Finding Your Way Back to Yourself – Part One

One of the questions I’m asked most often is, “What actually happens in a coaching session?”

It’s such a sensible question. Coaching has become a crowded profession, and if you’re thinking about investing your time, your energy and your money, you quite rightly want to know what you’re signing up for. Perhaps you’ve looked at a few websites already and found yourself more confused than when you started, because every coach seems to offer something slightly different.

The truth is, they probably do.

So rather than tell you what happens in a coaching session in general, I’d like to tell you what happens when you come and work with me.

Before I do that, though, I want to share something that sits at the heart of everything I believe, because it shapes every conversation we have together.

I don’t believe women are broken.

I don’t believe we need fixing, or that we’re somehow failing because life feels harder than we expected it to.

I believe we already carry the wisdom, courage and calm we’re searching for. Sometimes those qualities simply become buried beneath years of responsibility, impossible expectations, caring for everyone else before ourselves, and quietly convincing ourselves that we should just be coping better.

My role isn’t to give you all the answers. It’s to create the space for you to remember that they’ve been there all along.

By the time we meet for your first session, we’ve usually already had a conversation. We may have spoken on a discovery call, or you’ll have shared a little about what’s been going on in your life, so we’re not starting from scratch. We already have a sense of what has brought you here, and together we begin to explore it in more depth.

I ask a lot of questions.

Not because I have a checklist to get through, but because I’ve learned that a well-timed question can open a door that has been quietly closed for years.

We’ll talk about what’s feeling most difficult right now, what you’d love to be different, what you’ve already tried and, perhaps more importantly, how you’ve come to believe the things you believe about yourself.

We’ll look for patterns rather than problems.

We’ll explore your story, not to dwell in the past or assign blame, but because understanding how we’ve arrived where we are often helps us find a kinder way forward.

One of my favourite moments in a coaching session is when someone stops mid-conversation and says, “Oh… that’s a good question.”

I smile every time.

Not because I think I’ve asked a clever question, but because I know something has shifted. They’ve paused long enough to hear themselves think, perhaps for the first time in a very long time.

Years ago, when I was still finding my feet as a coach, I worked with a woman who had experienced more challenges than most people face in a lifetime. For almost the whole session she talked, and I listened. Every now and then I reflected something back or asked another question, but I certainly didn’t feel as though I was doing anything remarkable.

At the end of the session she looked at me and said, “Lucy, you’re so insightful.”

I remember laughing, because it didn’t feel true.

She had been the insightful one.

All I’d really done was create enough space for her to hear her own wisdom.

That experience has stayed with me ever since because it confirmed something I’d already begun to suspect. We spend so much of our lives looking outside ourselves for the answer that we forget how much we already know.

Perhaps that’s why I enjoy coaching so much.

Before becoming a coach, I spent sixteen years teaching children with special educational needs. What I loved most wasn’t the paperwork or the targets; it was sitting alongside a child, helping them understand themselves a little better and watching their confidence quietly grow as the barriers in front of them became a little less daunting.

In many ways, that’s still the work I do today.

The only difference is that now I’m sitting alongside women.

Women who have spent years holding everything together.

Women who are capable, caring and endlessly resourceful, but who have somehow lost sight of themselves beneath the weight of everything they’re carrying.

One of the things we’ll begin to explore in that first session is the possibility that you’re not the problem.

That might sound like a small thing, but it can be an enormous relief.

I don’t subscribe to the idea that women need fixing. I don’t even see imposter syndrome as the enemy it’s often made out to be. I tend to think of it as a rather overprotective friend who wants us to stop and check in with ourselves before we leap into something new. Once we stop treating it as proof that we’re not good enough, it often becomes much easier to ask, “Is this thought actually true, or is there another way of looking at this?”

That shift – from judgement to curiosity – is where so much of our work begins.

It’s also why my coaching programme is called Journey to Balance.

Balance, to me, isn’t about gliding serenely through life without ever feeling stressed or overwhelmed. It isn’t about becoming the perfect version of yourself, because I don’t think such a person exists.

Balance is knowing yourself well enough to recognise what you need.

It’s understanding the different parts of yourself and learning when each one can serve you well.

It’s making room for rest without guilt, for joy without having to earn it, and for the kind of self-trust that allows you to stop fighting yourself quite so hard.

As our work together unfolds, we’ll explore the patterns that have shaped your life, the archetypes that influence how you respond to different situations, and practical ways of working with your natural energy instead of constantly battling against it. We’ll also make space for something I call Soft Play—those moments of playfulness, creativity or simple enjoyment that remind us life is about more than ticking things off a list. They matter because they nourish us, not because they’ve been squeezed in after everything else has been done.

If all of that sounds like a lot, don’t worry.

We don’t do it all in the first session.

The first session isn’t about fixing your life in an hour.

It’s about beginning.

It’s about giving yourself permission to stop carrying everything on your own for a little while and allowing someone to sit alongside you as you begin to make sense of where you are and where you’d like to go.

More than anything, I hope you leave feeling lighter than when you arrived. Not because all your problems have disappeared, but because you’ve started to see yourself through a kinder lens.

And perhaps you’ll leave with the quiet realisation that you’ve never been broken in the first place.

Something to reflect on

When was the last time someone listened to you without trying to interrupt, solve, advise or persuade? And what might become possible if you gave yourself that same kindness for even a few moments?