My Background
It is immeasurably important to trust the person working with you on your goals. I know that it is a big leap of faith to start mentoring, and I work with my mentees to build a mutually trusting professional relationship over time. Below are some things you might like to know about me from the outset.
Here's some of my professional experience:
- Coaching qualification via Coaching Minds (my diploma can be viewed here), and membership of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council;
- Coaching and mentoring neurodivergent people since 2020, both privately and through Neurodiversity Self-Advocacy programmes;
- Publishing articles on autism, in a magazine, a health review, and a personal blog;
- Working in Higher Education from 2020 to 2023, helping students to navigate their studies and manage their wellbeing;
- Studying autism-related topics in academia, and postgraduate field research with autistic participants;
- Volunteering for an anonymous helpline for students in crisis.
- Certification from the National Autistic Society in: Autism and SPELL in Higher Education, Autism and Communication, Autism and Sensory Experience, Autism: Supporting Families, Autism, Stress and Anxiety, Understanding Autism, and Women and Girls on the Autistic Spectrum. (Please click to view certificates.)
And here's some of my lived experience:
- Adult diagnosis through the NHS;
- Misdiagnosis, and the journey to seeking diagnosis again;
- Functional neurological disorder (a condition that means I regularly have seizure-like episodes);
- Experience of autistic burnout;
- Experience of mutism;
- Experience of disability discrimination in various contexts;
- Proud membership of the queer community, as well as experience of homophobia;
- Support from the social care system.
My Approach
I love working with people, finding out their stories, and getting to see them make brilliant choices and achieve things that continually amaze me. I want to see my service users grow into the best versions of themselves - and for neurodivergent people, I believe that means embracing our neurodivergences.
Autism is a crucial part of many thousands of wonderful people. It can give us creativity, analytical skills, clear thinking, imagination, determination, and any number of talents besides. For many people, in many societies, it can also be disabling, and our talents can become hidden as we mask our true selves and are not allowed to meet our needs for flourishing.
I feel uniquely privileged to get to see the wonderful, kind, funny, and talented people with whom I work blossom as they explore themselves. Every person's journey is different, and I have no set formula for supporting them in this. But, through a range of tools and exploratory conversations, we can make progress towards your goals and self-discovery.
About Mentoring and Coaching
Mentoring is a resource you can use to find the insights, strategies, and actions you need to understand yourself better and achieve your goals. In our sessions, we can explore your options, obstacles, identity, and choices through conversations that bring you to greater insight.
We can work on tools together that could help you, for example, understand yourself and your priorities better; or we can have less structured conversations that offer an open and safe space for you to investigate what’s going on for you and where you want to go from here.
Unlike many forms of support, mentoring not a crutch that’s thrust at you, but a resource for you to engage with, a style of support that elevates your independent success – whatever you want that to look like – rather than inhibits it.
Through one-to-one sessions, you will be able to explore your aims, strategies, and/or identity in ways that work for you.
Sessions are online, normally via video-call, but adapted to each individual’s needs (e.g. camera off/on, using the chat function if preferred, inserting breaks or adapting the length of the meeting). We can also talk about the possibility of using WhatsApp text messages at a lower cost for sessions, in order to support non-speaking or sometimes non-speaking mentees.