For coaches and practitioners
Practicementorship.
In private practice, there is nobody to ask.
In a hospital you are never alone with a case. In private practice you are alone with all of them. This is somewhere to bring the client you cannot read, and an experienced clinical eye on your own work and protocols. Online, worldwide.
If you work one to one, this is for you
Whatever your modality, if you sit with individual clients and carry the weight of getting it right, you are who I built this for. Especially if you are newer, or working in one of the fast growing corners of the field where the demand has run ahead of the training.
Whether you are new or years in, qualified and not yet started, or busy and quietly isolated, the common thread is working alone with people who are frightened, unwell, and inclined to believe you.
Know thyself to heal thyself applies to healers too. So many gifted practitioners doubt themselves, and much of this work is helping you trust what you know.
What goes missing in private practice
In a hospital there is the handover, the colleague who says have you thought about without being asked, the corridor conversation, and the second opinion that costs nothing but a walk down the ward.
Most of it is simply the safety of working near other people who know what you know.
Then you go into private practice and every one of those disappears at once. What replaces them is you at your desk at nine at night, wondering about someone.
The loneliness is real, but the more serious thing is what happens to your thinking.
Working alone, your hypotheses stop being tested. Your favourite explanations get reached for a little too easily. Your blind spots stay exactly where they are, because there is nobody to say the unwelcome thing.
It is what happens to any practitioner without colleagues, and it is precisely why regulated professions build those checks in rather than trusting people to catch themselves. Coaches and practitioners are asked to self correct, alone, indefinitely. Nobody has built the thing that replaces the ward round.
You might recognise some of this
Signs you are carrying it alone
If some of these sound familiar, it usually means you are doing it without colleagues.
- A client is not improving, and you have started to read it as your own failure.
- Someone breaks down on the table and needs holding while a big shift moves through them. Done gently it can be deeply healing. Done badly it can do real harm, and nobody taught you where the line is.
- Most of your clients cry in the first session. Often it is relief at being heard. Sometimes they tell you more than you know what to do with, and you are left wondering how to follow up without losing your footing.
- Something came up in the room that you were not trained for, and you said nothing, because admitting it felt like incompetence.
- You have no benchmark, because nobody has seen you work since you qualified, so you cannot tell whether your sessions are normal.
- You are qualified and still not practising, and another course is starting to feel safer than a real person in front of you.
- You are undercharging, quietly resentful about it, and cannot see how to change it with the clients you already have.
- Boundaries you never set and now cannot retrofit, with late messages and sessions that over-run.
- You are not sure which direction to take your practice, and there is nobody to think it through with.
The part of the work that is not taught
There are people with a large following calling themselves health coaches who give the same advice to everybody, the same diet, the same fast, the same stack of supplements, whoever is sitting in front of them. It looks confident and it sells well, and it is also, often, dangerous. I watch poor advice go out every single day, with no thought at all for where it might land, on whom, or alongside what medication. Recommending a blanket approach to every client is unprofessional, and it can do real harm.
If you are a newer breathwork or somatic coach, ask yourself honestly how much of your training was about being a safe and effective practitioner, rather than about the method itself. You can teach someone breathwork, but can you steady the ground beneath them when it opens something they were not ready for? Can you tell the difference between a release and a person quietly coming apart? That is the part that keeps people safe, and it is the part almost nobody is taught.
What turns wanting to help into helping is judgement, and judgement is built with someone experienced beside you.
Real change is slow and results do not arrive overnight, and the wish to produce a fast one, yours or your client's, is one of the more dangerous forces in this work. It is what pushes a practitioner past what they know, and past the point where they should have said let us go carefully. Good results and safe practice are the same skill, and you build it far quicker with a second experienced eye on your protocols than you ever will alone and under pressure to impress.
What this is
Practice mentorship, with a clinical edge
Half of what I say to the practitioners I work with is that needs a doctor this week, and here is how you word it. The other half is that is fine, carry on, you are worrying about nothing. I suspect people value the second one more.
It sits alongside your own training, your insurer and the professional body you already answer to. It is somewhere to think, with someone who spent a career being the experienced person that newer staff came to.
There is no syllabus to get through. We work on whatever is live for you that week, and if something urgent walks in, everything else waits.
Where it helps, you get it in writing. A protocol, a plan, a set of parameters, referenced properly so you can see where it comes from and stand behind it.
I am never the treating practitioner and I never assess someone I have not met. The work is about your thinking, your judgement and your practice.
What tends to come up
What we work on
We look at the safety of what you are recommending: supplements and herbs alongside prescribed medication and the interactions that genuinely matter, exercise parameters for people who are not well, and dietary approaches chosen for the person in front of you rather than the one that worked for you, because it is not safe to put everyone on keto, or carnivore, or a long fast, and a good practitioner needs to know why rather than simply that.
