Becoming a Coach: Why This Chapter Feels Right
I didn't arrive at coaching by accident. Looking back, I can see it was there all along, woven through every role I've held over the last twenty-plus years.
I started as a primary teacher, then became an Advanced Skills Teacher, a SENCo, a CLLD Consultant, Head of Early Years, Acting Headteacher. Each of those titles sounds like a different job, but underneath them all was the same thread: I was the person other adults came to when they needed to think something through. Not to be told what to do, to be listened to, properly, until they found their own way to the answer.
I just didn't have a name for that yet.
The nurturing thread
If I'm honest with myself, nurturing has never just been something I do at work. It's who I am — as the eldest sister, as a mum, as a teacher, and now as a leader and a coach. It runs right through me. For a long time I thought of it as a soft skill, something that sat alongside the "real" expertise. Now I understand it differently. It is the expertise. The listening, the problem-solving, the instinct to create the conditions where someone else can grow. That's not incidental to good leadership or good teaching. It's the heart of it.
Managing an early years setting gave me a place to practise that on a bigger scale, building something nature-led and values-driven from the ground up, alongside colleagues who understand exactly what we're trying to protect. But somewhere along the way, I noticed how many of my best conversations weren't with the children at all. They were with the adults around them, practitioners doubting themselves, leaders quietly burning out, people brilliant at their jobs who couldn't see it in themselves. I
Naming it
Training formally, completing my ILM Level 5 in Effective Coaching and Mentoring, didn't teach me to care about people's growth. I already did that. What it gave me was structure: the confidence to hold a model lightly, the discipline to stay out of the way of someone else's thinking, the language to describe what I'd been doing instinctively for over two decades. It turned something I did into something I could offer deliberately, and well.
And here's the honest bit: imposter syndrome hasn't disappeared just because I qualified. If anything, starting The Nurtured Leader has brought it right up to the surface. That quiet voice asking who am I to charge for this, to put myself forward, to call myself a coach out loud. I'm learning that capability and self-doubt can sit in the same room together. Naming that pattern, rather than waiting for it to go away, has been part of the work.
Why it feels right
Coaching feels right because it asks for exactly what I already have to give, the listening, the noticing, the patience to let someone else's answer take shape instead of handing them mine, and it asks me to keep growing too. Every client I sit with, from a nursery owner rethinking her whole business to a practitioner rebuilding her confidence, teaches me something about my own edges: where I move away from silence too soon, where I want to rescue rather than trust the process, where I'm still learning to sit still.
At 48, with two decades of education behind me and a kindergarten still growing under my care, I could have kept doing exactly what I've always done. Instead I've chosen to build something new alongside it, not because the old work stopped mattering, but because this feels like the next honest use of what I've spent a lifetime learning: how to nurture, how to notice, and how to help someone else find their own way forward.
That's the journey. And it's why, even on the days self-promotion makes me squirm and the admin piles up, I know I'm exactly where I'm meant to be.
