Coach For Life's Tough Stuff
About Alison
I came to this work through my own losses.
In 2017 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Two years later my dad died. Then in 2021 I was made redundant from a job I’d had for years and loved. Three significant losses in four years that shook my world.
Everything that I had taken for granted I no longer recognised - my health, my identity, my sense of what came next. I learned what it is to sit with grief, to feel broken on the inside.
People said, kindly but unhelpfully, that time will heal. It won’t, not on its own. Healing requires something more active than passively waiting.
I had worked for three decades in retail leadership but the skills which had served me professionally were not enough when life's tough stuff hit.
Learning how to grieve and find hope again turned my life around and I wanted to support others to do the same. .
So I trained, becoming an ICF-accredited Life Coach, an NLP Master Practitioner, and a certified Edu-Therapy™ Specialist.
I work with individuals navigating loss of all kinds, and with organisations whose teams encounter grief as part of their daily work. My work is based in human connection, in listening and understanding. Knowing someone else "gets it" is healing in itself.
I live in North London. Being self employed enables me to use my time supporting my local community - I run a free community grief and loss group at my local library, I volunteer with cancer charities and I am a tour guide.
This work matters to me because I know what it costs to carry grief alone — and what becomes possible when you have someone supporting you.
My Approach
Coaching is forward-facing — it starts from where you are now and works towards where you want to be.
Effective grief work requires honesty about the past, patience with the present, and a willingness to sit with what is hard so that we can grow with our grief.
Improving Grief Literacy is a passion of mine - the better we understand grief then the better we can support ourselves and others. There is so much that is misunderstood and this can add to our feelings of isolation and confusion.
I use the Edu-Therapy™ programme for clients who want a structured, cognitive approach to resolving emotional pain. The sadness of loss stays with us, but we can put down our emotional pain.
Sessions are online or, for those in North London, we can walk and talk on Hampstead Heath.
