Thriving in mid life

We sat down with Sophie Carvin to explore how she found her niche. She’s a Confidence Coach with Deror, a Morpeth based coaching practice, and trustee for Hexham headquartered charity Wag and Company North East Friendship Dogs.

What led you to become a Confidence Coach?

As a consequence of my roles in the corporate world over many years, I often had senior managers coming to me for advice or support, so in 2012 I welcomed an opportunity to complete a postgraduate coaching qualification at Northumbria University.

Next we set up a small team of volunteer internal coaches in the business I was working for to support leadership learning, plus transformation and change programmes.

Then I started to dream of having my own coaching practice. In October 2020 that became a reality.

The focus on confidence arose because I’ve found a lack of it so often comes up in coaching, and having it is a real enabler for people to thrive in and out of work.

Is it easy to learn to become more confident?

Anyone can learn to be more confident. We’re all different, so it varies from individual to individual how their confidence grows. I’ve seen people suddenly see things and themselves from a different perspective, and others who have found it a much more gradual process to shake off long held beliefs.

What do you do to help people build their confidence?

For me two of the key reasons for a lack of confidence are:

We’re being pushed out of our comfort zone, we’re doing something challenging, new or infrequent, we haven’t built up knowledge, practice and experience. In situations like this, during coaching we’d work on finding ways to make it feel manageable. It might be starting a new senior job, leading a challenging team, influencing others, running a successful project and more.
The thoughts going round in our heads are really unhelpful. Thoughts about not being good enough, about being found out, about failing. I’ve got valuable tools we use to help people to quieten unhelpful thoughts and replace them with more constructive ones. Tools I’ve seen the most significant change with have been from the Positive Intelligence programme. There are other approaches I use too.

Other factors impact confidence too, such as people we work with, the culture of the organisation we work in, the fact we’re different from those around us, the challenges we’re facing outside of work and I’ve also realised that our mental and physical health play a significant role.

So in addition to one to one coaching, I collaborate with another Positive Intelligence coach, Erica Gibbon, who also practises as a nutritional therapist and functional medicine professional.

We’ve developed an online programme aimed at women trying amongst other things to juggle big jobs, care for parents, support their children, all whilst dealing with hormonal changes. We help build foundations for their mental fitness and optimum health so they are able to confidently deal with life’s challenges and have energy to enjoy their own life too.

The programme is about changing habits for life, so we create a small, supportive community who will hold them to account, pick them up when they’re down and celebrate progress with them.