The Ah-ha Moments Story

We all know the experience of those ah-ha moments that change our perspective and make new futures possible.  

Throughout my international career in professional services, I have found that one of the best ways to measure success is through the impact I have on my clients and teams.  I have come to rely on those ah-ha moments to give me the insights I need to really make a difference.  

For nearly 20 years, initially as a lawyer with Linklaters and then as a management consultant, including many years as a Partner with Deloitte, I worked with global and functional leadership teams across industry sectors to design and deliver their most complex and challenging business transformation programmes. 

For many years I led Deloitte’s Strategic Change practise in the UK and gained a reputation for my pragmatic approach to facilitating behaviour and mindset changes that deliver results. My passion has always been the individual and team transformation at the heart of successful corporate change.

I founded Ah-ha Moments early in 2014, to offer high impact, insight-generating workshops and coaching to accelerate your journey of success.  One of the most rewarding parts of my role as a Partner with Deloitte, advising global organisations on how to transform functional performance, had been the mentoring and coaching of others to thrive in their own careers.  I feel privileged to share with others who want to accelerate their own success, insights from my own experience and from a broad spectrum of high performance and psychological research.

In my own journey up the corporate ladder there were moments of triumph and disappointment.  There were times of laughter and celebration.  There were times of tears and fears.  But through it all, I was gaining valuable insights that would serve me and others well in future years.  

If those insights can help others thrive and achieve their corporate ambitions more easily, then I want to share them.

What many career women of my generation have in common, is that our journeys have at times felt lonely ones.  How it "feels" to be a woman in the corporate world is generally a bit of an "unspeakable", for fear that it draws attention to our difference.  After all, we all spend a lot of time and energy ensuring we can be counted on as "one of the boys", in order to succeed.  

There are two particularly damaging consequences of the way we "feel" about our experiences at work being something of "an unspeakable":

1.  We internalise and personalise the challenges we experience - one of the most common comments I hear from women I work with is "Oh, I thought it was just me!".  Internalising the challenges and making oneself wrong, or less than for having experienced them, can undermine confidence unnecessarily.

2.  We often don't share our insights around the personal strategies we have developed that work well to help us overcome our personal challenges.  Insights that could well help others avoid or quickly overcome the same challenges.

I have lived and worked in London, Hong Kong, New York and Amsterdam and for five years led Deloitte's Human Capital Financial Services team in UK and then globally.  I am passionate about helping the next generation of women thrive in the global corporate environment.  Until now, there has been little offered by employers to emerging female leaders, that directly addresses the specific needs of women as they progress through their careers.  

Imagine a world in which a woman who chooses to prioritise her career is equally as likely as a man to reach the Board Room, or in which someone who has found a great balance between their corporate role and their other life passions can feel at ease with that choice and thrive as they excel.  

In my experience, there are some essential skills and powerful personal strategies and mindsets that help make this a reality.  This is what we explore in the Ah-Ha Moments workshops and coaching sessions.