For coaches and practitioners
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 get an experienced clinical eye on your own work and your own protocols. Practice mentorship and case consultation, from a nurse of twenty seven years who works privately too.
Who this is for
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.
New or years in. Qualified and not yet started, or busy and quietly isolated. The common thread is not the method. It is working alone with people who are frightened, unwell, and inclined to believe you.
What actually goes missing
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. The second opinion that costs nothing but a walk down the ward.
Most of it is not supervision at all. 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. 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.
That is not a character failing. 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
None of this means you are doing it badly. 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. 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. The late messages. The sessions that over-run.
- You are not sure which direction to take your practice, and there is nobody to think it through with.
Safety and results
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. 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 not just unprofessional. 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. 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.
Wanting to help is not the same as helping. The difference is judgement, and judgement is built with someone experienced beside you.
And results do not arrive overnight. Real change is slow, 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 not two different skills. They 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 am not sure which one people find more valuable. Probably the second.
It is not a qualification and not a modality. It does not replace your own training, your insurer or 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
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. 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.
When something a client says needs a doctor's attention, and exactly how to raise it without frightening them. What to do when they will not go. How to work alongside medical care instead of against it. Reading what comes back from testing, and knowing what to do with a result that sits outside the range.
And then 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.
Ready to Practise
Six weeks, for people who are qualified
and have not started
The gap between the certificate and a real person in front of you is wider than anyone warned. This is six weekly conversations in a small group, two individual calls with me, and a practice you can actually open at the end of it.
Below is what tends to come up, roughly in the order it tends to come up. It is a spine, not a syllabus. If your week brings something else, we work on that instead.
What you actually offer and to whom. Where your own experience gives you authority, and where it makes you over identify. Finding the edges of your practice honestly, rather than discovering them by nerve. And why another certificate will not produce the feeling you are waiting for.
A session start to finish. What you need to know before you begin and what you do not need to hold. Intake, packages, endings, and what you write down. Most of the fear is not about the modality at all, it is about not knowing what happens in the hour.
Supplements and herbs alongside prescribed medication. The interactions worth knowing cold. How to ask about medication so that people actually tell you, and what to do with a list you do not recognise.
Matching the approach to the person rather than to your own success story. Who each popular protocol is genuinely wrong for. Exercise parameters when someone is unwell. Recognising when a plan is meeting a disordered pattern rather than a health goal.
What warrants attention today, this week, or in due course. The wording for raising it gently. What to do when they refuse to go. Working alongside medical care, and the client who wants to stop their medication, which is the conversation most likely to end a practice.
Whose outcome it actually is. Contact between sessions. Ending on time, warmly. Noticing dependency early. The clients who flatten you, treated as information rather than as a failing. And charging properly, without feeling that wanting to be paid makes you a worse healer.
What you hold at the end. A scope statement, an intake form, a session structure, a safety checklist, a referral reference with the wording written out, a records template and a boundaries policy. All in your own words, built around your actual practice, rather than downloaded from somebody else's website.
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.
Six weekly group sessions, two individual calls with me, and the group between times. The first cohort is smaller, because you will be helping me shape it.
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. Nobody has to explain themselves.
Who you would be talking to
I am not just a nurse
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 healing, sound therapy 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.
Twenty seven years nursing, 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 advanced life support taught 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. 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 am not describing your isolation from the outside. I have felt it. 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
Honest answers
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, you are exactly who the six weeks was built for.
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 I explain why each part of it belongs there. 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 six weeks out of politeness. 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. It is what this is for.
