Yesterday at 5pm, my life as an employee ended. Well, the employment doesn’t officially end until next Friday, but I’m on a flex day today and annual leave all of next week. I’m still being paid, but I don’t have to show up any more. I know, you’re not at all jealous!

Of course it’s exciting! I get to choose how my life looks in every way, restricted only by finances and the fact that I don’t drive. I can write when I want, work on new offerings for my coaching clients, perhaps offer some English tuition … read more, study more, spend more time with friends and family. I’m so looking forward to all that. As a starter, I’m lunching with a long-term friend and former colleague who has also recently retired.

It’s also scary. I need to make this coaching thing work, because I’m aiming for it to provide me with a liveable income. I’ll be getting some pension money every month, and I’m taking a lump sum from my pension pot to keep me in home and food and pay the bills for the next many months. I don’t know how much yet, though, and I don’t know when I’ll get it, because it turns out I needed to apply separately for my previous pension to be paid, and no-one told me that until I was almost out of the door. It may be several weeks before that’s all sorted out. And the other scary thing is that I get to choose exactly how I spend my time, and I need to make sure I create some kind of structure to my days and weeks, so I don’t just drift into inactivity. I was a practice client for a trainee coach the other day, and that was my reply when she asked what the potential obstacles might be to my plans. Luckily, she’s happy to keep coaching me, so she will hold me accountable and be watching me closely.

I’d been meaning to write a new post for a while, after I revised my pricing yet again. It’s been pointed out to me that, although some of the women I want to serve will be reluctant to spend time and money on themselves, they probably wouldn’t benefit as much as I’d like from my services anyway. The clients I need are those who will do the work in between sessions – make the lifestyle tweaks, do the journalling and deep searching for answers and healing, and involve the important people in their life. The price of Coping to Confidence is likely to go up again in the future, by the way, so if you’re thinking you’d like to come along to my sessions, now’s a great time to do it. The next sessions begin at the end of June and early July, and there are 3 options to choose from – Saturdays at 9.30am, Wednesdays at 7.30pm and Thursdays at 10.30am UK time. I’d love to see you there! It’s still priced as ‘pay what you want’, but the minimum price is now £150, which you can pay in 3 instalments if you choose the Paypal Pay Later option.

In the run-up to my leaving date, I began by being excited, with a tinge of fear about my financial future. As the day approached, though, I found myself contemplating it from an unexpected perspective. It just didn’t seem real. The closer the day came, the less it seemed likely that, as a fairly fit and agile woman, I could possibly be about to retire. Even now, the day after my last working day, it hasn’t really sunk in. I still went to bed early, to get up at 5.30am for a Writing Hour with my friends. I think it’s going to take some time for my system to realise I’m not just on holiday. I’ve spend nearly 8 years working in the same team in Social Services, and there’s nothing that can prepare you for the feeling of being cut adrift. It’s by my own choice, and I have so much to look forward to, but there is an element of ‘oh my god’ to it, knowing I’ll probably never have contact with the majority of the people I worked with again. I’m so glad I have a good friendship network outside of work.

And as if all that wasn’t enough, I gave myself the additional challenge of changing my logo. I’d originally just taken the one I’ve had since 2004 for my holistic healing business, Embrace Healing, and added the words ‘Embrace Coaching’ as a stripe across the heart. But it struck me a couple of weeks ago that it’s not as professional-looking as I’d like, nor as up-to-date and modern. So I asked Copilot to suggest a replacement. It gave me some lovely ideas, so I picked one I really liked, then tried to get Copilot to tweak it.

That did not go well! I asked it simply to colour the hands in pink and it replaced the lovely ‘hands cradling a heart’ image with a photographic picture of an old man’s hands placed together as in prayer. Every request I framed came out so different from the original, when all I wanted was a change of colour. So I had to take it into Lightroom and Photoshop just to change the hands from silver to lilac. I also had to change the font, as it hadn’t used Londonderry Air, the font I prefer for my header image. That wasn’t as easy as I hoped, either. Thank goodness for my techie partner, or the thing would probably still not be done.

And it’s only partly done, even now. If you read this soon after it’s posted, you may notice that, while the banner image has changed, nothing else has. I’m struggling to locate the original layered image that I can make quick and easy changes to, so I may have to re-create it from the PNG and TIFF files I can find. And it’s a real faff to change everything, everywhere, because of course, every image has different dimensions. If I’d realised just what a major job it would be, I might not have got started, but I do love the new image, and I’m looking forward to having it all over my social media. (What I’m not looking forward to is paying for all-new business cards!)

But that’s for the future. I have big plans, so watch this space! Today is the first day of the rest of my life, and I plan to enjoy it.