A bit about me....
Grab a drink it might be a long one...but stay with me, the journey to where I am now is a fairly interesting one, well so I am told! but one that I hope explains how I am where I am today, and why I have such a deep lived experience and qualifications of all that I coach!
​
It’s funny how when you look back its obvious the path you take, but at the time you don’t realise it.
​
In my early 20's I started studying martial arts, from kicking boxing to later MMA, and lots of disciplines in between. It was on this path I met a group of amazing instructors who introduced me to adrenal stress training...basically training the police, military, bodyguards and back then after the 911 incident, air marshals how to navigate extreme situations, but still be able to make clear informed decisions and use appropriate force when called to do so. I somehow, with a lot of luck and mentorship stumbled into working as a bodyguard, an industry that not many women worked in and even less without a military background, this was my full time job, along with surveillance, counter surveillance and undercover work for nearly 15 years. This role required me to be ‘switched on’, hypervigilant and my nervous system needed to be in fight or flight mode most of the time, it was the norm!
My sports weren’t kind to my body, surfing, snowboarding, MMA, horse riding until eventually it said enough is a enough and I broke the disc in my neck…I had to leave the sports I loved and the job that I loved, I felt pretty broken.
​
A few years bumbling around trying to figure out who I was (guessing it was a midlife crisis!), completing a foundation degree in Psychology and Criminal Behaviour, studying to be a psychotherapist and a spell working at the youth offending team, I discovered Stand Up Paddleboarding. I set up a school, but my love of performance led me to qualifying as a personal trainer and strength and conditioning coach and am so grateful to of worked with some of the world’s best in this field. I am also so proud to say that I am a Guinness World Record holder beating the men’s record and am the fastest person to paddle from Northern Ireland to Scotland.
​
It’s all pretty amazing for someone who was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, PTSD and suffered panic attacks, whose window of tolerance was so tiny that if I couldn’t paddle on the sea because my plan said so…I would sit sobbing on the side of the river because obviously all my training would be undone, or being so hypervigilant that to run on my own in the countryside meant that I would end up dead in a ditch somewhere!
So all that being said I am sat here with lived experience of how your nervous system impacts not only your day to day life but also your training, understanding how the science of breath work is the foundations of everything and also how you can learn to live differently so that you’re at your best whether that’s showing up for your training session….or just life.
