Happy (lunar) New Year!

It’s the first new moon of the year, which also marks the beginning of the Chinese and Tibetan year of the wood snake (nb: I just had a little look at this, and the wood snake symbolises the embodied wisdom of the Divine Feminine who knows her worth, lives close to the Earth and is at ease in moving within her body, which is always changing, shedding old skins for new growth. The wood snake is all about moving forward intuitively, quietly, intelligently and intentionally - I mean YES PLEASE).

So, what cracking energy to begin this year’s podcast with!

In this episode, I’m sharing the benefits of an incredibly effective practice for building self-belief: self-reflection. More specifically supported journalling.

So, if you have never quite gotten into journaling, or perhaps you love the process of self-reflection but rarely move past documenting what’s happening and into catharsis or even changing beliefs, listen in!

I share more about what makes a journalling practice so powerful, how to deepen your reflections and support yourself to process what’s happening, plus: my favourite questions to ponder.

Mentioned in this episode:

* Self-belief Journalling - quieten self-judgement and self-criticism, learn to hear the voice of your Healthy Adult Self, and build your self-belief with my new supported self-reflection practice!

* The Coaching Well - communal reflective practice and supervisory support especially for coaches.

* Let me create a podcast just for you! Email me with your questions or areas of interest for a podcast. And if you have a specific experience you would appreciate my take on, email it through - I will, of course, keep it anonymous if you prefer.

* The post I wrote after my reflection practice following the inauguration.

* My beloved astrologer, Phyllis (tell her we are connected!).

How do you feel about what you wear?

Shopping for clothes in our fast-fashion world, deciding what you like (colours, fabrics, makers), trying things on, and deciding what suits can all feel a bit like a minefield.

It can be incredibly activating for our self-doubt.

Lizzie Parsons runs The Distinctive Style Atelier and she is all about finding joy, confidence, and authenticity in your personal style - she has a really fun, human Instagram account that I recommend.

At the time of our conversation I was preparing for a keynote and having a real moment of what the hell should I wear?!

We had such a fun chat about how to find your personal style and allow your personality to shine through.

If your self-doubt get’s in the way of what you choose to wear, this is a really uplifting conversation.

Enjoy!

Resources:

Lizzie’s Instagram

Uncover your style personality - take the quiz!

The Distinctive Atelier

I’ve spent a lot of this year thinking about the Coaching industry. It is undoubtedly going through a somewhat sticky phase of maturing - for some of us, this is a long-time-coming-reckoning.

The increasing focus on ethics and having a scope of practice, being trauma-informed, calling out the training organisations that replicate unhealthy practices is all for the good - particularly when it comes to outcomes for our beloved clients.

And if you are a coach, this shift in the industry can feel a little discombobulating, it can understanably bring up self-doubt.

In this episode I share more about how I am showing up to support coaches, and specifically, what I think we need to focus on - what really matters for creating a sustainable, successful practice.

If you are in coach training, or you’ve been a resident of Planet Coach for a while, this is for you!

Mentioned in this Episode:

2025 Ripen Coaches Circle

Three OG Coaches Talking Shop

IMHO, the best kind of humans can access deep joy and light because they have sat in their darkness and shadows. Olivia is exactly that!

We talk about the path from anger, pain, shame and addiction to living from a quiet mind and safe body. Olivia shares how breathwork blew her heart open and invited her to follow what she calls ‘the yellow brick road home to myself’.

Breathwork is such a mysterious and deceptively simple practice. Olivia describes how peaceful, soft, and undefended she feels, how she is able to lean into challenging experiences, in particular, grieving for her mother right now. It’s so lush to hear her describe this.

Now, Olivia is a breathwork practitioner; she holds women's circles and the most divine retreats (on my bucket list for when we return to the UK).

Listen in for the richest conversation about what self-love looks and feels like. What it means to let go of labels of ‘good and bad’, to feel our feelings, to build our capacity to be in the mess of life.

I found our first date so healing, I just know you will love Olivia.

Connect with Olivia:

Website and Instagram.

Self-belief School with Sas

In my former life, I was in the business of corporate goals - we called these projects - and I was responsible for some of the biggest, hairiest, riskiest projects in the UK (that life is almost unfathomable to me now). #nowonderIdrank

We often had a team of physics grads who managed an enormous Gannt chart - the project plan. We talked about The Plan endlessly. It was forever being updated, changed, added to, and reported on.

We worshipped that thing.

I suspect that in the face of so many moving parts and dependencies, not to mention all the humans involved, the money involved - we were trying to hold on to some morsel of control. Of certainty.

But the plan NEVER reflected reality! Because things take longer than we think, people get sick or change jobs; we meet unexpected hurdles. Decisions get made in basement rooms in Whitehall, and the whole thing changes.

If there is one thing I learned, it’s that doing anything is bloody complicated.

