What is Wellbeing Mentoring?

The wellbeing mentoring that I offer for women in middle and later life, is a forward-facing, solution focused, learning partnership approach to managing life-stage changes and challenges, underpinned with psychological depth and using coaching and counselling skills.

Working collaboratively, we focus on helping you navigating life changes and transitions ,reclaiming identity, confidence, a sense of meaning and purpose and practical wellbeing enhancing strategies 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 act as a consultant , advisor and guide rather than a therapist.

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

How is wellbeing mentoring 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 Wellbeing 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 wellbeing 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 identify, set, and track their own personal goals, whilst empowering them to develop their own knowledge, skills and confidence to achieve the outcomes you want.

Our wellbeing is often negatively impacted by many differing challenges that we can face during middle and later life.

This can include unexpected caring demands as we become the ‘sandwich generation, feeling trapped in a career or job that no longer satisfies, rebuilding life after relationship changes or significant health issues.

With an emerging desire to focus on ourselves and what we want out of the rest of life we can feel that we lack the resources or 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 wellbeing 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 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 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, and in such instances, we may pause our mentoring work so that you can seek appropriate counselling or medical support, as it is not ethically appropriate to use mentoring as a "work-around" for therapy.

I will support you to identify the right services for you and the referral process.