Therapy looks back to understand what shaped you. This looks forward, toward who you are becoming and what you want to carry into it. It is not the kind of coaching that hands you a model and asks you to apply it to yourself. The aim is not to fix you.

I believe a transition is not an interruption to your life. It is your life, asking for your attention. Most of us are very good at not hearing it. We fill the time. We push the question down. But the questions don’t leave. They wait. And left long enough, they tend to surface in ways you can’t ignore. The women I sit with have usually reached the point of wanting, at last, to stop and listen properly.

What happens in the room is hard to describe until you are in it. Women tell me they say things they have not been able to say out loud before. Not because I press them, but because the space is genuinely safe and there is nothing in it that needs anything from them. I listen closely. I notice what hasn’t been said. And I will, gently, ask you to look at the thing you have been avoiding. Not to unsettle you. Because seeing it clearly is usually what lets you move.