When I burned out for the third time because I was not made for that level of stress, became a coach working with humans with self-doubt, I found we experience the same challenges for personal goals, on a more manageable scale.

Self-doubt is often a huge part of our personal goals - which makes so much sense - we are stepping into the unknown to bring something into existence.

However, no mainstream approach to goals takes our humanity, or Self-doubt into account. Instead, we are told we must be consistent, have willpower, be disciplined, and be organised. We are told our doubts, fears and worries should be dismissed or ignored. Its like having an internalised personal trainer yelling at us the whole time.

But after working with hundreds of humans over the years, I can tell you that none of that even matters.

In this episode of the podcast, I share the five things that pretty much guarantee goal success.

These qualities are woven into my Courage-based Goals coaching programme, which is currently open for enrolment!

If you’ve been stopping and starting on something that matters to you - a habit change, a creative goal, a desire for some new way of being - listen in!

In this episode:

Courage-based Goals: a 50-day coaching programme specifically designed for humans with self-doubt. If you are procrastinating on your goal - come and join us lovely - there is a spot just for you. We start on the 22nd of October and there is an early-bird price available right now 🐦‍⬛

I’m so excited for you all to meet my newest friend: Nici Wickes. Cookbook author, beloved TV star, restaurant reviewer and food editor for various publications, Nici is a national treasure here in Aotearoa.

We discuss the often undervalued experience of living alone. Nici speaks candidly about finding joy and fulfilment inside of a full midlife, living solo, and what she has learned about herself.

Our conversation moves through Nici’s experiences during New Zealand's lockdowns when she kept herself and her followers company with cooking videos. This reveals the powerful impact social media can have in fostering community and connection. Her reflections on the importance of creating meaningful connections without following the well-worn script are filled with humour and heartfelt honesty.

I know you are going to love Nici!

Quoteable bits:

"I look back now, and that was a big part of writing A Quiet Kitchen, which is, as you say, it's only a cookbook on the surface, to be honest, and the rest of is sort of memoiry, self-helpy. Because I wish I'd read a book when I was in my 30s and 40s about how you could happily have a life on your own."

“I reckon it's a really good idea, if you're on your own and feeling lonely, to move to a small place. I really do. I took a swim this morning and then stopped at the coffee shop, had coffee with a few characters, and had a few chats. That was nice. I reckon it really works.”

“I think the difference now for me is if you abandon me as a friend or a lover because you don't like what you're seeing, what I know now is I won't abandon me. I've now got my own back and I'm still learning about that. And it's that beautiful liberation of going: I can be imperfect now.”

Mentioned in this episode:

Nici on Instagram | Website

A Quiet Kitchen

More from A Quiet Kitchen

It’s a delight to be back in your earholes after quite a long break since the last episode - Sas

If you are experiencing a major change in your life, you’ll know what I mean by a Life Quake.

These experiences shake up our foundations of who we know ourselves to be; we can feel quite unmoored and at sea. This episode is especially for you if you are going through this kind of change right now, if you know you are entering a period of change or maybe coming out of one.

I thought it would be helpful to delve into this process and maybe what to expect. It can be a huge relief to discover that there does tend to be an overall pattern to these periods, especially when you are experiencing a lot of uncertainty and/or chaos.

I’m also sharing a bit of behind-the-scenes from my own Life Quake over the last nine months, what happened, and how I’m making sense of things now.

My hope is that this episode helps you feel less alone.

Quoteable bits:

"It might be our first rodeo, but it won't be our last. We do keep changing and growing. We're always becoming, if we're lucky."

"There is the sense of being able to really see the love and the light of each person. Even those people who are behaving in ways that I find objectionable - I worry about the distance they've travelled to leave their humanity behind. What has happened to them for them to think this is okay?"

"When that kind of grieving and shock begins to subside, we start to imagine sometimes quite big and wild options. Now that we're no longer that, what will we choose to become?"

Mentioned in this episode:

New glowed-up website!

Everything page

Lianne Raymond (who shared the dragonfly analogy)

Sammie Flemming

My brilliant guest today is Karen Arthur, menopause activist, campaigner, and host of the podcast Menopause whilst Black. She is also a teacher, a fashionista, and a grandmother, and does all of this with unrelnting wholehearted joy.

Karen joins us to talk about the balance of feeling joy amidst increasingly troubling world news, embracing the aging process, and putting your energy toward meaningful change, note to mention a whole range of goodness about how we connect ourselves to the world.

You can find out mroe about Karen at https://www.thekarenarthur.com/

QUOTES

“Instagram is my weapon of choice. And I don’t mind being visible as long as I’m visible on my own terms.”

“It all goes back to not doing something just because everybody else is doing it, but doing it because it feels right.”

“I’m loving the collective resistance that I'm seeing happening around the world, whether it's walking out of the Senate, schools, turning up for marches, speaking out, having vigils. It's incredible.”