Gerdi with Caroline Ferguson on 4 pillars of Self-Leadership
I met Caroline Ferguson a couple of years ago when we both attended a workshop on presentation techniques. Not that she particularly needed to improve her technique; from what I could see, she was already doing just fine. After all, having appeared on television, radio and numerous podcasts she has ample public speaking experience.
She’s won awards as a pathological writing person a.k.a. a comedy writer.
Caroline’s a not-so-pathological mind unscrambler when she puts her talents to very good use as a business consultant, cognitive behavioural hypnotherapist and mindset trainer to purposeful entrepreneurs and business leaders.
She works with her clients to magnify their impact by developing the #1 life skill of self-awareness, overcoming their inner resistance, learning how to manage their mindset and becoming truly effective self-leaders.
Caroline wasn’t always helping clients exponentially grow their impact though.
For many years she worked in business communications but felt increasingly pulled to do something that made a positive difference to people’s lives.
She started training as a Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapist and instantly knew she’d found a skill-set that would serve both her and others.
Being a therapist was rewarding but Caroline soon realised that the clients she enjoyed working with most were those whose amazing potential was being stifled by limiting beliefs and other mindset blocks. That’s when she started providing Mindset Training to purposeful game-changers and she hasn’t looked back.
Now she’s very clear on the impact she wants to make:
Helping intelligent, passionate, high-potential women and men to develop self-awareness and gain the mindset tools to stop sabotaging themselves so that they can deliver their own positive impact.
Caroline particularly loves working with those rare individuals she calls “Sensitive Upstarts” – the 6% of the population who combine high sensitivity with a strong need for high sensation seeking, which is a thirst for new experiences and adventure.
Using CBT, hypnosis and her own mindset training methods, she trains her clients to think in a rational and solution-focused way. This empowers them to overcome the limiting beliefs, low self-worth and unhelpful habits (like procrastination and feeling not good enough) that are keeping them stuck.
She helped found the charity, The Book Bus, whose purpose is to encourage children to read and provide them with access to books. Starting out in Zambia the project also set up reading schemes in Malawi and Ecuador.
So far The Book Bus has travelled more than 250,000 miles and gave more than 100,000 children access to books.
Stepping into her own self-leadership even more than she was doing already, in 2020 Caroline packed up everything to start a year of travelling around the UK and elsewhere in the world.
The plan was to housesit in different locations while getting to know her country better and still work with clients while doing so.
Then COVID hit and — as it did for so many others — her plans didn’t quite work out. Though she has been house sitting as lockdown measures lifted, her travels have not yet been as extensive as originally planned. As society slowly opens up more and more, Caroline’s travelling plans are finally starting to come to fruition.
In the meantime, what did work out is what she set out to do when the pandemic hit: go for a walk every day. So far she’s not missed a single one!
When it comes to Nature as she puts it: “She is beguiled by the natural world and walks in Nature every day, regardless of the weather – preferably with a dog for company.”
