Hi! I’m Katie

I’m an accredited Health & Wellbeing Coach, specialising in coaching people going through a medical crisis or health challenge.

I’m also an accredited Executive Coach.

I first got into Corporate & Executive coaching following an initial career in journalism.

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As a journalist, I moved from country to country interviewing country and industry leaders to compile special economic reports on those countries for Western print media

I met hundreds of leaders over the course of a decade, back in the ‘90s.

In the privileged position of being in a room with those leaders I learnt so much about strategic thinking, communication styles and leadership traits.

Transitioning those skills over to Executive Coaching was a logical career move once I decided to settle down in one place.

I am proud to have coached a lot of leaders who want to further develop themselves, to be the best leaders they can possibly be.

I’ve lived and worked in 12 different countries over the past 35 years

but now have come full circle back to where I was brought up; in Northumberland, in the north-east of England. 

I was just 17 years old when I first moved away and went to university, to study European Business Management. 

I kept moving south, studying in France, then moving to Spain and beyond, initially to West Africa. 

In my journalism role, I spent time on most continents and, over the past decade, I’ve travelled the world as a facilitator of leadership learning and development programmes too, working in organisations and business schools.

It wasn’t all plain sailing though…

I think of life as a journey, full of twists and turns

In 2001, living in Ghana, I broke my back in a car accident. I was medevac’ed back to England, where I was put back together.

Although I was lucky not to have had more severe repercussions from my injuries, it did mark the beginning of a new phase of my life as I continued to juggle my career, family life and health whilst living with physical pain. 

More of a struggle, however, was to manage my mindset and to develop mental and emotional coping strategies.

I believe in continuous learning. I’ve attended many courses and completed numerous programmes, not only to further my professional development, but also to equip myself with ways and means of building more resilience, sharpen my thinking and broaden my coaching capability.

In 2020, as the pandemic was beginning to spread across the world, and having been coaching for some 15 years already, a colleague told me about Medical Coaching.

I immediately knew that I simply had to become a Professional Medical Coach.

That’s because Medical Coaches help individuals going through a medical crisis or health challenge - be it breaking their back, getting a cancer diagnosis or experiencing career burnout or other - by helping them build their personal resilience and supporting them with tools and techniques to make their journey more tolerable. It provides exactly the support that I wish I’d had 20 years before, when I broke my back.

Ironically, whilst studying to become a Professional Medical Coach (PMC), I was diagnosed with a type of cancer (DCIS) and had to undergo surgery and radiotherapy. I qualified as a PMC just a month after completing treatment. 

I prefer to call myself a Health & Wellbeing Coach, specialising in helping individuals navigate medical crises or health challenges, because that explains what I do in a nutshell.

Today, I tend to coach from the comfort of my home office, via Teams or Zoom. I no longer travel so much for work, but I’m pleased to still be able to work with individuals from all over the world.

I love meeting new people and making a difference in their lives, helping them to navigate the storms and the calm; whether that be as an Exec Coach to them or a Health & Wellbeing Coach, or a combination of both.