A few years ago when I started to do my first training, I asked Cassie Jane to help me – to offer me her time and trust, so that I could see whether I could help her feel – even – more like herself and work out what would be next for her.
We worked online – it was 2020 – and in just 6 weeks I took her through the Helping People Change process uncovering her Life, Values, Drivers, Influencers and by going back to the core of her, her true self and real identity, she started to get clarity on her vision for life.
It was a beautiful process, a real partnership and the outcome of it was that I was left feeling I had helped her see clarity around her personal and professional life. Also, I was enormously impressed by her determination and wisdom to know what she wanted for how to run her businesses, take the next steps in her journey towards having children and all of it ended up on this wonderful vision board. I knew she was on the right track and she was going to get there.
What I didn’t know was that Cassie had begun to uncover a serious misalignment between her own vision, including where she was living and what she was spending most of her time on. Sometimes, when we work together in a coaching partnership, the real insights follow later when the ‘unpeeling’ has been done and the rebuilding can begin (this is called ‘integration’ or ‘cognitive processing’ in psychology).
In her recently published podcast ‘Greener Fields’ with Hannah Nash, Cassie talks about the role of her coaching as she made some major changes in her life (the whole podcast is worth listening to but if you’d like to jump to the relevant bit, it’s about half an hour in). Here’s what she says:
“For a couple of months I had been working with a Life Coach, which sounds funny but it was a colleague of mine who was training to be a Life Coach and then an Executive Coach. She’s incredible, and if there was one woman I was going to put in charge of my life it would be her!
“I was going through a lot of changes and she said, “Cassie, would you mind being my guinea pig while I do my training?” And so it was a journey for the two of us together.
“We had been meeting up quite a bit and she asked me to visualise my perfect life – not perfect, there’s obviously not such a thing – but with the activities I’d like to do, the hobbies I want to pick up, how I want my business to look, how I want my health to be… every single aspect of my life. To think about what I want from it. And I did this.
“I had painted the most beautiful life and I created a vision board with a load of Pinterest photos and it looked incredible. And the reality is: it put me in a lot of reflection: where am I now and how do I get here? And I just realised in the situation that I was in – and especially with the added pressure of now thinking about children and brining children into the world and into this situation... I just couldn’t do it. Because it wasn’t in any way aligned with who I wanted to be and what I wanted my life to be like before kids, let alone with kids. The situation wasn’t going to align with where I needed it to be, and I don’t think it ever could have.”
A few months later, Cassie left her husband, moved from Oxford back home to Ireland and started a new journey altogether to feel more like herself and live a life more aligned with her own sense of purpose.
I cannot take any credit (nor blame!) for her lasting changes – she went on a journey, she was in charge, and I just was a support for her when she took her first steps – but I will allow the power of the process to speak through her story: Living your fullest life is exactly about this, finding out what you really want in life and going for it – before it is too late.
Thank you, @Cassie Jane, for sharing your story.
Here's the link to her podcast, and a photo of her vision board. You're a star, Cassie! ✨
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