Coaching and cancer: Karen’s story

Karen Myers is a blogger, baker, knitter, traveller, theatre-goer and escape room addict. She was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in July 2018 and has blogged about her experience at atozeeofbc.com. In this guest blog post, she writes about her experience of Shine’s coaching programme.

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A cancer diagnosis tends to throw a spanner into the works of your life. The various cogs of your relationships, your career, your health, your lifestyle, your hobbies, and your free time are all whirring away quite happily until a doctor says ‘you’ve got cancer’. Then everything comes to a grinding halt. Through no choice of their own, many people with cancer have to put large parts of their life on hold as they go through treatment. But when that active treatment is over it can be hard work to get the engine of ‘normal’ life started again. The physical and psychological drain on your energy and enthusiasm can leave you feeling directionless. I certainly felt that way – my cancer diagnosis came after a difficult redundancy from a job I had loved, and when a year of treatment and surgery came to an end I had no clue what my next step in life should be. I felt totally lost.

Blog post author Karen Myers

That’s when Shine’s coaching programme appeared on my radar. I took the leap of applying in the hope that it would give me some guidance, some direction and maybe a little oil to get my engines running again. I had no real understanding of coaching but I learned quickly that the Shine coaching programme is flexible and open. The programme can help you focus on whatever you need: whether that’s your career, your relationships, your work/life balance, your search for better health, or your financial or personal wellbeing. Maybe post-cancer you wants to find a new direction, personally or professionally, or maybe you want help to rebuild normality after cancer has crashed through your life. Under Shine’s coaching programme, the end goal is entirely down to you. And if you’re not even sure what that end goal might be, that’s OK too. 

Now in its fourth year, the Shine Coaching programme starts with a fun, informative workshop where those being coached can meet and start devising the goals that will become the focus of their coaching sessions. These goals can be specific and detailed (‘I want to become an astronaut’) or, as in my case, woolly and vague (‘help, I need to change my life’). The goals can shift and change throughout the process, but initially they’re used to match you to the most appropriate person in Shine’s stable of experienced, skilled (and quite frankly, lovely) coaches. The opening workshop is also a crash course in what coaching should be: non-judgemental, flexible, open, and safe, and focused on exploration rather than sticking to a rigid, expected path. 

After the workshop you receive three full coaching sessions via Skype. What happens in those sessions is entirely up to you. What I found most surprising (and initially terrifying) about coaching is the freedom you have to plough your own furrow. Your coach isn’t there to steer you down particular routes or give ‘you must do this’-style advice, but rather to act as a sounding board. An experienced, skilled coach, like those on the Shine programme, know that their role is to ask you the right questions so that you can guide yourself towards your goals. Sometimes those questions can be challenging, asking you to peel back some of the layers of your self-perception. But your answers are heard with compassion and understanding and, surprisingly, it can be refreshing to be confronted with your own fears and self-conceits in such a safe environment. However, coaching is not therapy or counselling. Although my sessions occasionally became emotional, the focus was always on a positive way forward, on ways to reach the future ‘me’ I was trying to find. 

My coaching sessions were focussed on what work after cancer would look like for me. Having been in the same industry for nearly 20 years, the shock of a cancer diagnosis had me in a panic. I wondered whether I needed to become someone entirely different now. I really felt the pressure of all those ‘I had cancer and I started my own multi-million pound business/ran 20 marathons/climbed all the mountains’ stories. My coach’s steady, guiding (never leading) hand made me realise that I’m not ready to make a big leap just yet. I need some stability and security after an earth-shattering trauma to my life. And my coach led me to realise that that is OK. Coaching doesn’t have to lead to major changes. It can help you reclaim and reframe normal, if that’s what you want. 

Even Shine’s stellar coaching programme might not give you the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything (that’s 42!), but it might just help you find the right questions to ask. 

From PE teacher to ski instructor – how coaching after cancer can help

In this guest blog post, Kaeti writes about how Shine’s coaching after cancer programme helped her to leave her old job and take her life in an exciting new direction.

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What do you do when you realise that your ambition is no longer your ambition?

For as long as I could remember, I had wanted to be a PE teacher. When my friends in primary school were talking about being astronauts and vets, I wasn’t interested – all I wanted to do was teach. But being diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 30 wasn’t in my career plan.

