ABOUT ME

I’m Tracey, the founder of Hummingbird Coaching and mum to four beautiful children. Learning Mindfulness and Compassion has had a profound impact on my life, helping me to feel content, be happy in my life, to slow down without doing less and manage my stress and overwhelm when I need to.

My mindfulness journey started about 7 years ago. At the time, I felt so caught up in my busy life – I actually felt a bit like a Hummingbird - frantically flitting from flower to flower, flapping my wings at a zillion times a minute to stay in the air.

I had a really busy job, I had two young children who were growing up so fast and life just felt like it was getting away from me. I felt like my feet never touched the ground. Worst of all, I never felt like I was doing anything well – I felt like I wasn’t being a good mum, I felt like I was underperforming at work, like I wasn’t being a very good wife or a very good friend, the house always felt like it was a mess, the to do list was always so long. Ugh I just felt like everything was only getting half of me and I was so desperate to be perfect at it all! It was exhausting and made me very low. The lower I felt, the less motivated I felt to do any of it. This manifested in lots of ways, anger, sadness, I just didn’t feel like I was living the life I wanted to be living – I was putting so much pressure on myself to do it all! 

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Then someone recommended I read a book called Mindfulness: a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world by Mark Williams and Danny Penmann. When I read it, so much of it made sense. I started doing some of the exercises and listening to the meditations. All quite informally, but I started to feel a penny drop. I started to integrate little elements of mindfulness into my life. I slowly started to feel less mum guilt and started to enjoy my work. I remember one evening just looking at my son and thinking – wow this feels like the first time I have seen your face for ages.

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My practice waxed and waned as all new habits do, but was always there. Then my mum passed away and I found myself in all sorts of dark places, with my head just so rarely in the here and now – always ruminating about the should haves and the could haves. And when I fell pregnant with baby number three, I felt that I needed some proper support. So I did an 8 week Mindfulness course, similar to the ones that I now deliver and this was the light bulb moment. I really started to practice properly and live mindfully and started to notice the really profound effect it was having on me and my life and relationships.

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I started to feel more aware of what was happening, more accepting, more in control, less guilt and subsequently less stressed. This translated into managing to keep my cool much more in heated situations at home and helped me find a space around every situation, which enabled me to choose how to react next. 

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The impact on my life was so profound, that I felt like I really wanted to help others experience the same.

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I trained as a Mindfulness and Compassion Coach with the prestigious Mindfulness UK and received a Foundation Degree Level 4 mindfulness qualification awarded by CPCAB. I am also trained to deliver the gold-standard Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programme and a Compassionate Mindful Resilience course. 

If you’d like to know more about Mindfulness before signing up, I’d be very happy to have an informal chat and share some of the science that supports the benefits that Mindfulness can deliver and how we can work together to find a way for you to integrate this into your day. 

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I cannot wait to meet you and help you with your mindfulness journey.