ABOUT VANESSA
I believe in doing things that have meaning. I can´t say it has made me rich, but it has made my life rich. And working to create meaning has created meaning in my work.
This principle has led me down diverse paths (nursing, studying English and psychology as a mature student, journalism and teaching) because I have always followed my deeper motivations and passions.
But because I had meaning and personal purpose, I was able to push myself up the steep learning curves, especially when it meant newness on many life levels. It taught me grit, resilience and adaptability, which I now draw on to help clients manage their own transitions.
But it was in my last career incarnation, teaching English pedagogy students at a university in Chile (why there is a long story about a boat and a glacier), and parenting my kids, who were adapting to growing up in Spanish, that I learnt about something that can get us from survive to thrive.
And that was the power of emotional intelligence (EI/EQ). I learnt about its role in education and I saw how students who had it, thrived, and those who didn´t struggled. I realised that IQ alone is no guarantee of personal success. And that the secret lies in a simple equation:
SUCCESS = EQ + IQ.
But with a surprising ratio of 80% to 20%.
I didn´t know then that this formula would form part of my future. When we returned to SA in 2018, I started studying coaching, gaining my diploma in practitioner coaching in 2019.
And helping my kids readapt again brought me full circle to EQ. I realised then that I could draw on my experience to help teens find their career path in life using EQ, rather than IQ, as an intuitive focus. Which is how I developed my career assessment-programme.
But when I started coaching, I found so many adults were looking for new meaning and purpose from their lives and work. And having just weathered my own career reset, I was deeply connected to this search.
My passion as a coach is to use my role, my learnings and my experience to help teens and adults find their new direction by making choices that are based on answering the right questions.
MY EDUCATION
Parenting Workshop: Understanding Separation and Divorce from the Perspective of a Child, with Dr Mathilda Smit (June 2021)
Accreditation: Integrative Enneagram Practitioner (iEQ9), Integrative Enneagram Solutions (April 2021)
Parenting & Family Dynamics Through The Enneagram, Chestnut Paes Academy (October 2020)
Accreditation: Emotional Maturity Inventory (EMI), Institute of Zonal Leadership (IZL) (October 2019)
Diploma: Integral Coaching Practitioner, The Coaching Centre (2018-2019)
Bachelor of Arts, English & Psychology, UCT, (1991)
Diploma: Community & Industrial Health, Cape Technikon, (1988)
Diploma: Midwifery, Somerset Hospital, Green Point (1987)
Diploma: General Nursing, Victoria Hospital, Wynberg (1985)
Baby-name books have always linked my name, Vanessa, with the Greek meaning of butterfly. And when I was looking for symbols of change for my logo, the butterfly – a representation of rebirth, transformation, hope, change and life – kept coming up. So I took a deeper look into the link between my name and butterflies, and my purpose as a life coach.
“Vanessa” is steeped in folklore and symbolism across many cultures, but in Greek mythology, it refers to the goddess Phanessa, daughter of Pandora, who had a fascination for butterflies.
It was the Irish poet, Jonathan Swift, who created the name Vanessa as a nickname for his lover Esther Vanhomrigh, by taking the “Van” from her surname and adding “essa”, a pet form of Esther, for his autobiographical poem Cadenus and Vanessa.
And it was the poem rather than the mythology that inspired the famous Danish entomologist, Johan Fabricius, to give the name Vanessa to his newly discovered genus of brush-footed butterflies in the tribe Nymphalini in 1807. It is thought this was because of its frequent references to nymphs.
I then began to think about how the life cycle of the butterfly is the perfect metaphor for the coaching process, with the cocoon representing the protected space of the coaching relationship, in which metamorphosis – shedding the old before we can come into the new – can safely occur. And how the emergence of the constantly flitting butterfly teaches us that change and growth are part of the natural order. And to evolve we have to move.
The secret to change is in embracing it as the butterfly does.