The approach of the New Year is for many of us a reason for a resolution to change something in our lives. If you look in a women's or health magazine, or in the adverts in the media or on the web, there are resolutions everywhere: improve your image, lose weight, improve your diet, stop smoking, go to the gym, start a new hobby, learn a new language, etc.

I heard the story of this person: she was very unhappy, stressed, feeling depressed, anxious, angry, lonely, hopeless, struggling, just surviving, but then something happened, and so the story begins.

She had been told that life was a struggle and she had to work hard to earn money, that everything had to be earned, that nothing was free, nothing was given, that money did not grow on trees, so she was burning herself out.

The Dalai Lama, in his book The Art of Happiness, says that the very purpose of life is happiness, and I am sure you agree with that.

And what is happiness?
Happiness is about freedom and it begins in the mind.

In order to be happy you need to be yourself, live by your values, be true to yourself and choose how you want to live; you need to know what you want, what makes you happy, so that you can create the life you want; you need to feel good about yourself and about in general.

I worked with a client who had suffered from social anxiety for most of her life. She grew up in a dysfunctional family who emotionally abused her, and she arrived at the point of believing that there was something wrong with being her.

And this is a key to social anxiety: believing that there is something wrong or bad in you or with being you.

Having worked with many clients recovering from childhood emotional abuse, and having experienced it myself, I want to share my learning with you, in the hope that it will help you be well, feel good, be happy and create the life you desire and deserve.

The most important relationship you have in your life is the one with yourself, and if you have been emotionally abused, recovering that relationship with yourself is absolutely essential.

Everything begins with a choice and a decision. Everything is a choice, and if you choose consciously you become the person you want to be and create the life you desire. And when you choose, and commit to your choices with all your strength, you will achieve what you want.

Whatever the difficulties you have experienced in your life, whatever the difficulties you are experiencing at the moment, you can choose.

We all are alone sometimes, but that does not mean feeling lonely; we can be alone and be perfectly happy, so what is it that makes us feel lonely and how can we make ourselves feel good? But also why do we feel lonely?

I have worked with many clients who have experienced abuse in one form or the other in their lives and there is a common factor, which is in fact the feeling of loneliness they experience.

Most of the times when confidence is low and we suffer from anxieties, this is because we beat ourselves up continuously and without mercy. In fact self-confidence is very much linked to the way we treat ourselves.

We can be absolutely fierce in the way we treat ourselves but, and if we do that then how can we possibly feel confident?

We beat ourselves up about what we have done or not done, and for the ways we have behaved, if they were not according to our standards.

I am delighted to share with you some of my experiences in developing my practice as a Life Coach, in the hope that they will help you and make your process of becoming a successful coach painless and easy.

When I started my practice, I did not have clear ideas of which sort of coaching I was 'supposed' to do, whether I needed to focus on a particular niche or a particular topic; I asked many opinions to other coaches, I did many attempts of marketing, but somehow I was struggling.

As the number of life coaches increases daily, the need to be specialised, to be different, becomes more and more a necessity. Someone once told me that 'niching' describes how you would like other people to remember you, to talk about you, so 'niching' is closely linked to branding.

When I started coaching I did not even know what a niche was.