Georgina Halabi

My name is Georgina Halabi. I'm a performance and wellbeing coach and I'm based in Stratford-upon-Avon, which is in Warwickshire, middle of England.

A typical day... well I get up at about 6.30 in the morning, make sure my children are awake and they get out the house and then I like to have a bit of a morning routine.

So I'll do some exercises, I have some physiotherapy I need to do because I'm an old woman and I need my back to be good. I'll also do meditation if I can, 20 minutes or even more. I like to mix that up and then I start my work.

So because I work from home and I work with clients all over the world, they can book me in the calendar. So I will look at my day each day and say, what have I got? And each day will be completely different.

Most of my client meetings are an hour. So I'll tend to have anywhere between one or five of those in the day. So some days I have flexibility, I can go to the gym, I could go for walks, but more often than not I'm in front of my computer.

I'm sort of either helping people with client sessions or I'm trying to create new clients, so I'm going out there and trying to market myself and promote myself. Having conversations, having conversations with people I've worked with in the past or new people.

All of my clients we meet on Zoom, which is great because they can be anywhere in the world. I work with people from Australia to Mexico to America. So my day can be very long. You know, it could start very early if it's people in Australia or it could be very, very late if it's people in America, for example.

Seeing what happens to my clients when they start the work.

And when I say the work, imagine we all have, you know, voices in our head that stop us being as happy as we want to be or as successful as we want to be. And one of the best things about my job is telling people, okay, what are these thoughts?

You know, we explore them together and then we start to understand all of the thoughts and the beliefs that are holding them back. And they can start to realize that they're not their thoughts, right? You have control over how you respond. So when people start to understand that they can control their emotions, they can control how they respond, they have choice as to how they want to be.

If you're constantly thinking about negative things, all you're going to experience is negative things. Whereas often just asking the right questions, things like what do you want in life? What will you get there? What beliefs will support you? When they start to think differently, they start to behave differently.

So the best thing for me is you're just creating ripples and ripples and ripples and ripples. It's like a compounded effect and you're just helping so many people just by changing individuals within the system.

I would say recently the hardest part of my job is creating new clients. So I've been lucky, you know, a lot of people have found me, I've been referred, people just come to me, but after a while that can sort of slow down.

And so it can become to feel a bit like sort of having to do a lot of marketing, a lot of sales, and that takes energy and motivation. And that's not always something I have. I just kind of want to be there doing the coaching all the time rather than... boring business side of it, which I can do, but it's not as fun as the coaching.

I was in a meeting one time and something happened in my mind and I was like, what are you doing here? I'm not helping anyone. I was 45 years old at the time. So I already had an established career, working in marketing technology.

And I went and had a coffee with a friend of mine who tried so many different jobs. They were a coach. And I said, tell me about what you do. She told me about coaching and I thought you could get paid for doing this. She goes, yeah, you could get paid really, really well.

And I said, well, don't you have to know everything about everything? She said, the less you know about everything, the better. The main thing is you've got to be able to listen really actively and ask the right questions. So you don't always have to have the right answers in life.

Being able to ask a good question is so much more powerful because it will open things up for you.

I think it helped. Not just school education, right? It's the whole experience of being at school, because it's not just what you learn from the teachers, it's what you learn from your friends, how to be, how not to be, you know, what makes you feel good, what makes you not feel good.

I think the whole grounding that I had in maybe business studies and then my degree as well, that was a really useful tool to help me sort of go in and do all of the administrative side, you know, understand how to market myself, understand how to sort of look at all of the money and the financial stuff, spreadsheets, all of those.

That was all taught to me at school. I also did English literature, which I found was really great for A-levels. It gave me the chance to look at things and question them from lots of different lights.

But you know, school... it's just one tiny part. I think, you know, the school of life is just as important and everything that you learn, every single experience, nothing is wasted. Nothing at all is wasted.

When I think about most of my career things, it's not about the achievements, it's about the people. It's about, you know, the Christmas parties or the travel or that time where I've stretched myself and gone, this is terrifying. I don't know what I'm doing. And it turning out all right. You know, I've got so many memories of those all along the way.

I think that's why so many people feel like an imposter because they're like, I've never done this before, I don't know what I'm doing. And they do it anyway. That's how confidence is created, right? By stretching yourself.

So the first advice would probably be the most important opinion is yours, right? Not anybody else's. And when you go in and you quieten down all of those voices... really you have all of the wisdom that you need within and nobody knows you as well as you know yourself. Appreciate yourself, right? Value yourself.

The second bit of advice and this isn't sort of career advice, this is more personal advice that I wish somebody had told me, right, was this idea of beating yourself up.

I mean I'm looking at photos of myself when I was younger and I was like I don't know what I was worried about, you know. I always thought I'm too fat and I'm too this and I'm too that and I would give anything to look like that now, you know.

Don't beat yourself up and don't look at all the things you aren't, enjoy all the things you are because they're amazing, right?