It will be five years in October since I started The Buzz Hub Co. – originally a blog based in Tring about local businesses. If you’ve been with me for a while (I’m so grateful every day for the familiar faces I see and connect with on Instagram), you will know that the blog started as part of my social media training that I undertook as a way to leave my commute and corporate life behind. In the end it took 4 years and a pandemic to finally say goodbye to my corporate life and move away from running businesses as side hustles and, in the place of PAYE, I’ve seen some rather radical personal and business change.
My exit from employment was carefully constructed – it started with reduced working days, followed by taking on a temporary mat leave cover position, and finally downsizing our home to be able to adjust to the change in income. Freelance social media contracts were carefully built up and finally the step was manoeuvred in to place to feel like a safe one.
Of course, what I hadn’t accounted for was a global pandemic. I mean who had?
Within months of the pandemic arriving and just a few months of leaving my corporate I’d lost 80% of my income and the small bit of security I’d worked hard to support my transition was gone.
In this situation, the circumstances were far from normal and not being alone in this was what gave me the permission I needed not to crumble and accept defeat. There was an element of the rules as we knew them being entirely torn apart and I found myself in the position to rebuild my working reality on some fairly scorched earth.
I had loved the past few years as a business owner and working with independent businesses – it had given me pure purpose and was absolutely my raison d’etre. However I had always been dogged by my own lack of confidence and self-belief that seemed to hollow me at the core. I was sure there was something inherently wrong with the person who lived beneath the surface and lived in fear of exposing my sensitive core.
So when I was confronted with my career/ income scorched earth, it seemed time to meet myself and better understand the bits that left me feeling hollow and vulnerable. I started working with a Coach and began to take a closer look at who I was, what motivated me, what was draining me, and I started to gain shape of the events or feelings that had shaped my life. It was revolutionary. It seems like a such a small and insignificant thing, but really starting to understand who I was and how I ticked objectively was the start of my self-compassion and the end of me forcing myself to fit in. It gave me the ability for me embrace my gifts and make use of them to support my businesses.
The start of my journey into understanding myself was like reading the prologue of a story – it gave me so much, but there was more and it opened up the next stage in my healing journey. The better understanding that I found of my empathy and understanding meant that I had a natural affinity for this work myself. I had already started to work 1-to-1 with businesses – and I loved this – but wanted to build on my offering and support them at a deeper level.
Within months of starting on my own coaching journey I embarked on a 7 month journey to become and ICF (International Coaching Federation) accredited Coach.
Coach training was the next layer in my healing journey. It really was an experience that entirely changed my life and how I live. Studying revolved around some deeply valuable topics like Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy, Neuroscience and Positive Psychology, which gave me a great foundation in understanding the way we think, feel, and behave and – more importantly, how we can make serious, transformational change. I was incredibly lucky to also be mentored by a Psychotherapeutic Coach, who really helped me to unravel who I was, and understand the parts of me that felt painful and showed up in my life to make me feel less of the person that I was born to be.
The final piece of my puzzle (I say final…this work is never done) came through my own research and interest. I had been working to overcome my fear-based behaviours through the course and I was fascinated by why this affected me. I now understood where my fears came from, but I found it almost impossible to change my fears through trying to think differently. This is when I started to understand the nervous system, stress responses, and the power of the body on our behaviour. Through research and training I found that the majority of our signals start in the body before they are sent to the brain. When it comes to stress responses, it can require working with the body as well as the mind to fully support your nervous system, as you can’t “out-think” a stress response. The old paradigm of thinking that all our responses are generated from our thinking brain is misleading…..and understanding this is where I started my love affair with all things nervous system.
I’m now a fully certified ICF Coach now and am working directly with 1-to-1 clients who want to make transformational change in their lives and businesses. I work with individuals who feel like they want to uncover themselves in their life and also lack confidence, self-worth, or overcoming fear. I use neural tools to support clients to build capacity in their nervous system and increase their sense of safety to reduce symptoms like anxiety and depression whilst re-building their lives. This work is hugely rewarding as I love to see how humans can be emancipated from the ways of being that hold them down. Whilst I would never recommend the Covid baptism of fire – sometimes it does take dramatic change to see what’s really important.
Of course, this brings me back to The Buzz Hub Co. and it is very much part of my Covid story too. We have been so pleased to be able to support independent businesses throughout lockdown and having a space for them became more vital than ever. We decided to completely relaunch our site to make it more SEO friendly and give it a new look. We’ve built a business that is more sustainable to grow and manage and work well around our other businesses. We plan to work hard to keep building our community in the coming months, so that we feel connected to our businesses in spite of the challenge of minimal in person meet-ups……and coaching might make an appearance there too!
For more information about Katy Murray Coaching:
View my website here
Or find me on instagram