Ultimately Personal Consultancy is a way of noticing and a creative exploration of life. It is a practice in learning to live joyfully with uncertainty and the unknown.
Through the following principles, it supports you to choose and commit to your projects, people and places for a life full of creativity and purposeful well-being:
Holistic
Any Personal Consultancy outcomes are shaped and defined by your uniqueness. It starts with you. Your process and pace is put first and there is collaboration on any technique or framework used to move you towards optimal functioning.
This is based on the belief that each person has an innate self-actualising capacity and tendency. It may be latent but with the right conditions, you will spontaneously strive towards your potential.
Exploration
Personal Consultancy treats ups and downs in life as a normal part of being human. It isn't about diagnosis, neurosis, heal/fix/cure or arriving at a certain place. It is an exploration of creativity and becoming ever more curious: learning and sharing, experimenting and experiencing, noticing and more noticing.
It's inquiring into what is authentic living: embracing the shadow e.g. pain, hardship, suffering, adversity, together with the light e.g. contentment, purpose, joy, love. It's also not about names or the latest technique, but what's deep underneath that: how are you in relationship to something? How does it touch and move you? What direction are you facing now?
Awareness
If there is a word that sums up Personal Consultancy it would be awareness. Self-discovery, self-knowledge and self-mastery come down to your inner observation skills and the development of your inner witness. Together these allow you notice and then choose where you place your attention next for desired effect.
Change in Personal Consultancy isn't forced. It is allowed to happen naturally through attention deepening practices that heighten your awareness. This way can sometimes be painful but as more and more kindful attention is brought to your habitual patterns, eventually they self-transform and take on a new life of their own. Growth and change like this is sustainable and integrative, leading to a related principle: presence.
Presence
Everyone has a signature presence. Sometimes known as true or essential nature, Personal Consultancy strengthens the development of qualities such as compassion, courage, confidence, calmness, curiosity, cooperation. This in turn grounds your being in emerging truth and gives you a core centre and ability to survive, if not thrive, in times of uncertainty and dealing with the unknown. This is true leadership and something everyone can develop, taking us towards responsive and creativity living.
For Now
Personal Consultancy understands that everything is constantly evolving: you, me and the processes for supporting us to become you and me. It's a dance with 'And what's happening now?'
It also acknowledges that whilst based in the 'here and now' it is important to look at where we have come from and where we are going. It's hopefully an intelligent, sensitive system of being and doing that allows for different things at different times for different people.
This 'managed eclecticism' approach as named by David Clutterbuck, supports the bringing together of coaching and counselling theoretical disciplines with the lived tension ore reality: learning in the moment and being in a state of not knowing.
"Natalie is a very patient and perceptive consultant whose use of the Clean Language approach encourages clients to deeply explore and to create positive change in their lives. Natalie challenged me to dig deeper and her use of imagery and exploration of metaphor was very effective in my understanding of beliefs and motivations that guided my behavior. I’ve become more reflective."
Leadership Impact Coach
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"Thank you for your help last week in inspiring me to dig deep with finding those questions I needed to ask. They really helped. I’ve now had the courageous conversation I needed to have and also done a budget exploring my living costs and I feel a lot more confident about things."
Mental Health Administrator
