About

With Love & Courage actually started as With Courage.

I’d recently left the Army, started working for myself, and was going through a period of my life where courage felt like exactly what I needed.

Keep going. Do the scary thing. Take the risk. Work it out.

Courage was something I understood.

What I was much less good at was being on my own side while I did it.

For a long time, I didn’t even realise I was hard on myself. It had been pointed out by other people throughout my life but I’d put it down to being a Virgo, an eldest daughter and someone with ‘high standards’. I thought it was just part of who I was.

Then, I went through a period of deeper self-inquiry (therapy, ontological coach training, and spiritual practices) in which quite a lot of what I thought I knew about myself stopped making sense. I started to see just how much criticism, pressure and judgement I’d normalised internally.

I started understanding myself differently.

Why I reacted the way I did. Why certain things frightened me. Why I kept ending up in patterns I didn’t particularly want to be in.

And, for probably the first time, I started to feel some real compassion for myself.

Which was needed. Very needed! So needed, in fact, that I then swung fairly enthusiastically in the other direction.

I got very good at listening to myself. Protecting my energy. Not forcing things. Giving myself permission. Choosing what felt safe.

And for a while that was exactly what I needed too.

Until it wasn’t.

At some point I realised that I had become so focused on protecting myself from discomfort that I was also protecting myself from quite a lot of life.

I lost any sense of desire or ambition and felt like I was happy just existing.

But that turned out not to be true either.

I wanted to make money. Do interesting work. Meet people. Create things. Take risks. Love people properly. Laugh more. Travel. Try things I might be bad at. Have experiences I couldn’t guarantee would turn out well.

I wanted to feel alive.

And unfortunately, quite a lot of that was going to involve being uncomfortable.

That was when I realised I needed to find a middle ground.

I didn’t want to choose between loving myself or changing my life.

I didn’t want to have to hate who I was in order to become something different.

But I also didn’t want accepting myself to mean that I never challenged myself, took a risk, had a difficult conversation or did something that scared the shit out of me.

I needed both.

Love for the human I am.

And courage for the life I want.

That’s where With Love & Courage came from.

And it’s still what the work is about.

We all have a self.

A human being shaped by everything we’ve lived through. A brain and a body with habits, fears, expectations, assumptions, desires, protective strategies and some extremely well-practised ways of doing things.

That self isn’t bad.

It also doesn’t always need to be in charge.

Sometimes the part of you that desperately wants everyone to like you gets to come along while you say no.

Sometimes the part that wants another 6 months of research can be frightened while you press publish anyway.

Sometimes the part that thinks you should push through actually needs you to stop.

Sometimes you realise you’ve been avoiding something.

Sometimes you realise the thing you’ve been trying to force yourself to do is something you don’t even really want.

There isn’t one correct response.

That’s kind of the point.

I’m interested in what happens when you can notice your self while life is happening, stay in relationship with your self rather than immediately fighting or obeying whatever shows up, and create enough room to ask:

What do I actually want to do here?

Not what am I ‘supposed’ to do.

Not what would prove I’m brave or healed or good enough.

Not what will make this uncomfortable feeling disappear fastest.

What do I want to do?

And then: Can I stay with my self while I do it?

That, to me, is Leadership of the Self.

It’s not about controlling yourself better or becoming endlessly self-aware.

And it definitely isn’t about becoming some beautifully regulated human who floats through life responding perfectly to everything.

It’s much more ordinary than that.

It’s noticing when you’re getting defensive halfway through an argument.

Realising you’ve said yes to something you didn’t want to do and being able to go to the person and say “Actually, no”.

Catching yourself researching the same decision again because choosing feels scary. So you stop, take a breath and then make a choice.

Knowing you need to apologise and actually apologising.

Knowing you need to rest and actually resting.

Knowing you need to get off your arse and actually getting up to go do the thing.

Letting somebody be disappointed in you without trying to fix their reaction.

Changing your mind.

Trying again.

Being a human being, basically.

But being one with a little more ability to consciously choose who you’re being in any given moment.

This is a practice, not a destination.

There isn’t a version of you at the end of this who never overthinks, avoids anything, gets defensive, cares what people think or makes decisions from fear.

At least, if there is, I haven’t met them yet.

The practice is noticing.

Coming back into relationship with your self.

Meeting what’s here without immediately making it wrong.

Finding the place where you have some choice again.

And then living that choice as best you can.

Over and over.

That’s what we practice here.

In workshops, Coaching Rooms, 1:1 conversations and whatever else With Love & Courage becomes.

I don’t pretend to have the answers to life or being human.

But I think our lives change when we stop treating our selves as a problem to solve and start learning how to be with our selves while we actually live our life.

If this sounds like a way of being you’d like to cultivate, I hope you’ll like it here.

With love & courage,

Kirsty