My story
I want to tell you who I am before I tell you what I do, because I think the two are inseparable.
Before motherhood
The seed
Before I became a coach, I spent fifteen years in the retail sector. It was fast-paced, demanding, and it was there through my own experience of being coached that I first understood what becomes possible when you invest in yourself. What it feels like to be genuinely listened to. To have someone hold space for you to think clearly and move forward with intention.
That experience planted a seed, it would take motherhood to make it grow.
The shift
I loved becoming a mother. I also didn't recognise myself.
When my first son arrived, I felt something enormous. An animalistic, ferocious love.
I remember thinking I'd finally found something I was naturally good at.
What I hadn't anticipated was the quiet, gradual erosion of everything else.
I stopped wanting to socialise. Conversations felt awkward, like I had nothing to offer unless the topic was my children. I lost the ability to hold eye contact for long.
Making friends felt like something I'd forgotten how to do, or didn't have the energy for.
The woman who used to look forward to a dinner party, who loved getting dressed up, who had opinions and passions and things she was genuinely hungry for, had gone very quiet.
I knew I loved being a mum. What I hadn't expected was that it would come at the cost of knowing who I was.
I felt like I'd forgotten how to be me.
The relentlessness of the role was real. The mental load was real. The asymmetry of being the one whose world stops when the boys are sick, the one who cancels, the one who is always on was real, and mostly invisible.
I remember one February morning, walking down my road alone, when my neighbour spotted me and said, cheerfully: "Oh hi Faye, I didn't recognise you without your children."
She meant nothing by it, but it hit home. Because in that sentence was everything I'd been quietly holding: the creeping sense that the woman I was had become invisible.
That all anyone saw now was the role.
But, I’m not just a mum.
I’m a woman with needs and desires and dreams beyond this role,
and I am so hungry to live them.
That moment clarified something important for me.
Harder seasons
Loss, anxiety, and learning to ask for help
Before my second son arrived, I experienced a miscarriage. The physical process was drawn out and painful, but what stayed with me longer was the internal pressure to rush the grief. We’re told miscarriage is so common, I somehow felt I wasn't entitled to sit with it. That 'only' twelve weeks meant I should count my blessings and move on.
I've since learned: the connection forms from the moment you find out, no one gets to put a timeline on your grief, and every woman's experience is hers alone.
After my second birth, I navigated a season of post-partum anxiety I hadn't expected. I sought CBT, which gave me practical tools that I still use today. And it deepened something I'd already begun to believe: that being genuinely listened to, and having a calm space to think out loud, is not a luxury. It is necessary, and it can be life-changing.
I submitted the final paperwork for my coaching diploma in December 2024, five months after my second son was born, shaking with a mixture of panic and determination as I uploaded multiple pieces of work one after another. With a restless baby in one arm, and one eye on an active toddler, I remember feeling the deep unfairness of having to juggle all of it at once.
This was me drowning, and still not asking for help.
Finding the word for it
The moment everything made sense
It was when I first read Lucy Jones' book Matrescence that something clicked. Here was a word, and an explanation, for the profound identity shift that happens when a woman becomes a mother.
Not a personal failing, or a rough patch, but a universal biological and psychological transformation that is barely named, let alone supported.
I couldn't believe that solid neurological evidence existed for what I had been experiencing, and most profoundly, that it wasn't just me.
That discovery is very much at the heart of everything I do.
Because in naming something, you can actually start to navigate it.
Where I am now
Doing the work.
I want to be honest with you: I haven't arrived at some perfectly resolved version of myself.
I have two young boys, a growing coaching practice, a home to run, and relationships that matter deeply to me. I still have hard days.
What's changed is what I do with them; how I speak to myself through them, what I reach for, and how quickly I find my footing again.
I've seen the progress I've made: in how I claim time, in how I understand what I need and ask for it.
I have tools and frameworks that work, and a deep conviction that this journey is worth making.
That's the work, and I will be there to walk alongside you as you make it too.
Women don't usually arrive at coaching with a neat problem statement or clear goal.
They arrive with a feeling, or a weight that they can't quite articulate.
A sense that they've been running on empty for so long they've forgotten what full even felt like.
That's exactly where we start.