True story. Throughout my twenties, I experienced burnout in my social services career, relationship and caretaking responsibilities. I was constantly taking on too much, saying yes to helping everyone before tending to my self-care and generally being a self-confessed people pleaser. Truth be told, yes, shift patterns are a challenge, yes, I chose an emotionally difficult career, but the main issues were my lack of self-management, sense of connection & awareness back then. I was on autopilot, not fully grasping the extent to which my crisis management responsibilities at work were also present in my personal life so I was running on empty, consistently. The truth is, I love supporting and empowering people, it’s who I am. Yet, at this point in time, my burnout experience happened to communicate to me that I was to go within, find out more about myself and ultimately to believe in my importance, my needs and prioritise them. You might be wondering right about now, “well, what is burnout?”. The term “Burnout” came about in the 1970s when Herbert J. Freudenberger, a German psychologist, defined burnout as “the loss of motivation, growing sense of emotional depletion, and cynicism”. Since then, psychologists have developed the term to encompass attributes such as emotional, mental, and/or physical exhaustion, irritability, low self-efficacy, reduced performance and generally feeling like nothing you do makes a difference. Burnout often gradually increases in intensity due to repeated exposure to chronic stress and without intervention or awareness, can lead to the onset of mental health conditions. For me, that looked like anxiety, panic attacks and resigning from my job.
2015
Tough as it was, the years of self-development, therapy and coaching brought me to several life-changing realisations. The main one being that burnout, just like anxiety in my case, is a communicator of being out of alignment with your basic needs. If we do not take our self-management, like well-being, seriously, we cannot expect to robotically keep going. Our business, careers, relationships, mind, body, spirit and soul suffer. We have to take responsibility for prioritising the self-care practices that speak to us, slow us down and allow our answers to find us in the silence. This is vital for the world we live in where the external noise of modern societies competes for our attention is so many ways. With awareness, we can make more conscious decisions of where we spend our attention with our mental well-being at the forefront. Having said that, our organisations need to be reinforcing the importance of balance, meaning and fulfillment through advocating and investing in the well-being and self-management space. With consciousness among our leaders we can be the change that workplaces are crying out for.
We all have the answers within us, we just need to create the time to invest in uncovering them. That’s where my work as a leadership coach comes in. Bringing a norm disruptive approach to leadership well-being and self-management is my jam! Since packing a bag, leaving my home country, renting out my home, resigning from my full-time job, I decided to find my own answers that I knew were within. I changed my environment and the areas I felt unsatisfied with (almost every area!) and with the support of my coaches, I dared to dream BIG and take BIG action! So much so that I started my coaching business on a working holiday visa when many people questioned if it would work, if it was possible and thought I was aiming “too high”. What came to me was a deep sense of who I am, my strengths, an understanding of my unconscious belief systems and a robust set of steps to rewrite my future. I decided to stop living by what others and society expected from me, disrupted the norms that restricted me and decided to take the lead in my life.
2019
So if you’ve read this far, thank you and I welcome you to The Nature of Coaching!
The mission:
1) help busy minded individuals create a calmer mindset for themselves, lead and live with less ‘noise’ and create more time for balance, connection, fulfillment and a slower pace of life;
2) support aspiring or established leaders to show up as their whole authentic self, prioritise wellbeing and generally break the mold that burnout is part of the deal in leadership, being an entrepreneur or running your own business;
3) develop value-aligned, diverse, authentic methods of entrepreneurship so that your business can align with nature’s cycles, you, it can fit into your life, not take over it.
The vision for The Nature of Coaching is to co-create a wave of elevation in the way we do leadership globally. Where well-being, vulnerability and inclusive self-expression are valued in workplaces initiated by conscious leaders who are committed to changing the way we work. With that said, another layer of the vision is to inspire entrepreneurs and business owners globally to take bold, aligned and conscious action to develop their businesses with their own well-being, authenticity & self-management as their primary priority not an afterthought.
Through a mixture of 1:1 sessions, community events and online workshops, I plant the seed in others to find their self-management style, find the practices that light up their well-being and go on to influence the same course of action among the people they lead, their workplaces and the people they interact with.
The Nature of Coaching values: health and wellbeing, authenticity and transparency, diversity and inclusivity, nature and climate action, community, social impact, empowerment, connection, innovation and equality.
What you’ll find here at gemmarosepeacock.com is a conscious space that strives to provide you with a deep sense of connection to self, others and nature, self-management education, informative wellbeing resources of high value, inspiration for doing life, leadership and business differently as well as bespoke coaching that will transform the way you lead and live. Head on over to the testimonial page to read what my clients have said about coaching with me.
If what I’ve written in this piece has resonated with you, reach out in the comments, contact form or via socials. Perhaps you dream of having a different way of earning money but don’t know how to make that happen? Or maybe you feel like you could be burning out and you want to recover or take a preventative stance? If you find your people-pleasing, lack of boundaries and perhaps your beliefs about yourself prevent you from prioritising your well-being, I hear you. We can change that! If you are willing to make a change in your life you’re a conscious leader.
Let’s reconnect, refocus and reignite the whole YOU!
Gemma