How Fiona Changed My Life In 3 Months
As a psychologist, I was rather wary of going to see a coach but I had seen Fiona on a programme called Faking It and I was impressed.
I assumed I was a life coach as part of my job as a Counselling Psychologist, but this was to be a different type of life coaching.
Essentially my work, as a Counselling Psychologist, is to help clients understand themselves better and to move them on from patterns of thinking and behaviour they are unhappy with.
From there I support and encourage them to work towards their own life goals. Life coaching, however, concentrates less on understanding oneself and more on moving on despite oneself.
Fiona, as a coach, does not soothe you when you fail but instead to urges you to learn from your mistakes and rapidly move on again towards your goal.
Excuses
I was at the stage of my life where I could make a lot of excuses for not attaining my dreams. I had a number of attempted and unpublished books behind me, a few TV appearances in the too distant past and a lot of experience of working with clients with acute stress, either from critical incidents, or organisational and life stress.
But I wanted more. I wanted to share my knowledge of psychology and stress with a larger audience. I wanted to finish my latest and best yet book called Dare to Live, and I wanted it published this time. I wanted to increase my media profile to get to that wider audience.
Yet I was petrified of moving into an exposed arena. I realised I had stayed in most people’s shadow for most of my life - my husband, my children and my clients. The children however were now adults, the husband had gone and the clients were OK.
Into The Limelight
Was it really my turn now to go into the limelight? My divorce was going through, which was upsetting and stressful, and there seemed to be more than the average disasters for me to attend this year, but I decided that I was going to make this a great year for me despite all.
I chose to Fiona Harrold, as I had read that she was the UK’s top life coach and as I mentioned, I had seen her in a TV programme. I believed she would be the one to move me on.
On our first session she asked me about my obstacles to moving on and I explained the shadow bit. She then told me it was my turn to shine and develop the balls to say I don’t care what people think. Wow that was a powerful.
I realised that it had been safer for me to make myself invisible for most of my life and suddenly for the first time I felt visible and valuable. I need not just stay in the supporting role I could have my opinions and voice them out loud!
With Fiona’s firm coaching I managed, with "balls", to:
- get John Bird, founder of the magazine Big Issue to come and speak to the prison inmates at a prison I work at;
- make contact with Big Brother about appearing as one of their psychologists;
- finish my book – Dare to Live - Transforming Trauma into Triumph - I even tried out my own PR and realised I wasn’t very good at it, so Fiona helped me find a good PR agent who will also find me a publisher for my book.
Then just as the three months expired I got my appearance on Live Ch4 TV on Big Brother's Big Brain!
Not bad eh? A word of advice - if Fiona decides to take you on, then you have to be committed 150%, you have to have enormous determination and energy and be able to drop the excuses. Then, like me, you can go all the way to your dreams.
