About Nicola

My Path Here

I don't think I chose this work in one defining moment. I think I've been finding my way towards it for most of my life.

I grew up learning how to adapt. My life has taken me through seventeen homes across six countries, and somewhere in all that movement I became very good at reading rooms, finding my feet quickly and getting on with whatever life placed in front of me. I learned how to survive long before I had a word for what survival was, and those qualities served me well. They carried me into adulthood, motherhood, leadership, business and entrepreneurship. I built businesses, created communities, worked internationally and spent years doing what capable women so often become exceptionally good at: taking responsibility, making things happen and finding a way through.

My personal mission to empower one million women has taken many forms: developing world class leaders and teams with Successfactory, business coaching built for mothers at Mpower, and support for coaches building meaningful, high-impact businesses at Grow Your Coaching Business.

Underneath all of it I became fascinated by a simple question: what makes us who we are? Why can two people experience the same circumstances and respond completely differently? Why do we repeat patterns we consciously want to change? What makes us feel safe enough to become more fully ourselves? And why can we know exactly what we should do and still find ourselves unable to do it?

That curiosity led me into coaching and human development, and my work kept evolving along the way. I studied different approaches to coaching, leadership, behaviour, personality, trauma, the nervous system and embodied change, and I grew less interested in giving people answers and more interested in what helps us hear our own.

And then life took everything I thought I understood and made it personal.

In 2018, an extraordinary Friesian horse named Monty came into my life. What began as learning to ride became something I could never have anticipated. Over six years and thousands of hours together, Monty became one of my greatest teachers. He taught me about presence, trust, relationship, fear, love and the difference between trying to control life and learning to meet it.

On 17 September 2024, Monty and I were struck by a car while riding along a Cheshire lane. He died at the scene. I survived. The woman who had spent a lifetime being capable discovered that capability couldn't carry her through what had happened, and recovery asked something entirely different of me. It asked me to slow down, listen to my body, receive help, live with uncertainty and stop measuring myself by what I could produce or carry, and eventually to question some of the ways of being I had mistaken for simply who I was.

None of it was navigated alone. My partner Graham, a steady, grounding presence throughout, held space for all of it, long before I understood how much I would need him to.

For the first time, survival itself became something I could see. Not as something wrong with us, or something to be ashamed of, but as an intelligence that protects us, carries us and gets us through, and that we sometimes become ready to live beyond.

That didn't replace what I'd learned professionally. It deepened it, and today my work lives at the meeting point of both: decades of leadership, business and life experience, continued training and study, and the humility of discovering that some things can only truly be understood once life asks us to live them.

Beneath so many of the questions I've met, professionally and personally, I keep finding the same longing: to feel like our true selves and walk the path we're meant for. Perhaps that's what my path has really been about, slowly finding my way Home to who I was beneath everything I'd learned to become in order to survive, and helping other women make enough space to find out what that might mean for them.

I've walked through more than one desert in my own life, and I've come to understand that an oasis isn't the destination. It's the place we step out of survival long enough to rest, resource, listen and hear ourselves again. That idea now sits at the heart of The Leadership Oasis®, the space I've created for women who are ready to explore not only how they live, but the place within themselves from which they lead, and to discover what becomes possible when survival is no longer the place they're leading from.

Because ultimately, Home isn't somewhere we're trying to reach. It's who we are beneath everything we've had to become to survive.

What Informs My Work

My work isn't rooted in a single methodology. I draw from different disciplines, bodies of knowledge and decades of professional and lived experience, bringing them together thoughtfully according to the person, the context and what the work is asking for.

Transformational Coaching
Exploring not only what is happening, but the beliefs, patterns, identities and assumptions beneath it.

Trauma-sensitive practice
Working with an awareness that our ways of coping, protecting and responding often make sense in the context of what we have experienced, and that meaningful change requires attention to safety, capacity and pace.

Embodied practice
Recognising that insight doesn't live only in the thinking mind, and creating space to notice and work with what the body may be communicating.

Leadership & Self-Leadership
Drawing on decades of leadership and organisational experience and more than fourteen years developing leaders, particularly women, to explore how who we are shapes how we lead.

Strengths & Personality
Using evidence-based profiling and psychological frameworks, where useful, to deepen self-awareness rather than put people into boxes.

Mentoring
Knowing when a question is more useful, and when it helps to share what I know. Alongside coaching, I draw on decades of leadership, business and entrepreneurial experience to offer insight, challenge and practical guidance where useful, particularly around leadership and building, growing or evolving a business. I have particular expertise in supporting coaches and other businesses working in the field of human change.