Executive Coach for chronic illness (UK)

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Somewhere between the NHS appointment letter and the board papers, nobody tells you how you're supposed to hold both.

I know, because I did it for years before I found a better way to. 

Nine years as a public sector Chief Executive, running an organisation while my own body was becoming unrecognisable to me — gastrointestinal dysfunction, fibromyalgia, deep endometriosis, ovarian cysts. 

Some days I led from a hospital corridor. Some days I couldn't lead at all.

If you're a UK leader managing chronic illness — in the NHS, the civil service, a company you built, a board you sit on — you already know there is very little written for you specifically. Plenty exists for employees, but almost nothing exists for the executive herself, still expected to perform capability she no longer has the capacity for.

I am a former public sector CEO, an ILM Level 7 executive coach, and soon to be doctoral researcher in coaching psychology — currently interrogating my own Whole-Wellness™ framework rather than simply defending it. This work is evidence-informed, not evidence-based: lived experience came first, research came to confirm and sharpen it, never to replace it.

Whole-Wellness™ holds five lenses — Physical, Mental, Emotional, Spiritual, Social & Environmental — because chronic illness never arrives in one domain alone. It touches your body, your identity, your relationships, your sense of what your working life is even for.

At the centre of the model sits a distinction most coaching never makes:

You have never been questioned on what you're capable of. The gap is capacity — what your body and nervous system can actually sustain right now — and when that gap goes unnamed, it becomes the architecture of every crash that follows.

Sustainable Capacity = (Resources + Recovery + Regulation + Support) − (Demands + Stress Load).

When the equation runs at a deficit long enough, it moves through the Habitual Burnout Cycle — Spark, Ignite, Burn, Extinguish, Rest. 

Oscillating back to Survive after a flare-up isn't a setback in this model. It's what a body under real load is supposed to do. 

Coaching built for well people, retrofitted for chronic illness, will never understand that. Coaching built from inside chronic illness does.

Leaders and executives — in public sector, corporate, or founder-led organisations — managing a long-term physical health condition alongside genuine leadership responsibility. Women who are tired of choosing between being taken seriously and being honest about what their body needs.

This isn't medical treatment, and it isn't a substitute for your clinical care team. It's coaching, not therapy — living forward from where you are now, not processing what brought you here. Who am I, leading like this? What's possible from here? — those are the questions this work holds.

The Wylde Life Audit takes two minutes and gives you an honest first read across all five lenses, sent straight to your inbox.

Or, if you're ready, I'd love to hear from you.