I’m Tracey Cumming, and I love life.
I really do. I love everything about life. I enjoy the thrill I get from riding my motorbike through the country lanes on a weekend. Every chance I get, I’ll try something new and exciting (scuba diving was definitely one to remember!). I also know how important it is to slow down, and I enjoy walking, cycling, swimming, and gardening. I didn’t always have the time for the life I wanted though. My life was all deadlines and budgets, chaos and cutthroat competition.
Working a corporate job and living in the city gets old fast, and being Superwoman can’t last forever. When I struggled to conceive with my husband, it made me reconsider a lot of things about my life. When our first cycle of IVF was successful, I was elated and promptly fell in love with my unborn daughter.
The thing about pregnancy and motherhood, is that nobody tells you how much your identity changes when you are responsible for someone other than yourself, and you have this tiny being that relies entirely upon you for nourishment, care, advocacy and more. I had always been in control, but here was this beautiful perfect girl, over whom I had absolutely no control. She needed me, and the shift from Tracey to Mum was initially a tough one; I sought counselling to help me through. After my counselling, I began to rebuild. As a family, switched lanes, got out of the city and my husband, daughter and I moved out into the countryside, where we now have a 20 acre farm, with a herd of beautiful Wiltshire Horn sheep. It doesn’t get much better than lambing season, bottle feeding all the babies, and we are also cultivating our own orchard which I’m really enjoying.
It was the support and clarity I got from my counsellor, along with a love for mentoring others – something I had a lot of experience with from working in the city, that made me understand the value of having someone on your side to help you when things are hard. This is when I became interested in the value of coaching, and decided to train as a transformational life coach. Given that I’ve experienced change, I knew I was able to help others through their changes, and my mind was set – this is who I wanted to be. Mother, wife, lover of life, and a transformational life coach.
As I soon found, not all coaches are created equally, and so I set out to find a programme that would not only work with my personal beliefs and feelings, but one that would set me apart from your average life coach.
Each month, I’ll be writing to you, for you, about the things that make my heartbeat faster, the things that I’m passionate about, and the issues I feel need to be given a voice; things like women’s wellbeing, maternal mental health, empowerment of women in the workplace, fertility, infertility, and more.