If you were sitting in front of me right now, I wouldn’t begin by asking you what’s ‘wrong’
because I don’t believe there’s something wrong with you.
I’d probably ask you What’s been happening in your life lovely? What are you tired of? What keeps repeating?
What do you really wish felt different?
What three AM thoughts come that somehow are so hard to explain once daylight arrives?
And then… I’d listen.
Not simply for the problem you think you’ve come to solve, but for the you beneath it.
Because perhaps you’d tell me you’re tired of overthinking everything, or that even when
you know what you want,you can talk yourself out of it
before you’ve taken the first step.
Perhaps you’d tell me you’re exhausted from being the person everybody relies upon but you feel uncomfortably guilty
whenever you need something yourself.
Perhaps your life has changed and you’re standing in the middle
of it thinking I know who I was there…
but who the hell am I here?
Or perhaps nothing dramatic has happened at all.
You simply know you don’t want to keep experiencing yourself in quite the same way.
Whatever it is for you, that’s enough.
You don’t need to arrive with the right language for what’s happening.
You don’t need to know which belief is underneath which behaviour or have already
worked out the transformation you’re looking for.
That’s what conversation is for.
Often, as a woman talks, I’ll hear something she doesn’t yet hear herself.
A sentence spoken as though it’s an unquestionable fact.
I’ve always been like this. I’m just an overthinker. I’m not very confident. I’m terrible at making decisions. I couldn’t do that.
I’m too old now. I have to be there for everybody.
And I’ll become curious. I’ll ask questions that move deeper than surface answers.
Do you? Are you? How did? Who told you that? When did you decide that was true? And is it still true now?
I love those moments. Because our stories are decidedly fascinating little creatures.
We can repeat them for so many years that eventually we stop recognising them as stories at all.
We build decisions around them and relationships around them.
We decide what we’re capable of through them. What we’re allowed to want.
Whether our voice matters. Whether we’re ready.
Whether we’re too much, not enough, too old, too late or simply not that kind of woman.
Yet I don’t believe those stories are who you are.
And I have no interest in handing you a better collection and telling you who to become instead.
I’m interested in you – the woman beneath all those accumulated descriptions.
Because when we begin separating the woman from the stories she’s been living
inside, something opens.
There can suddenly be room for questions where previously there were only conclusions.
Room to notice what you actually want before automatically considering
everybody else’s response to it.
Room to hear your own voice without immediately calling a committee meeting
to determine whether it’s right.
Room to wonder whether the edge you’ve drawn around your life is really the edge at all.
You may have spent so many years listening outward that
you need somewhere to begin hearing yourself again.
You may be standing between an old life and a new one, knowing you can’t go backwards
but having absolutely no idea what forwards looks like.
You may recognise that the stories you’ve been telling yourself are shaping far more of your life than you ever realised.
Or you might simply arrive and say
Sandie, I know something needs to change. I just don’t know what that is yet.
And we begin there.
Because every woman who sits opposite me is different,
I’ve never been interested in creating one doorway and insisting everybody squeeze through it.
Sometimes what a woman needs is a conversation and enough space to finally hear herself think.
Sometimes she knows exactly what she wants to change and is ready
to go deeply and quickly into the stories beneath it.
Sometimes she wants a whole day where nothing else is asking for her attention.
Sometimes change needs more room to breathe, with time to practise experiencing herself differently
as ordinary life continues around her.
And sometimes she wants the depth of having someone walk beside her for months, through the decisions, discoveries,
wobbles, celebrations and unexpected things
that no beautifully constructed programme could ever predict.
Different rooms. Different rhythms. Different amounts of time.
I bring decades of experience, intuition, practical tools and deep identity work into those spaces,
but I don’t arrive carrying a predetermined answer about who you are.
I’m much more interested in what happens when you begin hearing yourself.
So if you’ve arrived here wondering which way to go, you don’t need to work it all out immediately.
Have a wander. Read. Notice what catches somewhere inside you.
And if you find yourself thinking,
Bloody hell, that’s me…
Well, perhaps we’ve already begun the conversation.
Choose the doorway that feels like where you are now.
I'd love to speak with you.
You're always welcome to reach out.
