MY
Story
L
My life is created by my experiences and stories. Every decison and choice I made has brought me here.
Like most lives, mine has been a fair mix of incredible times with successes and incredible experiences, but also challenges, trauma and heartache.
I earned a scholoarship to an incredible girls school, was successful in my educational achievements but rejected my University place in exchange for the sun and freedom of California when I was just 19.
This was also my first taste of entrepreneurship as we set up a small business washing cars at local business parks.
Freedom turned out to be one of my core values.
Over the next decade, I spent time a lot of time in California. I trained as a Holistic Therapist and took my first level in Counselling training.
I was a psychology and self-development junkie had always been interested in NLP, but it was all self learned knowledge and there were dots that needed to join up so that I could bring peace and happiness into my life, I wasn't aware of that and so my unconscious was running the show.
When I was 22, I suffered an existential crisis and a depression that led me to feeling suicidal. Nobody noticed as I covered it all up. I was completely terrified and alone.
I finally got some help and spent the next two years spent recovering and recalibrating and still had a lot of residual anxiety.
I had a media advertising job I loved, I had friends and a great relationship. I had a part time business in therapies and loved that - life was good.
Until the end of my relationship and I found myself wanting to get away- I now recognise this as a real life flight response. I would literally get a flight away from my problems.
After time in Sydney, I landed a high performance corporate role in media advertising sales.
This was demanding but highly rewarding. I quickly became a top performer and a high earner, but it came at a cost.
After I had my daughter, I went back to the same pace, but my values had changed.
Being a Mum was my priority and it didn't fit with the values of the company any longer.
This made me unhappy but I continued, unclear how to change things now I had more responsibility and was a solo parent.
Then a tragic and sudden family loss reminded me how short life really is.
I realised I needed my freedom and to find my purpose.
I wanted to leave the rat race and stop living at such high speed.
I wanted to be present for my daughter and do something that I loved doing.
I made the decison to leave and start my own business.
I had all the skills and experience I needed to run my own publishing business and, in 2012, I launched Community Life Magazine.
This was led by my values and fast became a success as I created one of the first augmented reality magazines.
The magazine won the FSB Award for Innovation and I was chosen as Bedfordshire BusinessWoman of the Year.
The magazine was well-recognised and I was nominated for my contribution to community and was invited to one of The Queen's infamous Royal Garden Parties.
I was commissioned to produce a Special Edition Royal Charity magazine for the Lord Lieutenant of Bedfordshire.
In 2015, I merged with another local publishing house and this new business partnership saw launch of a new community magazine and also produced special edition publications and local guides.
Business was great, but I was still leaning towards my passion for psychology, personal growth and helping others to develop and fulfil their potential.
It was time for a decision and a new path.
I sold my shares and left publishing to become an NLP Coach which led me to the path of transformation, healing and growth.
Coaching and NLP invited me to see everything in my life a new light.
Values work was transformational and I could see where all those dots of my life started to join up...
I realised my life wasn't truly aligned with my values and I started to notice the patterns and beliefs that had run through my life, formed from past experiences and trauma. I started to awaken and really raise awareness of what I needed to be able to rewrite my stories and change my beliefs about who I was.
This was the beginning of the inner work that unlocked me and gave me the ultimate freedom.
The past will knock on your door
when it's time to grow.
People often miss the links between their past and present.
It may seem far away on your timeline as an experience or event, but nothing is the past when impacts you every day in the form of thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
Truth was, I couldn't see the impacts of my past on my present, even though I had experienced some very difficult times personally.
But when I looked at my current thinking system and my beleifs, I began to trace my steps, connect the dots and dive deeper.
I wanted a lot more in my business and life, but I couldn't understand why it hadn't all materialised yet, why things had been tough personally and why I often procrastinated as much as I took action, I felt an inner conflict and never felt truly at rest or like I could relax or stop achieving.
I had a lot of resilience and was pretty high functional and intellectual but my capacity was becoming really stretched the more I tried to do and achieve.
I was still running on my old programmes and needed to heal and transform the past.
