What is Life-Stage Mentoring?

The life-stage mentoring that I offer is a forward-facing approach, underpinned by psychological depth and using coaching and counselling skills to support women navigating the changes and challenges of middle and later life.

Working collaboratively, we focus on helping you by adopting a problem management and opportunity development approach to navigating life changes and transitions, reclaiming identity, acquiring new skills and confidence, a renewed sense of meaning and purpose for the second half of life.

I bring over 20 years specialist experience of working as a counsellor, coach and mental heath mentor, and bring that wealth of experience to our sessions.

While my clinical experience can inform my understanding of your difficulties, mentoring is not a substitute for therapy or mental health treatment. In our mentoring sessions, I bring my deep listening skills to my roles as collaborator and guide rather than a therapist.

(please see the important note at the bottom of the page)

How life-stage mentoring is different to counselling?

As a fully qualified and dual trained counsellor and coach, I bring a high level of ethical rigour and psychological awareness to all my work. However, although using counselling skills, it is important to distinguish between Mentoring and Clinical Counselling, as they serve different purposes and follow different frameworks.

The simple graphic here aims to inform you of some of the main differences but please feel free to ask further questions about this.

What life-stage mentoring can help with?

Unlike mentoring that happens in the workplace or in an educational setting, the life mentoring that I offer is focused on helping you maximise your overall sense of identity, wellbeing, direction, meaning and purpose as you navigate the changes of middle and later life and truly transform the quality of your life.

I take a ‘whole-health’ approach by using coaching and counselling skills to help you explore their experiences or difficulties in multi-dimensional ways. Together we work to explore the background to your difficulties, identify options for change, set and track your achievable goals. Throught this we focus on empowering you to develop deeper self- knowledge, skills and confidence to achieve the outcomes you want.

Regardless of the circumstances, mentoring offers a space to bring greater clarity to your situation, identify unused strengths and realise your hidden potential to help you create a rich, satisfying and rewarding future.

My life-stage mentoring can help with many issues that are a feature of women’s middle & later life.

This can include ( amongst many):

  • Rebuilding after major life change

  • Career change or retirement planning

  • Identity or role changes

  • Major decision making

  • Menopause related mental wellbeing

  • Health & wellness issues.

  • Managing ‘sandwich generation’ dilemmas

  • Rebuilding confidence and self-esteem

  • Conscious ageing and elder development

  • Later-life planning

IMPORTANT NOTICE

You may not fully know at the start of our work what kind of support is best suited to your needs. This is because sometimes deeper issues merge as the work progresses.

If, during our mentoring work, it becomes apparent that there are underlying needs that are best suited to a therapeutic intervention (such as clinical depression, complex trauma, or acute anxiety), I have a duty of care to discuss this with you in a supportive way, and in such instances, we may pause our mentoring work so that you can seek appropriate counselling or medical support. It is not ethically appropriate to use mentoring as a "work-around" for therapy.