As a child of divorce and family division, being highly empathic

ensured that I’d spend a lifetime striving to make sense of often

confusing messages that conflicted with what I intuitively ‘knew’

to be true in my gut. With little straightforward communication

to help unravel the woundings in my family (something I came to

see passes down the generations in myriad ways and is more the norm for most families than the exception), the things I experienced in my external world were frequently incongruent with my internal experience and a voracious hunger for understanding behaviour, people and relationships was therefore embedded from an early age.

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Predictably, I came to see, my instinctive recognition that ‘hurt people hurt people' and the compelling need to 'fix' things that were never in my power to fix and 'save' people I cared deeply about from pain and the trauma of exclusion that had been my usual for so long turned me toward difficult relationships in my adult life that only perpetuated the wounding patterns for another generation. And so, the connected / healed / communicative / forgiving / all-embracing and ever-extending family I spent most of my life believing would eventually come to pass if I could just get everyone to talk and be real with one another never materialised – a source of deep personal heartache that I struggled with for years. I stumbled through some very tough challenges with coercive control and abusive behaviour in my marriage that I simply couldn't love nor communicate my way to making better (takes commitment and honesty all round and that wasn't forthcoming); with parenting through some very tumultuous teenage years and ultimately excruciatingly painful family breakdown for the second time in my life with all the feelings of failure that went with that.

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Through the most difficult and painful years of my marriage, I ravenously read, studied, consulted with ‘experts’ at various stages in my desperation to save my family from disintegrating completely, eventually putting myself through professional development where I did a deep dive into the power of the mind relative to how we create our own reality through a diploma in Clinical Hypnotherapy and then gained my Practitioner & Master Practitioner in NLP.

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While there was deep and profound learning for me in all of this, despite not being able to ‘rescue’ my marital situation, I was able to rescue myself and create new opportunities to provide some sense of stability for my then still teenage sons. My own evolution was really what led to finally making decisions that would effectively turn my own life around. Unfortunately that meant having to let go of the long-held and fought hard for dreams that had underpinned my sense of identity for so long (hence the struggle) but nevertheless, it was the only outcome that made any real sense and the one that anchored me on my current path.

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On intimate terms with the agony and the damage to one's sense of self, one's sense of belonging and to one's primary relationships that goes hand in hand with not knowing how to communicate from a space of true connection with self, I knew I wanted to use the pains of my life to uplift others so that the skills I hadn’t had command of when I most needed them could potentially help other families to work through the issues that ultimately broke up my own family and empower them to make the tough decisions that must sometimes be made, without guilt or regret.

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Leading Edge Communication is the manifestation not just of years of professional development that has helped so many through innovative and inspired coaching and uniquely powerful communication and relationship skills training, but of a deeply personal mission I remain passionately committed to: to shine a light on the importance of taking responsibility for our communication skills; to show up real – even when it's hard; even when it hurts and even though the world we live in doesn't encourage that kind of independence. Being all too familiar with the costs of living by outdated rules for life that are based on conformity, dependence and suppression/repression of one's true self in order to fit in, be acceptable and not rock the boat, my goal is to help people achieve better psychological, emotional and yes - physical health and well-being; to create happier and healthier relationships that are worthy of their effort, commitment and loyalty and that bring out the best in them; to take better care of their own needs, feelings and emotions and to thrive through the kind of authentic self-expression that brings so much more joy, freedom and much deeper, richer and more profound meaning to life.

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