After an unhealthy relationship that has contravened every value I help and given me such heartache, I looked at this and took a new persepctive of responsibilty, If all the choices I made had brought me here, how did I make those choices? Based on what?
With this new level of awareness, I asked myself this key and life-changing question:
How did I get here?
How had my past impacted my present?
What had I experienced that had that impacted me and my decisions?
What did I believe at my core about myself, others and the world?
Whose values had I been living by?
How much of the true me was operating?
How did I reconnect with myself and fulfil my true purpose?
I realised I had gone against my own values and tolerated so much that I wasn't sure who I was anymore.
Found myself in a place where I didn't have much self-love or compassion and I wasn't valuing myself.
It made no sense at this point. I had always been confident, smart, successful and resilient but it became clear I had lost myself somewhere along the way..
Going back to go forward
Finding my voice
I looked back to gain insight and unravel some of the past to make sense of it.
I examined my story and I started to realise that my childhood had a major impact on me and had created trauma which was unresolved and stayed within me affecting my choices, emotions and behaviours into adulthood.
My Mum was divorced and the truth about my my real Dad was kept from me. Mum worked two jobs. There was little money left over, but I remember the things I loved and was good ar; reading, singing, writing, creating and drawing -and I loved school and learning.
I had been bullied badly when I was 7 and then was very unhappy at middle school so when I won a scholarship to a girls' school aged 11, it was the best thing ever for me.
It provided me with safe environment, education and learning, guidance and structure and new friends.
Unfortunately I suffered abuse at the hands of only shape of a father I ever knew. A man who was in my life for 3 years and did me harm.
I kept silent about that for 40 years and buried that trauma until I started the real journey of self development and began to explore who I was and my own map of the world.
As a child, I didn't have the power or the voice to self advocate and so I suffered alone.
But now I was an adult, I could choose my own empowerment, healing and transformation.
It was time to go deeper...
I had already overcome a lot that happened in my past. I had already built huge resilience skills in my life as a result of my childhood, I was intelkectual and high functioning. I used my brain and cognitive skills to cope which kept me in my head.
NLP coaching helped me to connect my mind and body and transform the meanings I had made and the beliefs I had about myself. It helped to transform how I felt and how I reacted and it invited me to rewrite my story and heal my past,
Even though I had created success on some surface levels by the standards of the world, I still neded to heal on the level of my unconscious to be able to accesss true freedom and inner peace.
Along with growth, truth, humour and faith to name a few, I started to work with what was important to me and my values became my guides and inner compass.
Empowering myself
I started to really apply these powerful new tools and I started to rewrite narratives from my stories, shift old beliefs and release limiting patterns. I learnt to work with my emotions and Silent Counselling and somatic coaching invited a deeper level of release and reclamation of the true me.
I was able to embody my values, set new boundaries and learn the power of compassion, acceptance and self-love.
It was tough work ahead and I invested in counselling, coaching and therapy as I walked this tender path. I ensured I had support although this was a new level of vulnerability that was pretty raw and unfamiliar. However, with the righe people and commitment to myself, I began to truly transform my inner world and unravel the past.
I took control to empower myself and transcend the past.
NLP timeline, parts integration, inner child work and 100's of hours dedicated to understanding who I was through education and self-healing helped me to make new choices and dive deep to find freedom and inner peace from within.
Developing my emotional intelligence, learning to be deeply compassionate and to live in the present moment, focusing on what I can control whilst learning to rewire my unconscious and be guided by my body and intuition. It wasn't easy but developing my faith and learning the lessons that presented in real time helped me to walk the often messy path of healing, growth, transformation and true freedom and peace.
How has your past shaped your present?
How has your past experience impacted your life, business, career and choices in relationships?
Everything you do is a reflection of your values and beliefs which impact how you feel and what you choose to do - or not do. If you don't like how things currently are or how you feel abd behave, it's perhaps time to explore your map of the world, examine your beliefs, and evaluate your emotions so that you can think and feel and behave differently - and make different choices about what you do that are aligned with your core values.
Your BUSINESS doesn't operate itself and it will reflect who you are at your core and represent your beliefs and values as well as the parts of you that hold unconscious beliefs about who you are and what you can achieve. This can cause limits and unhealed trauma can unconsciosly sabotage your growth and achievements in the efforts to keep you 'safe'.
