I felt on the top of the World, but…

I am not sure I can really say I am from one single place. I moved countries 5 times and changed home 10 times.
That’s a lot of boxes I have packed, and unpacked. I even found myself stuck in a few…

I also sent many, many postcards. And letters.

Originally from France, I spent my childhood in the south of France, my teenage years in New Caledonia, University years in Paris, and started my career in New Zealand. I now live in Malta.

I have been a corporate busy bee. The “super-achiever” type.

For over 10 years, I have been working in the Marketing and Sales industry. I was Senior Brand Manager and Regional Business Manager in the Pharmaceutical industry.

Back then, I was splitting my time between New Zealand, France and the French Pacific Islands, New Caledonia and French Polynesia (it seems islands are seeking me, or maybe I am seeking them!).

I had a very – overwhelming – rewarding job, a shining “social status”, I was traveling the globe in business class and staying in the most beautiful places. My ego was happy: I felt on top of the world, but…

I felt trapped.

At the time I was an extreme perfectionist, I was crawling under the dozens of tasks, the always-full inbox, projects (and side-projects), presentations, meetings, travels, team management, and so on. Add-on the home-based tasks and the list easily expands.

The start of procrastination. Decrease in productivity. Disorganization? Lack of motivation. Lower self-esteem. But still, looking from outside, it was an amazing job.

I felt like the actor of my life. Stuck in the jar, watching things passing, and feeling unable to get out. Constantly doing, thinking about work, day and night, and weekends.

I am super-organized. Yet I started to believe I was not.

Isn’t too much structure killing the structure? I am no better witness of it. I attended a number of “organization” workshop and time-management seminars. Needless to say, I mastered my agenda: the most logical, colorful, classified (by activities, order of importance, personal vs professional), optimized and full version you can find. Looking back, I ended up spending more time sorting and organizing my own organizational models that producing work.

Respecting it all was another story. As you can imagine…

I was over-thinking. Stuck.

And alone, it is pretty hard to unscrew the lead of the jar. 

I liked NLP immediately, and became passionate about it. I decided to study it while working, and passed my certifications as Master Practitioner, Train the Trainer and also qualified as accredited Coach with the International Association of Coaching Institute. I knew deeply I would use those skills fully, “one day”. In the meantime, I developed my Coaching business on the side of work and felt more and more attracted to it.

I’ll always remember what my Dad told me one day: “one person is no longer devoting her entire life to one profession. Those days have gone, we need to re-invent ourselves, be polyvalent” (needless to say, I had the perfect example at home, my Dad is now renovating houses!).

I always got open to this idea, but it is true that unless you have a true entrepreneurial mindset of constantly wanting to create or develop new things and ideas, being at the time more than pretty well established and comfortable in my life, it was hard to project myself changing careers overnight.

Priorities.

As I mentioned earlier, my job was keeping me busy, entertained, travelling – and last but not least, “feeling important”. The development I made on myself re-invigorated my work life a lot. I became my own coach, sorted a lot of “fluff” in my daily routine, deconstructed my “too perfect agenda”, developed trust to delegate tasks, postpone meetings, decreased my “perfectionistic standards”, found strategies to be un-reachable until I was able to cruise again.

I got out of the jar.

So, how to get out?

Limit yourself to free yourself.

A lot of businesswomen like to be and feel like Wonder woman. Yes, that very woman who can handle e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. But don’t forget, she is a fiction. A fiction. Yes, she is.

And we are not.

She is an over-achiever. And on top of this, we are over-thinkers. And our thoughts are blocking us. From over-achieving to procrastinating. Being stuck.

Let’s write this as a “mathematical” equation (a very simple one): Overthinking = Stuck.
So how do we START doing?! In simplistic mathematical language, what is equal to “Start”?
Here is the answer: Start = Re-set. 

But, how do you re-set?! And what does it mean?

Re-set is not wiping out and starting fresh. Not at all. Re-setting is setting things differently. By understanding the equation currently in operation and not working (anymore), to write another one that works in that moment for you, and that will make you progress. By understanding what’s happening to you, to your mind, how it is happening, why it is serving you. Acknowledging all this. And taking the decision to work on it. Changing perspectives, creating new understanding, initiating change.

That is what I did. I re-set.
It gave me a new sense of focus, clarity.

I realized that over time, my center of interest had shifted. What I was driven by when I started working in pharma was no longer what was driving me now. I was passionate about supporting people, making them shift, progress. I loved coaching more than the actual content of my role.

And one day I left it all.
My partner got a job opportunity on the other side of the world.

I resigned. We took a flight to Malta. Call it destiny? Star alignment? Or simply attracting what you need when you understand that what you have is no longer suited for you?

I am now based in Malta where I decided to dedicate my time to what I love the most: human relationships and personal development. The understanding of how we grow as individuals, self-improve, change our behaviors.

I immersed myself into coaching. But there are so many coaches out there.

It is hard to choose.

Coaching is so vast. I believe that a coach can (in theory) coach anyone about anything. Coaching is about listening, reflecting, and enabling the person in front of you to take the time to head where she wants to go, in her own way, on her own terms.

But I also believe that coaching someone and having life experiences in the area you are coaching this person for are true assets that give a lot of strengths to coaching.

None of those common names used to define coaches truly define me. So, I chose the name that suited best my approach: Re-set Coach.

I am now working independently as a Coach and Trainer to support people in their personal and professional journeys. I work with self-improvers’, Senior Managers and CEOs in various industries such as Real Estate, e-commerce, Fitness, Pharma and Cosmetics. I support businesswomen across the globe, stuck in progressing their path, by opening their perspectives and enabling them to find their own change.

My coaching journey began from a conversation and changed the direction of my career.
I grew up in the times when alternative medicine, meta-medicine (organ-mind or mind-body connection concept) and therapy started to boom.

My Dad is a medical Doctor. He became one of the pioneers bringing those concepts into his practice, and from my side, listening to him, I found it fascinating.

I decided to follow a scientific path, passed a Master’s degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology and oriented myself in pharma.

A few years ago, I came across Neuro-Linguistic-Programing (or NLP), well actually NLP came to me, in a discussion with my Dad.

Anecdotally, I also have been jealous for a long time. It was overwhelming.

When I first became self-employed, I was committed to help women feeling insecure in their relationships, as this is something I have been battling with for years. I created my business of Life Coaching, called “My Foxy Project”, to help women who tried to overcome jealousy without too much success.

How am I as a coach?

Simply, I call a spade a spade. I am very direct, honest, and also very sensitive. Who I’ll be with you is who I am in life, how I’ll talk to you is how I talk with my friends.

And I am human too. I swear sometimes.

If you want to know a little more about me, I am a salsa dancer. This is where I unwind, on the dancefloor. It acts like a meditation. It is one of the only places where I don’t think about anything else.

I am also a “Challenge addict”. I like rewards. Who doesn’t?! So, at home my partner and I have established the “30 days challenge board”! Every 30 days we set a new challenge; each one chooses. From fitness to food and reading I have accumulated a few great rewards over the years! And great challenges create new habits too.