Stacy

I started working in mental health in 2002, on NHS wards in the north of England, back when nobody was calling any of this wellbeing. If you sit in this field long enough, there isn’t much left to surprise you. People tell me things they have never told another living soul - not because I am extraordinary, but because I ask a particular kind of question and actually wait for the answer. Tell me about your life, and I will tell you how you think, and in turn why you feel and behave the way you do. That is more or less the whole trick. Not labels, not diagnoses - the human condition, properly looked at.

In 2015 I started my own coaching consultancy, which is also the year I began running Minds@Work, a network for some of the country’s leading wellbeing professionals, including what was then CMHA and is now Mind Forward Alliance. Not long after, I co-founded Thrive in the City, which the Mayor of London was generous enough to say some kind things about - over eighty wellbeing events, across twenty corporate venues, all free, all in a single day. I mostly remember it as a logistics nightmare involving several hundred borrowed chairs.

Around the same time, halfway through my MSc, I decided to specialise in perfectionism. The evidence was hard to ignore - it drives a remarkable amount of genuinely high-performing success, and a remarkable amount of anxiety and distress, frequently in the same person, frequently on the same day. Most people are not nearly as complicated as their diagnosis suggests once you take the label off. They are just working very hard not to feel like they are not enough.

Confidante is the more honest word for it.

I do not think of myself as only a coach. A lot of the people I work with do not have anyone else they can hand their actual life to - not because they are in crisis, and not because there is something broken that needs fixing, but because carrying everything alone has quietly become the norm at a certain level of responsibility. Somewhere to put it down properly is not therapy. It is closer to a pillar of high performance, and of decent wellness, and hardly anyone is offered it honestly.

In 2021 I added an introductions app to the portfolio. Reddi is not really a departure from any of this - it runs on exactly the same foundations, connection and wellbeing, because a good relationship remains one of the most reliable things I have seen improve a person’s life, and everyone else’s around them. When a dispute later left me without my own codebase, I rebuilt it myself in four weeks, with no technical background. I’m told that’s the impressive part. Honestly, it was mostly stubbornness.

I am also a solo mum by choice - IVF at forty-one, on my own - which has taught me more about pressure and running on empty than anything on a certificate. There’s a memoir in progress about that chapter specifically. Working title: How the F*ck Did I Get Here. It will be honest. Possibly too honest.

At the end of the day, whether it’s a boardroom, a consultancy, or two people working out if they suit each other, it’s the same question underneath - what people do to feel enough, and what it costs them. I’ve been asking it for 25+ years. What’s yours?

Stacy