From helping FTSE 100 companies to Clinical director of her own private practice

Can you tell us about your current role?

I am the clinical director of my private practice that I set up in 2015. I’m a counsellor and clinical supervisor and I support people who have mental health issues and relationship issues. It started off with me on my own, after I qualified, with one client. I now have 19 people working alongside me, so it’s grown. We’ve got four offices in Glasgow and we’re about to open an office in Aberdeen.

What were you doing previously?

Prior to setting up MAC, I worked for a company called Mercer, the pensions consultancy, and before that I was with a similar organisation called Aon. I was a client relationship manager with Mercer in the pensions administration business and also led a UK sales team during my time there.

What made you decide to look for a change?

I was managing big FTSE 100 companies from a pension administration perspective. I had good relationships with the clients, but it was a job that involved long hours and lots of travelling to London and elsewhere in the UK because clients were all over the place.

I’d reached the senior role of principal in Mercer. I was grateful for all the opportunities I’d been given, but corporate life was becoming more and more difficult. It was very stressful, with a lot of expectation around what was demanded of you and the hours that you were given to do it in.

My marriage had broken down and I then lost my mum and I just started to think that there must be more to life than this. So, I went back to what I originally wanted to do which was something in the caring industry.

When I left school at 17, I’d decided that I was going to be a nurse. At the time nursing training had two intakes in May and September. My dad said to me ‘you’re not sitting around here all summer, you need to get yourself a job’, so I started working in a YTS (Youth Training Scheme) in a chartered accountants office, Pannell Kerr Foster.

When I was due to leave to start nursing training, they offered to keep me on and train me in accountancy. The pay (at that time) was very appealing so giving that up and moving to nursing didn’t seem like a good thing to do.

How did you go about it?

My uncle was terminally ill and I was spending a lot of time with him in hospital, observing that there were all these older people in hospital with no visitors. I ended up becoming a volunteer with the NHS, visiting people who were at end of life or had dementia.

That was my volunteering role. I really loved it, but I recognised I could probably do with some skills around how you listen to people in those circumstances and that’s when I started looking into counselling. I did a counselling skills certificate and that was the start of it all.

How hard was it to make the change?

I was a single parent with two kids, I had a full-time job, I studied for 2 years attending classes one weekend a month, and it was hard. I look back now, and I think, ‘how the hell did I do that?’ I was so driven by the fact that I loved what I was learning and what I was doing, that was my motivation to keep going.

The more I was getting involved in training and developing as a counsellor, the more I realised that it was time for me to leave the corporate world and take a leap. When I qualified, I basically decided that that was it; I was just going to leave in December 2015 and start in January 2016. I had put aside some money to help me cover my first few months of costs, I developed a website and with the help of my now husband, a chartered accountant, my business was set up.

On my very last day in Mercer, I was in hospital getting my gall bladder removed so that’s what I was thinking about primarily.

What transferable skills did you find that you had?

The years that I had working in the corporate world gave me a lot of tools to set up a private practice. I had accountancy, marketing, and sales experience. That’s been really helpful. At Mercer, you got a lot of excellent training.

In the job I do now, I absolutely love working with people. I work with individuals and couples as well as supervising other counsellors in practice. I was a manager for a number of years, so I am getting to use those skills as well.

What would you say to other people who are thinking of making a change?

The main thing I would say to people is don’t wait until you’re a certain age. Change can happen at any point. You can do it when you’re 26 and you can do it when you’re 56. There is no time bar. If you feel the desire to change your career and your life, absolutely do it because you won’t regret it.

When I realised that the corporate world was no longer how I wanted to live my life, I wasn’t afraid to say I wanted to do something different. Taking a chance and believing in yourself are probably the two biggest things that can help you. So often, we just want to stay in the same place for safety and, actually, we don’t go on to do what is going to make us happy and contented. I’m very happy and content with the life I’ve got and very fortunate in that.