Lucy Power, ICF Credentialed Coach using Transactional Analysis to transform lives
“Decide what you want with crystal clarity and then to communicate this to people who may be able to help you. In my case, it was that I needed to leave my job as soon and as healthily as possible and it was the Head of HR and Operational Director who I invited in to my process. If you are not sure what, who and how, I strongly advise that you work with a coach to help you to clarify your wants and needs and how you will meet them.”
Whats is your background?
I worked in social care as a support worker for vulnerable people until I qualified as a Social Worker in 1999. While working as a Social Worker, I started to work in a youth group and qualified as a Youth Worker in 2001. I soon became Lead Social Worker, a role I enjoyed until I left to work at Director level for a private care provider. My last job was head of Learning and Development for a national not for profit. I loved this work and took the constant challenges head on, using my creative muscle and my ability to think from outside the box.
Why did you decide you wanted to change?
I had been training and developing for four years in the run up to leaving my job and switching career. I had a very vague and undefined plan in place that at some point I would leave and set up my own company but I didn't know when and how exactly I would fill my time. I begun training as a Transactional Analyst in 2014 and also qualified as a Personal and Business Coach in 2016. I had skills I wasn't using in my job and my frustration with the limitations I experienced were growing.
Since around 2002, I have been leading teams of people and you may know that this is not without intense personal and professional challenge. I talk straight and sometimes people have experienced me as far too clear and straightforward for their liking. It has always been important to me to model clear communication with an expectation that my teams return the favour. A member of my team, who I had just begun redundancy consultation, put in a complaint about some words she had ‘heard’ me say in a team meeting while addressing my whole team. The individual had got into a passive aggressive way of communicating with me since our redundancy chat. She was clearly very angry but would not allow herself to feel or express this, which was a shame for us both. I was suspended because her complaint amounted to an accusation of gross misconduct. Because nobody else had any sense that what she had accused me of had actually happened, and of course this matched my statement, the investigation concluded within days that she had allowed her personal situation and feelings to cloud her understanding of my message. I was reinstated after 3 days of suspension but something was finished for me. I then went to a coaching conference and witnessed a demonstration of constellation (or systems) coaching where a woman explored her feeling of leaving the system of her organisation, something changed inside me and I knew I had to leave. I was done with working to other people’s rules and I wanted to do only what I loved.
How did you decide what to do next?
I spoke to the organisation I was employed by and asked them to support me to leave as soon as possible in a safe and mutually beneficial way. I told them I wanted to continue to work together with them because I loved everything about them other than the necessary bureaucracy. They valued me too and I felt sure we could work something out together which would feel ‘win-win’ and we did! We contracted for me to work as a consultant for a set number of days on a day rate across the next year which assured me a monthly income for at least my first year of setting up my own business. I left, set up my company, got a coach and developed my business. The rest is a happy history of making loads of mistakes, getting a lot of stuff wrong and also building authority and connections and starting to get some really wonderful clients
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." Carl Jung
What would be your advice to anyone who wants to change career?
Always to decide what you want with crystal clarity and then to communicate this to people who may be able to help you. In my case, it was that I needed to leave my job as soon and as healthily as possible and it was the Head of HR and Operational Director who I invited in to my process. If you are not sure what, who and how, I strongly advise that you work with a coach to help you to clarify your wants and needs and how you will meet them.
You run a programme encouraging people to look after themselves and ' eat well'... what was the inspiration behind the programme?
I run a programme using Transactional Analysis as a tool for psycho-education and personal change around the way we meet our relational, communicative, and other personal hungers. In doing this, women stop using food when they actually need something else but have no internal permission to get it. Over ten weeks, using weekly interactive workbooks and group coaching I support women to become aware of early decisions and the development of their life script and the games they play to support this. I coach them to raise their awareness and to re-decide the ways they meet their own needs so that they get what they actually want rather than the food they have been using as a substitute.
How important is what you eat to your mental health and looking after yourself?
I believe what we eat and how we eat is vital to our mental health. So many of us, so many women, use food to meet other hungers and lose touch entirely with our physical hunger. I believe that once we begin to recognise what we really want and need and then work out how to get our wants and needs met, we will be able to change the way we use food. There is hard work to be done but the destination on this journey is a real sense of peace and a new best friend, yourself!
Do you have a few pointers for people to help them on the right track?
I always invite people to begin with a food and feelings diary so that they can start to see what needs they are meeting with food and how inappropriate this is. So many of us unconsciously repeat the ways we were neglected as young children. If we were given food for anything at all other than to address our physical hunger, we were being taught that our needs were not important and how to silence our needs with food.
Lucy is launching an online programme, ‘Transactional Analysis is Ten Weeks’ on 25th March. The programme is powerful as you’ll learn to deliver real life impact.
And, a new membership (learning and personal growth) community launches on 1st March called The Power House which you’ll find details about on Lucy’s page.
If you are interested in Lucy’s work please get in touch with her. You can find here here:
https://www.facebook.com/LucyPowerCoach/
https://twitter.com/LucyPower000
https://www.linkedin.com/Lucy Power