Kaeti was 30 when diagnosed with breast cancer.

I really missed my job when I was on sick leave. However, at some point during my eight months of cancer treatment, I realised that I didn’t miss teaching. The problem wasn’t my workload (you might have been expecting that complaint!) – actually, I had no idea what it was. Still, I knew for a fact that something had shifted, and I needed to figure out what was different in order to move forward.

A couple of months into my treatment, I saw on social media that Shine Cancer Support was offering career coaching. This was just what I needed: someone to help me make sense of the fact that I desperately missed being at work, but also knew that my teaching days were numbered. I felt like a failure: teaching was all I had ever wanted to do. Before my diagnosis I had been certain that I would progress through the ranks to deputy headteacher, and maybe even headteacher one day. Yet now I was lost, and I didn’t know what to do.

I took up Shine’s offer of support and met Emily Lomax, my coach. Emily works over the phone or via Zoom, and for our first session I think I talked at her for 40 minutes. She listened patiently to my ramblings. My first session had coincided with my return to work. I was excited to be back, but I knew deep down that even though I loved the thought of being busy, being needed, and feeling focused again, the idea of being a teacher was distressing. Cancer had made me realise that I wanted change.

After that initial session, Emily sent me some tasks to complete. One was about prioritising my values and the other was about looking at my energy levels. I realised that my values hadn’t really changed since cancer, but that my energy at work had been affected. The majority of the time that I spent in my job, I was in the ‘burnout and surviving’ zone. After everything I had been through with my diagnosis and treatment, I needed to prioritise recharging in order to thrive. We discussed these tasks and Emily lead me to realise that as a teacher, I could do other things. I was focusing on the fact that I had a PE teaching degree and ‘that only qualifies me to teach PE.’ Emily got me to think about all the transferable skills I have that could be beneficial in other sectors.

After this session I decided to jazz up my CV. CVs are not widely used when applying for teaching jobs, so mine looked sad and dated. Comic Sans? What was I thinking?! I’m a keen skier, and I remembered that a friend who works in the industry had offered to pass on my CV to his company’s head office, should I ever want to move out of teaching. I sent him my CV, and also passed it to some other skiing companies. In the meantime, I finished my sessions with Emily and began considering my options. Should I stick with teaching? It paid well, and I was good at it. Should I pack it all in and do a ski season? Should I re-train as a cancer rehab personal trainer? Should I go abroad to teach? These questions were exhausting, but relevant. Whenever I considered an option I revisited Emily’s energy task handout, and that helped me decide the way forward.

Emily had helped me to understand that I love organising events. It was easily the best bit of my job. I needed to remember this and not let the pull of money, a secure career path, and pressure from colleagues change my mind. A few weeks after my last session with Emily, I got an email from the Head of HR at my friend’s skiing company. She was very complimentary of my CV (I had updated the font!) and invited me to the head office to discuss some job opportunities. I went for the chat during the Easter break, and a week later – while doing some holiday work for a different ski company – I realised that it was time to move on from teaching. It wasn’t failure, it was acceptance of my changing circumstances and the fact that I was allowed to have new ambitions. My ambition of being a PE teacher was over 20 years old. It was time to do something new.

A week later, the ski company contacted me to offer me the position of events coordinator. I was hesitant at first as the job was mainly office-based, and I asked for a couple of weeks to consider. I was away with friends when the company replied to say that they had reviewed the job and that 3-4 months a year could be spent in the Alps working remotely and taking responsibility for trainee ski instructors. It felt like all my Christmases had come at once! I handed in my notice and I finish teaching at the end of this term. The minute I handed the resignation letter to my headteacher, it felt like a weight had been lifted.  I was somehow so much lighter: much lighter than I had been in months, maybe years.

Kaeti takes on the slopes!

When I was considering the job offer, my mum told me ‘the world is full of teachers who have given up teaching, and teaching is full of teachers who wish they have given up teaching.’ It’s taken cancer and career coaching for me to realise that it’s OK for your ambitions to change. It’s not failing to want to do something new and different. I am VERY excited about my new start and even more excited about spending next ski season in the Alps, thriving and recharging! Thank you so much to Emily and Shine for the gentle shove in the right direction.

Shine’s 2019 coaching after cancer programme is currently in progress – but follow us on social media for details of our 2020 programme!