27/07/2026
I am Jo, a free spirit and a lover of the outdoors.
This all started early. At eighteen months old I went missing at an agricultural show. I turned up safe, but my auntie clearly saw the pattern coming, because she bought me a name tag as a gift, ready for the next time. And there was a next time. By three I'd been found singing Old MacDonald to a field of cows, working my way through a pint of milk I'd lifted off the neighbour's doorstep.
As I grew up, I kept wandering across the fields with my dog. That was where I felt most like myself. I once told a teacher, quite matter of factly, that I would never work in an office, so I had no need to learn typing.
Life had other ideas. A health condition knocked me off my sporting path, and I took what I thought was a stop-gap role as a GP receptionist. That stop-gap lasted twenty-four years. I worked my way up to practice manager, telling myself I had to, that I needed to prove I could do it. And I could. But something underneath it never sat right.
In 2005 I started volunteering as an athletics coach, working with under-11s. I taught them to say "I can do it", to listen to each other, and to always have fun. Looking back, those were the exact rules I was trying to teach myself.
In 2008, it started to come apart. I couldn't hold it together any longer, and I walked out of an eighteen-year marriage, certain that was the weight I'd been carrying. The feeling stayed exactly where it was.
By 2012, physically and mentally burnt out, I made the decision to leave the NHS altogether, which brought a fresh set of financial worries along with it. I moved into coaching children in sport, which I genuinely loved, and I collected qualification after qualification, still trying to prove to myself that I knew what I was doing.
My NHS years had shown me something I couldn't unsee, how stress, anxiety and low mood quietly feed into chronic illness. I started to wonder how I might support myself, and other people, to lower that risk.
In 2019 I trained as a wellbeing coach. In early 2020 I began working with a coach of my own, and for the first time I started to understand why I felt the way I did. I trained in TARC EFT, and that was the first real shift. Then I supported a client with motor neurone disease through to the end of her life, and it landed hard: life is far too short to keep holding back. So I finally took on the challenge I'd swerved for fourteen years, on the strength of a set of limiting beliefs I'd built all by myself. I walked the Pennine Way, all 268 miles of it, solo.
It was after that walk, with something in me finally loosened, that I went on to train in clinical hypnotherapy, another way to reach the root of things rather than just manage the surface, first for myself, and then for the people I work with.
That walk also gave me the bug for multi-day walking. And in 2024 that same love opened an unexpected door. I met my now partner, and relocated from Manchester to Aberdeenshire.
Settled in, I've become part of village life here, joining a walking group and running a monthly social wellbeing group.
I'm also an ambassador for The Great Big Yawn, which raises a few eyebrows until I explain it. Yawning is one of the simplest ways we have to reset a frazzled nervous system, so I love getting people talking about why something we write off as rude or boring is really just the body looking after itself.
When I'm not coaching or out being sociable, you'll find me in nature with my partner and my dog Nala, visiting stone circles, walking beaches, and watching the wildlife, the seals most of all. On yesterday's walk I watched a baby alpaca being born.
And in August we're heading down to the Midlands for a weekend of paddling, which for me means facing a fear head on, along with the European Athletics and a proper catch-up with friends while we're there.
Because here's the thing I'm still working on, out loud, in case it's useful to anyone reading this. I'm learning to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Fear has held me back for most of my life, and if I'm honest, it still does, more often than I'd like to admit. The paddling is me walking towards it on purpose rather than going the long way round it. On the last trip it hit me plainly: the fear hasn't gone anywhere, I've just stopped letting it have the final say quite so often.
The biggest thing 268 miles of the Pennine Way taught me is this. You don't have to feel ready, and you don't have to see the whole route ahead of you. You just take the next step. Then the one after that. That, in the end, is the work I do with other people, helping them stop waiting to feel ready and start moving, one honest step at a time.
