It started in a Derry café, with a sausage roll and a quiet doubt.
I was sitting with classmates from my HND course. Everyone else seemed to have their life mapped out. I had no idea where mine was going. I knew I was meant for more, I just could not have told you what more looked like. Then someone mentioned social work. The more I read about it, the clearer it got. Helping people. That was it.
So I moved to Manchester and studied social work. My first placement was in a children's home. I cared about the work, but I knew children were not my path. My last placement was in an alcohol rehab unit. I still remember standing at that door on day one, sure I knew nothing about addiction and had nothing to offer. Within a few weeks I was hooked. The people I met were so resilient. Their stories were raw, and they kept on living anyway.
That is where the work began. My first job was at the Wigan Substance Misuse Service, and that is where I learned what real practice looks like. After that I worked in social work and addiction roles across England, then came home to Ireland: the charity sector in addictions, then the NHS in primary mental health, then back into addictions. Eventually I was headhunted into the mental health hospital. Constant firefighting. Fast, intense, demanding. I loved it. But I missed the slower, deeper work I had done in addictions.
The coaching course did not hand me a new toolkit. It gave me words for what I had been seeing for twenty years. People are not broken. They have the answers. They have just got lost somewhere along the way. My job is to help them find their way back.
That is the work I do now. I coach business leaders, professionals and athletes who have reached the level where strategy is not what holds them back. They are. The tiredness, the second guessing, the quiet habits that started as coping and stayed too long. Most high achievers are running on something underneath. The work starts with naming what.
What I bring is not a weekend certificate. It is twenty years inside rooms most coaches have never set foot in. Regulated, registered, and still training. The same care and honesty I brought to mental health work sits inside every coaching session. People trust me when they are at their most vulnerable, and I do not take that lightly.