From the outside in 2024, I looked like I had my sh*t together.

Successful business, beautiful home, amazing daughter, great friends, confidence, freedom, and for some, quite the aspirational lifestyle… on paper. What most people didn’t see was what was happening behind the scenes, and I’ve been sitting with whether to write this publicly for a while now. But the thing is, everything I teach comes from living this. Not reading about it. Not quoting someone else. Actually living it, in real time, with a toddler on my hip and a multi-brand business to keep running with absolutely no guarantee that any of it was going to work out.

So here it is.

The Twelve Months After I Left

The twelve months after I left my relationship were, without question, pretty gruelling, and people often think that identity work means everything suddenly becomes easy once you’ve made the brave decision. It doesn’t. Sometimes it asks you to become the next version of yourself before the 3D, your external world, gives you a single piece of evidence that you’re doing the right thing. That’s exactly what happened to me.

When my ex and I agreed to separate, our house sold almost immediately, and actually for more than we’d first thought, though it didn’t surprise me all that much because we’d spent the previous five years pouring a significant amount of blood, sweat, and tears into creating a home we absolutely loved. I used to offer home staging via Refined House Co., so I’d have been a bit concerned if it hadn’t sold well!

Attracting the right buyer was the easy part. Completing the sale was another story altogether, because it dragged on for ten months.

Four months after we’d accepted the offer, my ex moved out, but I stayed behind with our daughter, who was just two at the time. Suddenly I was living in a pretty big house on my own, managing two gardens, maintaining the entire property, and looking after everything, because we’d even stopped having a cleaner by that point. While also solo parenting a toddler and trying to run multiple businesses. I was spinning far too many plates.

I had absolutely no spare time, genuinely, no evenings, no social life, every weekend spent catching up on the bloody mowing, cleaning, meal prepping and laundry.

Every single day felt like survival. If the house had also been full of clutter, I simply wouldn’t have coped! The environment I’d built was what held me together.

The Lord of the Manor, Handwritten Letters, and #Housegate

As if all of that wasn’t quite enough, the sale nearly fell through entirely because of an absurd covenant attached to the property.

For a few weeks, I found myself literally handwriting letters and physically delivering them to a ninety-year-old Lord of the Manor, begging him to instruct a solicitor to release us from the covenant so we could actually complete the sale. The estate agents and solicitors had both hit a complete stalemate, so I ended up spending hours playing private investigator, trawling Facebook groups until I found someone who knew his PA and could give me her number. He didn’t have a mobile phone, of course, so we ended up communicating entirely by handwritten letters… (he was absolutely unavailable for anything less), some of which were so illegible I had to use AI to work out what they said!

I’m sure, if you followed me on Instagram at the time, you’ll remember it became quite the saga. Literally #Housegate. I honestly felt like I was in a film… albeit, a really rubbish one! Sometimes I look back and think that if I’d written it into a novel, people would have said it was too far-fetched to be believable. Instagram didn’t see the half of it.

Eventually, after ten exhausting months, the sale finally completed.

My Mum’s Spare Room, a Wisdom Tooth, and a One-Bedroom Airbnb Above a Garage

The plan had been for me and my daughter to stay with my mum for a few weeks while we waited to complete on my next house. It was meant to be easy and temporary. Instead, it was a living nightmare… obviously!

We argued constantly, I had a wisdom tooth removed under general anaesthetic in the middle of it all, and work had exploded to the point I was regularly working until one o’clock in the morning. I’d lost so much weight to stress, my under eye bags were next-level and I felt like a hag! It quickly became obvious that living together wasn’t going to work, so Ottilie and I moved into a family friend’s tiny one-bedroom Airbnb above their garage.

She slept in a cot in my bedroom. We had one small living area that doubled as my office, dining room, and living room, and one shower room you could barely swing a cat in, not exactly ideal when you’re trying to bathe a three-year-old while getting impaled on the radiator every time you move…

At first I was just so grateful to have somewhere for the two of us to live alone again. But after a while I started to feel trapped. I was living there, working there, parenting there, trying to build my future there, and I felt like I was climbing the walls.

It was during that period that something interesting started happening.

My physical circumstances hadn’t changed much yet, but my identity had… again. Dramatically. The Airbnb had become too small, not just physically but energetically. I’d grown beyond it and I knew it. I needed an environment that matched where I was going, not where I’d been. My coach completely agreed, this wasn’t a luxury, it was essential. The environment you’re in when you’re trying to build the next version of your life matters in a way that’s very hard to explain until you’ve experienced it firsthand.

If you want to understand why that’s true, not just as a concept but in terms of what it actually does to your nervous system and your decision-making capacity, it’s one of the things I go into properly inside Break Up With Your Stuff, and it’s also at the heart of the Life Upgrade Audit if you want a sensational starting point.

“I’d grown beyond it. I needed an environment that matched where I was going, not where I’d been.”

Six Months’ Rent, Burnout and Deciding Not to Spiral

A few months later I found the house I’m renting now: space, a garden, a separate home office and gym, somewhere to actually breathe. It felt like the next chapter and it also scared the absolute sh*t out of me.

The new Renters’ Rights legislation was about to come into force and the landlord and letting agents insisted on six months’ rent up front. Six months’ rent on a three-bedroom detached house in South Oxfordshire is a pretty big wedge… IYKYK.

