What is Specialist Mentoring?

The 1:1 specialist mentoring service that I offer for women in middle and later life is a forward-facing, solution focused, directive, and collaborative partnership approach underpinned with psychological depth.

Working collaboratively we focus on helping you navigating life changes, transitions, reclaiming identity, confidence, a sense of meaning and purpose and developing practical strategies for mental wellbeing the "Third Act" of life.

I bring over 20 years specialist experience to work in collaboration with you helping you reconnect with and rediscover unused and underused skills and resources, develop new ways of thinking to identify the barriers or blocks holding you back from living the life that you want, and improve your mental wellbeing and resilience.

While my clinical background informs my understanding of your wellbeing, mentoring is not a substitute for mental health treatment. In our mentoring sessions, I act as a consultant , advisor and guide rather than a therapist.

How is specialist mentoring different to counselling?

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

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

Further details about the lengths of session, packages available and prices can be found here.

The Key Differences

What can it help with?

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

Our wellbeing is often negatively impacted by the physical and mental changes and challenges that we face during these years in addition to the tension between unexpected caring demands as we become the ‘sandwich generation, or feel trapped in a career or job that no longer satisfies and an emerging desire to focus on ourselves and what we want out of the rest of life.

We can feel that we lack the vision, resources or a route map for the future.

Regardless of the circumstances mentoring can address all of these things and help you create a rich, satisfying and rewarding future.

My specialist mentoring is grounded in psychological understanding and lived experience and can help with issues such as

  • Empty nest

  • Career change or retirement

  • Identity shifts

  • Divorce/separation

  • Caring responsibilities/ sandwich generation dilemmas

  • Menopause mental wellbeing difficulties

  • Confidence loss, rebuilding self-esteem

  • Rebuilding purpose

  • Conscious ageing

Please note:

You may not fully know at the start of our work which is best suited to your needs because sometimes deeper issues merge as the work progresses however, despite by dual training I am not able to ethically offer to be both your counsellor and mentor.

If, during our mentoring work, it becomes apparent that there are underlying needs that require therapeutic intervention (such as clinical depression, complex trauma, or acute anxiety), I have a duty of care to discuss this with you. In such instances, we may pause our mentoring work so that you can seek appropriate counselling or medical support, as it is ethically inappropriate to use mentoring as a "work-around" for therapy