Life Coaching for Londoners
I used to be one.
I spent many years living in London and working in the corporate world. It’s also where I started my coaching business and made the move from a successful corporate career into an even more successful life coaching practice.
And as a former Londoner, I know that being knackered, overcommitted and slightly pissed off can quite easily pass for a normal Wednesday night.
So when clients talk to me about the long days, the ambition, the pressure, or the money that makes leaving a job considerably more complicated than someone saying, “Well, just do what makes you happy,” I know the world they’re talking about. I also know the speed of it. When you’re busy getting through the week, there isn’t always much room to ask whether you actually like the life you’re getting through.
I’ve worked with London clients for over a decade, including people in demanding professional and leadership roles. And what brings someone to coaching is rarely as neat as, “I need help with my career.”
Work gets tangled up with confidence. Confidence gets tangled up with relationships. Burnout gets tangled up with perfectionism.
A decision about whether to leave a job turns into a conversation about why disappointing people feels so fucking difficult.
Maybe work has taken over your life and you’re bloody exhausted. Maybe you’ve become very good at doing what’s expected of you and have lost track of what you want. You might be stuck in a relationship, a career, a decision, or one of those endless loops of thinking where you examine the same problem from 34 different angles and somehow end up exactly where you started.
Or perhaps your life looks pretty good on paper. That can be the confusing one. You have the job, the relationship, the home, the friends. You’re functioning. Other people may even think you’ve got your shit together. And yet something feels off.
That’s usually where things get interesting.
What do you actually talk about with a life coach?
Whatever is going on.
You don’t need to arrive with three goals and a colour-coded plan for achieving them.
You might want to change career. You might be burnt out and wondering how you got here. You might overthink everything, struggle to say no, keep ending up in the same relationship dynamics or feel as though everyone else received an instruction manual for being an adult and yours got lost in the post.
Sometimes people come because there’s a very obvious problem. Sometimes they say, “I don’t know. I just know I can’t keep doing this.”
That’s enough to start with.
I’m interested in the patterns underneath what’s happening. What you assume about yourself. What you expect from other people. The rules you’ve picked up about success, failure, being liked, being useful, being strong, getting things right.
Those rules can run your life remarkably effectively without ever announcing themselves as rules.
Once we can see them, we have something to work with.
My approach to life coaching
My coaching is psychologically grounded, curious and direct.
I’ll listen properly. I’ll ask questions. I’ll probably notice the thing you said twenty minutes ago that contradicts the thing you’re saying now.
I will challenge you when I think it will be useful.
And there will be humour, because spending an hour treating ourselves with deadly seriousness every week sounds fucking exhausting.
My own route into coaching came after years in the corporate world, so I bring more than coaching theory to these conversations. I know what it’s like to have a career that looks successful from the outside, to question what comes next, and to make a significant change when staying put would have been considerably easier.
I’m a qualified Senior Practitioner coach with the EMCC, and you can read more about my background and training here.
We may look at where certain patterns came from because context matters. We’ll also look at what you’re doing with them now.
Insight can be incredibly useful. It can also become another sophisticated form of standing still. Plenty of people understand themselves beautifully and continue doing exactly the thing that makes them miserable.
Eventually, something has to happen differently.
That might be a big decision. More often, it starts with something much smaller: saying no, having the conversation, applying for the job, stopping doing something out of obligation, letting someone be disappointed, or admitting what you actually want.
Then we see what happens.
I was skeptical about life coaching before I started with Liz – I didn’t actually think it would make a difference but I could not have been more wrong. I was feeling very stagnant in my life and job, and wanted a change. I knew roughly what I wanted to do but couldn’t find the courage and motivation to do it.
Liz was so great at pin-pointing areas that she felt would help me move forward. The direction she took was always tailored according to my needs and goals. Delving into my past and upbringing, societal influences that made me feel the way I did, helped me realise why I was limiting myself.
Addressing all of this made me feel so free. Coaching with Liz has helped me grow and take ownership of my life and career.
Liz is an incredible coach! We worked together for the last 2 years I have seen a profound change in myself, my life and my business. Liz immediately made me feel understood, helped me simplify things that felt complicated in my brain, and helped me take steps forward in so many areas of life. I left every single session feeling a massive impact and weight lifted off my shoulders.
No matter what we were working on, Liz encouraged me to stay true to myself, be brave in my life and work, and take massive steps outside of my comfort zone.
Do I need to be in London?
No.
I started my coaching practice in London and worked with clients there for years. I now see my clients in Cheshire in person and work online with people in London, across the UK and the rest of the world.
There was a time when I assumed coaching had to happen in a room together to have the same depth. Years of working online have rather thoroughly changed my mind about that.
There are practical advantages too. If you have a demanding job, a family, a commute or a calendar that already looks mildly deranged, spending another hour getting across London for an appointment may not be especially appealing.
You find somewhere private. We meet online. When we’re finished, you close the laptop and carry on with your day.
No Tube required.
How does life coaching work?
We start with an introductory call.
It gives me a chance to understand what’s going on and gives you a chance to work out whether I’m someone you actually want to talk to.
If we decide to work together, our sessions are one-to-one and online. The work develops around you rather than following a fixed coaching programme.
You can read more about how I work and what it costs here.
Finding the right life coach in London.
There are a lot of coaches in London. There are also a lot of different ideas about what coaching actually is.
Qualifications and experience matter. So does the person.
You’re going to be talking about things you may not say out loud very often. You need to feel that the person sitting opposite you gets you enough to ask useful questions and challenge you without making you want to throw the laptop out of the window.
If you’re wondering how the hell you choose a life coach from all of them, I’ve written a guide to choosing a life coach, including what I think is worth looking for and what probably matters rather less than you might think.
In our introductory call, you can tell me what’s brought you here. Ask me questions. Get a sense of me.
I’ll do the same.
And if it feels like a good fit, we can work together.