The timing also couldn’t really have been worse financially: I’d been in burnout after a year from hell, I hadn’t been able to work properly, so naturally, zero marketing and even less mental capacity for serving more and more clients. I still hadn’t fully got back into it, and I’d deliberately been protecting the business financially and allowing myself to recover instead, rather than paying myself what I normally would. To make that happen without raising my cortisol further, I decided to use savings from the house sale.

Years earlier, that decision would have terrified me.

I’d have worried about whether I was making a huge mistake, spiralled, convinced myself I was being irresponsible, definitely talked myself out of it, and stayed somewhere that was making me shrink. But this version of me was different. I’d done too much deep work on my mindset and identity to go backwards. I couldn’t energetically afford to worry anymore, because I knew that worrying about tomorrow wouldn’t change tomorrow, it would only steal today’s peace. And more importantly, I knew I couldn’t keep unintentionally manifesting from a place of lack. I’d had enough lessons on that one.

So instead of focusing on what was leaving my bank account, I focused on what I was creating. This house wasn’t just somewhere to live. It was the environment my next level required, somewhere I could expand, think bigger, and build the business, life, and income I knew I was capable of creating.

The decision wasn’t reckless. It was identity-coherent.

This is something I see constantly in the women I work with, by the way, and it shows up in business just as much as it does in homes and personal lives. The inability to make the investment, to take the leap, to commit to the thing that’s clearly right, that’s almost never a practical problem…

It’s a self-concept problem. It’s the version of you that still doesn’t quite believe she’s the person who gets to have the thing. That’s the work. If you run your own business and any of that just resonated, this is exactly the work I do with my business clients inside the Business Strategy Sessions at Pro Organiser Academy. It’s not just strategy. It’s the identity work underneath the strategy, because that’s where the real block almost always is.

Pulling out of two property purchases (One after I’d already bought the kitchen… Yes, really.)

Looking back, I realise that almost every major decision I made that year required me to become the future version of myself before I had even a morsel of physical proof she existed.

I trusted a ten-month house sale saga. I trusted pulling out of two different property purchases when they stopped feeling right, one of them after I’d already bought the kitchen! I don’t disagree that on paper, that sounds completely reckless and *slightly* unhinged. It wasn’t. The kitchen company allowed me to lock in the price for five years and completely redesign it for another property if needed, and I already knew I’d never buy a new-build or a house that didn’t need renovating anyway.

If that purchase fell through, the kitchen would simply go into the next house. Part of it was practical logic. But part of it was also acting as though the right house was already mine, not sitting back hoping, but making decisions from the identity of someone who had already worked it out.

People often misunderstand what trusting the process, or manifestation actually looks like. They think it means sitting back, wishing and hoping everything works out. It doesn’t. Sometimes it looks like taking action and making decisions before your circumstances make any logical sense, because you’re already thinking and choosing as the person you’re becoming rather than the person your current bank balance or living situation suggests you are. Although, I’m not suggesting buying a kitchen without a house, I probably wouldn’t do it again! There are less drastic ways to manifest and embody your new identity…

What That Year Actually Taught Me

That year taught me something I genuinely will never forget, and it’s the thing I come back to more than almost anything else in the work I do now.

Identity work (and manifesting) isn’t positive thinking.

It’s making courageous decisions while your current reality still looks like complete chaos! It’s trusting yourself when there is no evidence yet. It’s refusing to shrink back into your old life simply because your nervous system is screaming for certainty, because certainty is the consolation prize your old self settles for when your future self knows what’s actually possible.

Everything I teach today comes from living this. Not reading about it, not quoting someone else’s transformation, not teaching theory I’ve never actually tested under real, serious high-pressure. When I say that changing your identity changes your decisions, and changing your decisions changes your life, I know that’s true because I did it in the middle of two out of three of the most stressful human-life events, (moving house and separation) alongside an ADHD diagnosis with failed medication titration, burnout, major family rifts, and a wisdom tooth removal under GA.

That’s not a perfect set of conditions for a glow-up. It’s a fairly realistic set of conditions for most women’s actual lives, in the endless juggle.

When you change who you believe you are, you stop making decisions from fear and start making them from the person you’re becoming.

And eventually, your external 3D life has no choice but to catch up. It has to.

If Any of This Sounds Familiar

If you’ve read this far, something in it probably recognised something in you, whether that’s the environment piece, the identity piece, the inability to make the scary decision, or the sense that you’ve outgrown where you are but don’t quite know yet how to get to where you’re going. That’s not an accident. That’s exactly who this work is for.

If you’re not sure where to start, grab the free guide Why You Can’t Break Up With Your Sentimental Clutter, it’s the place most people begin, and it goes into exactly why letting go feels so much harder than it should.

The Life Upgrade Audit is the next step: an honest, clear-eyed assessment of where you are across every area of your life and where the real work is.

And if you’re ready to go all in on the identity work, the environment work, the habits, the mindset, and the accountability, Break Up With Your Stuff is where that happens. Join the interest list and I’ll let you know when the next round opens.

If you want to work with me 1:1, on your life, your home, or your business and the identity inside it, you can find out more here.

And if you want to hear me talk through all of this in more depth, come and listen to How to Break Up With Your Stuff on the podcast.