Natalie Pearce

I'm a facilitator and coach qualified through Barefoot Coaching, with 10+ years experience working inside fast-growth companies including scaling a design agency from 3 to 100+ people and co-founding one of the UK's first culture design consultancies. But what my coaching really stands on is lived experience of transition: I came out as queer in my early thirties, got diagnosed with ADHD, left a 12-year heteronormative relationship, left my own business, and rebuilt my career, identity and life from scratch. I coach people through the exact crossroads I've navigated myself - the ones where who you are and what you do stop matching, and something has to give.

The people who work with me are usually mid-story. A lot of them are millennials who have built exactly the career they imagined in their twenties - and then they got there, only to find themselves thinking, is this it? Sometimes something else moved first: a late neurodivergence diagnosis, a health condition, a relationship changing - something significant that changes what actually matters to them. I also work with early-stage founders wrestling with a related version of the same question: how do I become the leader my business needs, without losing who I am and what I care about?

Different entry points but the same underlying shift - from a career and life that happened to you, to one you've actually chosen. And often the real turning point isn't a five-step plan but someone finally getting to say out loud what they'd never quite admitted before: that the version of success everyone else seems happy with isn't the one they actually want.

For example, one client came to me feeling trapped, disengaged, financially anxious, and overwhelmed by everything she'd been told she should want. Four sessions later, she had a fully formed freelance vision spanning facilitation, coaching, workshops and early-careers work. But the real shift wasn't just in the plan. It was the sentence she said out loud for the first time in our final session: "the successful career path my friends have isn't what I want for myself." She finally gave herself permission for this to be true.