Fiona.

THE STARTING POINT

Where Fiona started.

We met Fiona three years before she started working with us. She was already struggling then. Three years later very little had changed, and some of it had got worse.

Her assessment looked reasonable overall at fifty-six, until we broke it down. Her mental score was forty-one, and that is the one that told the story. She was navigating overwhelm while juggling two jobs and a bookkeeping practice. Work had buried her, and she had lost sight of who she was underneath it. Her brain, she said, felt like it had stopped working, and her spark had gone.

On our first call she said something that turned out to matter: it is on me, and I need to take control.

WHAT WE DID

What we actually did.

We started with where her energy was going, ran an energy audit, and began making space in her life. We introduced the Hawkins Scale so she could notice the emotional energy she was carrying week to week.

Her journalling was deliberately tiny. Two minutes on the negative thoughts, two minutes on the positive ones and what might be possible, one minute of "I am" statements and one thing she could do that day to be the person she wanted to become.

Then there were the limiting beliefs, and one in particular. Part of Fiona desperately wanted to paint. Another part told her that art is not a proper job. Art had kept coming up: in her values, in what gave her energy, in what she wanted more of. It was not a hobby she happened to enjoy. It was a part of her that had been pushed down for years.

Relevant modules on mental and emotional burnout, one to one sessions, and the weekly coaching calls.

WHAT CHANGED

And this is where she is now.

She was offered what felt like a dream job, and it gave her the thing she had needed most: space. Space to paint. And she took it.

She started making art again. Then she started contacting galleries. People began asking to buy her work, and then asking for commissions. Her work has hung in a gallery, she has been featured in a book, she opened an Etsy shop, she makes cards from her paintings, and her work is on display in places around Kent.

She took up open-water swimming, and the sea she loves now runs through most of what she paints. The woman who questioned whether art was a proper job now calls herself an artist, and attends events as the artist.

• Mental burnout score, 41 to 86
• Work hung in a gallery, and featured in a book
• Selling commissions, cards and an Etsy shop
• Took up open-water swimming, now woven into her paintings