In your CAREER, you may want to show up more confidently and accelerate your acheivements. You may find it hard to speak up and voice your opinion. This may be a part of you doesn't believe this to be safe and stays quiet while others appear to climb the ladder easily, Conflict and communication can be challenging, you may struggle to take feedback or any critisicm, be easily upset, react badly or make assumptions about others and what they think of you. You may not feel good enough or suffer with imposter syndrome which hinders your success.
In your personal RELATIONSHIPS, you may still be carrying the wounds and impacts of childhood and unwittingly re-enact a lot of your past experiences by opting for partners who are often not suitable or have red flags early on that you are blind to.
This is because a part of you (your inner child) has a deep need to be loved and to have their unmet needs met at any cost which means you may easily and frequently attach to partners who are not suitable, abusive or emotionally or practically unavailable. You may tolerate a lot of poor treatment and keep hoping for things to get better, but they don't. You feel unable to leave or break from these relationships and have many fears and insecurities within them that make you unhappy.
What's happening is there are inner conflicts, younger parts at play and each having their own sets of values and beliefs. This is often referred to as inner child work which focuses on healing the part and bringing the metaphor of inner child to be soothed, healed and integrated by the adult part of you with a new set of empowering beliefs and an 'upgrade' into the present day.
The concept of your inner child can be thought of as a part of your subconscious. Inner Child work or Parts Integration work is a big part of healing and NLP is transformational for this changework as it uses metaphor to work with the unconscious in a safe, content- free way.
Silent Counselling complements to NLP and coaching and is essentially emotional healing - a gentle but powerful method that works with the emotions and the corresponding meridians and representing organs in the body. Through a touch and breathe method, this allows release of negative and stuck emotions in the body in a and self-guided way without needing to talk, retell any difficult story or get stuck in 'content'.
Empowering the next generation
The courage to use your voice, break patterns and cycles and find your voice will empower your as a woman, entrepreneur, partner, colleague - and parent. This is what heals not only you, but your children and ends those painful generational cycles that run on repeat. As a parent, your healing and growth is the best thing you can ever do as then you show up in a way that models the behaviour they will copy and learn from.
This is healing, this is impact and this is transformational growth.
As a Transformational Coach, Master NLP Practitioner and Credited NLP Trainer I help you to identify your patterns, connect the dots and bring clarity, healing and growth. An advocate for Mental Health, I'm passionate about healing for childhhod survivors and I volunteer for the NSPCC to deliver their SpeakOut StaySafe Campaigns to schools.
You have a choice now to live a different life and find freedom and peace.
"When life pushes you to the limits, you still have the power of choice. Choose to turn it around."
Recognising your power and choice gives you the chance to change your life: and sometimes it takes someone else to walk with you to shine a light on these and show you what power you truly have within. The courage to face any difficulty in life will sit right alongside fear. You are not your past and you can choose your future.
Start with your Values and discover your true self
Where am I now?
I'm owner of a coaching business, helping women to become visible and successful in their business and healed and empowered in their lives.
I'm a Cerified Coach, NLP Master Practitioner & NLP Trainer and I'll show you how to harness the power of NLP.
My holistic approach addresses every element of a womans life and takes into consideration all influences, impacts and demands so I can tailor a bespoke journey for them. A journey that embraces healing, transformation and growth inside and out.
I often meet women for the part of their journey which is often the toughest; the place where you feel confronted, confused and are often at a crisis point where something has to give - or already has.
At this point, you need support, guidance and high quality coaching to help you transition out of the difficult places and successfully into the next stage where you can really own your true identity.
What's your story?
If you’ve read this far, you have resonated in some way.
Perhaps you want to show up and speak out in a new way, be a new version of you and shed the past.
You want to make new choices, make powerful decisions and become all you dreamed of being.
Don't stand at your crossroads wondering what to do.. being between what feels safe and comfortable and what you really want is no longer an option for you.
You’re ready for real growth.
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Want to talk?
@teresabrookscoaching