“Let’s give ourselves the gift of pinging!”
This is a glorious quote from Anna of The Audacious And. We were talking about how over the last couple of years I’ve felt like I’ve been pinging rapidly from opportunity to opportunity. Each one taking me to the next, creating a path I couldn’t possibly have predicted.
I’m learning to trust that when an opportunity comes up that feels right, the chances are high that it’s going to take me somewhere brilliant. Living in this way tends to lead to much better outcomes than I would dare imagine for myself if I was trying to plan it all out in advance.
In the past I’ve had a tendency to cling onto everything good that came my way. I didn’t really trust myself—or the universe—that any new good things would turn up. So I held on tight—to people, jobs, beliefs about myself…—sometimes long after they’d stopped being suitable for me, or I for them. I was too scared of ending up with nothing that I didn’t leave any space for change.
But lately I’ve realised that things seem to turn up in my life just when I need them. Some of them stick around for a long time, and some of them “ping” me towards the next right thing and then gracefully exit from my life. Either way it feels like magic ✨
This is the story of how I became a coach
Starting point—a parenting group I was already part of
In January 2023, I was working through some journal prompts from a parenting group. Thinking about the different areas of my life, I suddenly realised that the job which had been so perfect for me when I started several years previously had changed so much that it no longer suited my skill set.
I mentioned to a close friend that I was thinking about the next steps in my career and she suggested I look into the brilliant book Designing Your Life. She hadn’t read it herself, but someone else had recently recommended it to her.
*ping* to a helpful book
One of the prompts in the book was to think about what you would do “if money was no object and no-one would laugh at you”. That was the first time I articulated the idea to myself that I miiiiiight like to work with people in a healing capacity. I’d been doing a lot of healing work on myself for a few years, and a little part of my brain had started to whisper “you’re actually really good at this, maybe you could help other people too?”
Until this point I’d been dismissing that voice as clearly nonsense, but the book has you make three very different five year “Odyssey” plans, so I obediently created one based around inner healing work.
The same day I finished that plan, a newsletter came into my emails. It showcased someone from On Purpose—a social enterprise and leadership community I had spent a year training with—who was now doing healing work. This was clearly a sign from the universe(!) so I got in touch.
*ping* to a healing modality
She told me about the Journey, a healing modality where from the start you work with partners taking each other through a powerful healing process. It would be a chance to experience working with other people one to one in a healing capacity. It just so happened that they had a weekend workshop coming up. And unusually, it was a weekend that I was easily able to arrange childcare, so I could attend.
*ping* to interesting people on LinkedIn
I found the weekend transformational, and I really enjoyed leading my partners through their processes. So I joined a Journey “pod” to keep practicing with the modality for another 6 months. As I thought more and more about being a coach I increasingly found myself emerging from my own Journey practices with the message “you’re on the right track”. I updated my LinkedIn profile to show that I was interested in this space, and started following relevant people on there.
*ping* to a fabulous conference
One of them got in touch and we had a chat over zoom. She generously offered me a free token for the One Woman Conference that was happening in London in a few weeks. And again, miraculously, it was a day when I was able to arrange childcare.
At around the same time, I spoke to an old friend and said out loud that I thought I might want to become a coach or a therapist. I came out of that conversation so enthused that I told my husband I thought I wanted to allocate some of our budget so that I could retrain. I was so nervous that I squeaked it round the dining room door at him and then immediately ran away!
*ping* to a coaching certification
At the conference, the first thing I saw on handout on my chair was one of their core principles “Listen to your body”. That was something I’d been learning to do over the previous few years, and it I felt like a sign I was in the right place. I found the conference very inspiring, and when they talked about their One of Many coaching certification I decided to sign up.
*ping* to the neurodivergent community
Halfway through my certification I realised I was most likely neurodivergent. There is a lot of healing in the coaching tools we were taught and I was in a really good place mental health wise. Then I noticed I was still getting overwhelmed very easily and still very much struggling with small talk. These were things that I had expected to change about me as I offloaded my emotional baggage and felt more secure in who I am. Maybe something more was going on with my brain than I had realised?
I looked around for people in the One Of Many community I could talk to about all things neurodivergence, and reached out to Anna from The Audacious And. We had such an enjoyable conversation, I felt lit up from within. Could this be what it feels like when you find your people? She mentioned she had a group programme starting the next day with her crowd of mostly neurodivergent changemakers. I found myself bouncing round the kitchen with excitement and decided to sign up.
*ping* to officially becoming an autistic coach!
Since then I’ve qualified as a coach and been diagnosed autistic within a month of each other. I’m part of a group of neurodivergent coaches all supporting each other, and life has never felt so “right” before.
When I lose my nerve in the future I’ll remember to “give myself the gift of pinging!”
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