We work through what to do when something a client says needs a doctor's attention, how to raise it without frightening them, what to do when they will not go, and how to work alongside medical care. We also look at reading what comes back from testing, and what to do with a result that sits outside the range.
And then there are the parts that are less clinical and just as costly: boundaries you cannot retrofit, over giving that is really anxiety wearing a kinder name, carrying outcomes that were never yours to carry, pricing, packaging, the quiet months, and the client you should probably decline.
Ways in
Ways to work with me
There is no ladder to climb and no reason to start with the largest thing. Most people begin with a single session, because something specific is on their mind, and there is no wrong door.
One hour, bring whatever is on top. I prepare beforehand, and afterwards you get a written referenced plan, protocol or set of parameters you can keep and use.
The same hour without the written follow up, for a debrief, a wobble after a difficult session, or a case you simply need to think aloud about with someone.
One call a month with messaging in between, for practitioners who would rather have this as a standing habit than reach for it only when something goes wrong.
On being able to afford it. Prices are shared when you enquire or join the list. I keep a quarter of my capacity free for practitioners who genuinely cannot pay, and there is no awkwardness in asking. Send me a note and say so plainly, and nobody has to explain themselves.
Who you would be talking to
A nurse who knows both worlds
I am a nurse who moved into the integrative and alternative field years ago, and did it without letting go of a professional qualification. My own practice spans functional and integrative health, energy work, therapeutic massage and medical astrology, alongside the nursing, so when you bring me your work I am not reading it from outside your world. That balance, holding the clinical and the intuitive at once, is harder than it sounds, and it is the exact balance this work is about. I know both worlds from the inside, which is why I can help you stand fully in one without losing your footing in the other.
I have twenty seven years of nursing behind me, roughly half in critical care and high dependency, postgraduate qualified in both, an MA in medical ethics and law, a seat on a research ethics committee, and years spent teaching advanced life support to other clinicians. I have mentored hundreds of nurses, including overseas nurses before they joined the NHS, which meant holding them to a formal Code of Professional Conduct. Through the Barefoot Roadmap I also trained our own health coaches, and watched them go on to open their own practices. That professional backbone is the thing your field never hands you, and a good deal of what I do is help you build your own.
I work privately from Portugal now, registered with the Ordem dos Enfermeiros, so I know this isolation from the inside, because I have felt it myself. Building this is partly self interested, because a field where practitioners can think alongside each other is a safer field for everybody in it, including me.
I remember being newly qualified and left in charge of a ward, and how frightening that was. What made the difference was never a course. It was having somebody experienced within reach.
The modalities in my own practice
Training as a health coach?
The Barefoot Roadmap, where I trained our own health coaches, will return in a new form. If you are thinking about training as a health coach, leave your email and you will be the first to hear.
Common questions
It is the opposite of too early. The practitioners who most need this are usually the ones who have not started, because waiting until you are busy enough means learning the difficult parts on real people. If you are qualified and stalled, a single session is a good place to begin.
It is practice mentorship and case consultation. You keep full responsibility for your own clients and your own practice. It does not replace your training provider, your insurer or the professional body you already answer to, and it does not carry any formal role inside a regulated profession. What you get is an experienced second opinion and somewhere to think out loud.
Yes. Anyone working one to one with individual clients in a healing or wellbeing capacity is welcome. Bodyworkers in particular tend to find the contraindications and the when to refer conversations useful, because hands on work carries risks that are rarely taught properly.
I will think it through with you, show you how I would read it, and be direct about what I would want checked. What I will not do is give an opinion on a person I have never assessed, and I ask that case material comes to me anonymised. It is a cleaner way to work and you learn more from it, because you leave with a way of thinking rather than one answer.
No. I help you build the framework and explain why each part of it belongs there, and then you run it. There is no certificate at the end of this, and it does not replace your own insurer, training provider or professional body.
Then say so and we stop. A single session is the sensible way to find out, and I would rather you discovered that in one hour than committed to more out of politeness, and nobody is going to chase you.
In their words
What the people I have mentored say
Jennie was my mentor when I was a newbie staff nurse starting on the intensive care unit. This was over twenty years ago, and I will never forget the impact she had on me, in holding me to high standards and to the Code of Professional Conduct. She is a great teacher. She also encouraged me to apply for promotion and ended up driving my early career, which went on to many different and amazing experiences within the nursing profession.
If you have read this far
If this sounds like you
There is no countdown on this page and nothing runs out tonight. The doors open soon, and the people on the list hear first. If you simply want somebody to think with about a case this week, that is a good enough reason to get in touch, because it is what this is for.
