When life isn’t working, what do you do? Nurse and life-coach Sandra Crathern from Worthing told a recent public meeting in the London centre of Initiatives of Change how a crisis in her life led her to new skills to help others:
I am a trained nurse and life coach as an NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) master practitioner, specialising in health and wellbeing.
When I was born in 1960, my father said that I did nothing but smile. My mother said that everybody’s got a gift. I remember getting very excited about this and asking her, ‘What’s my gift?’ She said, ‘You’ve got the gift of the gab!’ I thought this was fantastic and went to my father who said, ‘I’m sad to have to tell you this, but you do talk rather a lot.’
My smile and my gift of the gab have been my gifts, because academia is not my thing. At school a whole lot went over my head. In my late 30s I was diagnosed with dyslexia. So being able to talk my way out of a paper bag and smiling were good tools to have.
I met my future husband, a police officer, when he stopped me when I was driving home, a miraculous intervention as I wasn’t doing anything wrong! We have three children. I was very blessed to train as a nurse, a very practical training.
So here I was going on reasonably well. But inside I wasn’t happy with who I was. The inside was not reflected on the outside, as I’m quite extrovert and comfortable talking with people. So there was an imbalance in myself.
Then I started to have real problems. I won’t go into all the details but I wanted to be the perfect wife and a great mother. I just wasn’t congruent and I didn’t have the skills that I have today to communicate effectively. So there started to be cracks in my marriage. I started to go on a journey of quite a lot of self-destruction. On the outside you would see this trained nurse and three lovely sons. I was immaculately dressed and had a clean house, with beautiful meals on the table. But there was really a serious imbalance in my behaviour. I started smoking, drinking and over-eating and lots of other areas of my life, which I can discuss with people on a one-to-one basis, but the bottom line was that it wasn’t a healthy way of behaving.
I came to the stage where I thought I can’t carry on like this any more. That was probably my saving grace because until then I hadn’t any spiritual direction in my life. On 25 May 1996, I decided I’d got to get away from everything. So I went on holiday on my own, which was quite a big thing to do. I was 36. I met my brother-in-law, my husband’s brother, and told him all the things I had done. He said, ‘I really love you, Sandra, but don’t tell anyone all this. This is not good. This is major.’
So I went back home and did the complete opposite. I told my husband everything, which one would think was not a good move. But actually it was the making of me, because when I was on holiday I had got on my knees—I didn’t really believe in God—and said, ‘If there is a God there, please help me. I just can’t carry on like this.’ That was my miraculous moment, being out there and really reflecting on my life. The bottom line was, very simply, a question which I now ask all my clients: ‘Is what you are doing working for you? If it is not, do something different.’ It is as simple as that.
What I was doing fundamentally wasn’t working for me; I didn’t have inner peace. I had some serious health issues, mental and physical. So I went to see an amazing person who supported me through all this. I was very blessed. Through it I thought I’d like to help other people, because when people change other people do so too. It’s about choosing to do things differently. If I behave differently and do a different dance, so does everybody else. So now my husband is not the husband I married even though he’s the same man.
I said to him, ‘I need £10,000, please.’ He said, ‘No, Sandra.’ I said, ‘No, I want to retrain, like the person who helped me; I want to do the same and help the world.’ Amazingly, God’s gift to me was that the money came. I did the training and opened my own business as a health and wellbeing coach.
With my experience as a trained nurse, I created a simple tool which clients fill in. You put numbers in from nought to ten to see if your life is in balance. And if any areas are imbalanced—and the client chooses, not me—I will come alongside and help to find the answers that are inside you. I don’t know the answers but you have the answers to the questions inside you.
Now I don’t just talk the talk. When I was a practicing nurse I used to tell people, ‘Stop smoking. Stop drinking and take care of yourself.’ Then I’d run outside, jam a sandwich in my mouth, have a cigarette, have a drink and then rush back in again. The difference in me today is that you now see an authentic Sandra. The inside matches the outside. I really do walk the walk. It is not an easy journey. But the rewards are amazing.
Einstein once said that the definition of madness is to repeat the same behaviour and expect a different result. With a power greater than myself, which I choose to call God, and with the support of people around me, I’ve been able dramatically to change my life.
English