My first encounter with coaching was in 2004. I was 39 and had recently been promoted into a role that left me feeling completely out of my depth. Fortunately, my employer—the UK civil service—provided one-to-one coaching. The first two coaches that I met didn’t feel quite right for me, but with the third coach, Richard, the chemistry was there from the start. I worked with Richard for 15 years, through three different jobs, and it was a relationship which changed my life. He first helped me find my feet by working on some basics around diary management and boundary-setting with my team; he later helped me through a number of professional challenges and personal crises, all the time bringing curiosity, empathy and deep insight, and a commitment to helping me figure out for myself the best way forward

In 2015, around the time I turned 50, a friend lent me a book called “The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning” by an American psychotherapist called James Hollis. It turned out to be one of those books where you find yourself underlining sentences on every page, and you re-read several times. I now see that the book helped crystallise an unacknowledged but growing sense that I had to seriously consider a change of direction in my career.

It then took me 6 years before it finally became clear to me that I wanted coaching to be the focus of my second career. During that time I worked with a second coach (while I was at the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC) who helped me clarify what I wanted to do next, and how I could make it happen.

In January 2023, I retired from the IMF, closing a 35 year career chapter as an economist and public policy evaluator, having also worked at the UK Treasury, the National Audit Office, Deloitte and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. A couple of months later I started a training program to become a business and life coach, and this is what I do now.

What became clear to me by the end of my 6 years of deliberating on my second career was that I wanted to become a coach for three reasons. Firstly, I had experienced first hand what a good coach could do. Secondly, when I reflected on what I had enjoyed and found most fulfilling about my career, it was working with more junior colleagues on their professional development, and dealing with stresses and strains of the world of work by sharing a sense of the absurd with like-minded colleagues. So personal connection, meaningful conversations and being able to help others by sharing my hard-won experience were important things I wanted to be at the heart of whatever I did next. And third, I loved the idea that I could do something that would call on the full range of my life experience, while teaching me to use and trust my intuition. After decades of work which relied on my analytical skills, this felt liberating and energizing.