Welcome to the view from Coaching Corner
News, views and experiences from the world of coaching by Jenny Stallard
Hello and welcome! Thank you for reading and subscribing to this new newsletter, the view from coaching corner.
Why coaching corner, I hear you ask? Well, in one of the spare rooms in my house is a room where I coach, and I call it Coaching Corner.
OK. I know. ONE OF THE ROOMS? Long story short, my partner and I sold a flat in London and bought a house in Oxfordshire - which was more affordable because it wasn’t in London. It was a big choice, not taken lightly, and one we made before any of this lockdown pandemic business. The countryside was calling, and so was a change of career pace…
The house is a four-storey Victorian town house on the edge of Chipping Norton, in the Cotswolds. The stairs go up and up, wooden floors in need of a sanding, walls in need of a lick of paint. A project house, but not so crumbling we can’t live in it as we do it up. On the first floor are two bedrooms and a bathroom, the ‘guest floor’. The first of the two bedrooms is at the back, a little smaller than all the other bedrooms, and that’s the space. When I’m in there, with the door closed, I feel a sense of peace and focus. The plan is to wallpaper one wall with some paper that’s got a terrarium pattern on it - in line with the cacti theme of my coaching platform, Freelance Feels. There’s a bed, my bed from when I was single and living in London. The walls are a pale blue - in need of a refresh, but a calming pale blue/grey. I can see the garden from the window, and occasionally next door’s cat is brave enough to come and sit on the flat roof outside, too.
When the room is decorated, in the corner will be a dark blue velvet armchair - my coaching chair, in Coaching Corner. For now, I sit on the bed, and the sense of peace is still there. It’s the room that makes me feel it, not the chair… (but who doesn’t love a bit of interiors planning?).
Coaching Corner is my zone, my place, my sanctuary where it will be just me and the client - probably on Zoom for now - in our bubble. Coaching corner is a place where I feel comfortable, safe, and like the coach I hoped to be.
And so it’s the inspiration for this newsletter.
For those of you who don’t know me, let me introduce myself a little more. I’m Jenny Stallard, a journalist and writer, with just over 20 years of writing experience for national newspapers, magazines and websites. You can see some of my work at jennystallard.com, or have a google. I used to write a lot about being single, and dating, but then I met a lovely man called Geoff, and now we live together in the big house! We’re engaged, too, and will get married in September 2022.
I’ve been self-employed on and off for many years, but the final time I went freelance was in April 2017, after redundancy. I wasn’t always happy, and by March 2019, was wondering if it was for me. I began to write about it, and Freelance Feels: Wellbeing for humans who work for themselves was born. What was a blog and instagram account charting my ups and downs as a freelancer became a podcast, newsletter and now, coaching business.
The Freelance Feels newsletter is a personal take on freelance life, and I want this one to be more of a round up, of ideas and news, of views from other coaches, too. A bitesized look at the industry and my experiences, what’s going on in the world of coaching, in your inbox on a Monday morning.
I decided I wanted to begin coaching a while ago - I would often interview coaches for work, and was a ‘guinea pig’ for some coaching trainee friends, too. Slowly but surely the calling came to me that I wanted to coach, too. I decided to train, as I wanted to immerse myself in learning something new, as well as give myself something that set me apart from many in the coaching world, to be able to say I had accredited training. So in October 2020, I joined the latest cohort of the Optimus Academy course, run by Ruth Kudzi. I ‘graduated’ in May 2021.
So, I am quite new to the coaching world. I’ve met some fabulous coaches through my work as a journalist and now as a coach, and I will speak to them for the newsletter, as well as sharing news from the industry, new books or blogs, articles and takes on the world of coaching.
This newsletter is for you if you are:
A coach
Training as a coach or thinking about it
Working as a coach, mentor or trainer
Being coached or considering it
Interested in the world of coaching, workshops and masterclasses
I work one on one with clients who are freelance or considering it, as well as running group coaching workshops called ‘Relight Your Freelance Fire’ and workshops on how to be a media-friendly coach or expert, pairing my journalism experience and coaching skills.
The newsletter will be a weekly Monday morning missive, quite short and sweet, to start your week with a view or two from Coaching Corner. I will be sharing information about my own offering, including workshops and so on, and am open to sharing those of others, too. I will be transparent - the idea with this newsletter is to make it a place where coaches can also share their own offering, via classifieds, as well as, eventually, paid guest posts. I shall work on that side of things, but, in the meantime, I shall be sharing for free.
The first one will come to you on July 5th.
If you’d like to know more about me, head to www.freelancefeels.com or on instagram @freelance_feels