Lucy Maeve is a trailblazer in empowering high achievers to rewrite their narratives and embrace authentic living.
Drawing from her own journey away from a successful finance career, Lucy incorporates insights from trauma-informed practices and breathwork, inspired by mentors such as Gabor Mate and Layla Martin. Her expertise, featured in The Telegraph, The Times, and the BBC, helps clients rediscover their true selves.
Based in Cape Town, Lucy's passions include (bad) dancing, ocean waves, and indulging in Lindt Orange Intense chocolate—all while striving to ensure no soul is left uninspired.
Lucy Maeve, Transformational Coach
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
It honestly feels like such an honour to do this, thank you for inviting me to be an executive contributor to Brainz magazine!
In 2020, I quit a 10-year, 6-figure career in investment banking with zero idea of what was next.
It was bizarre, after years (and I mean years) of should I stay or should I go, I was in an Uber home one day in early spring, it was one of those crisp blue-skied days which are so rare (and SO beautiful) in London, and completely out of the blue I heard a little voice in my head whispering ‘this isn’t your world anymore, it’s time to go’... and it was.
Life since then has been a whirlwind. 2 months after I quit, I wrote an article on the reasons why I quit (which went viral) and was subsequently inundated with messages from people feeling the same way as I did and asking for support – that was where my business began! Alongside growing my coaching practice, I’ve been committed to a journey of profound personal healing (enter stage right spiritual awakening), global moves (from London to Mexico City to Cape Town) and a complete redefinition of what it means to lead a ‘successful’ life – away from external measures of success, towards meaning and personal evolution.
I now live in Cape Town, swim in the sea almost daily, have a mild addiction to dark chocolate, spend weekends hiking in the mountains, dancing under the moon and committing to becoming the truest version of myself in this lifetime – because isn’t that what we are all here for?
Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
I’m still mortified that this moment had such a profound impact on me but, here we are.
In 2019, I started dating someone who I decided after one date that I would marry.
So much so that I created a completely farcical story about this person in my head – I’d figured out where we would live, the names of our kids, and what the wedding dress would look like, I’d even gone as far as to imagine where we would retire. It was bad. Anyway, after 4 dates (yes.. I told you it was insane for me to have indulged quite as intensely in the story of this person)... he decided he didn’t want to date anymore.
Any ‘normal’ human being might have been a little bit bruised but carried on with their day. Banker Lucy, however, was floored. Couldn’t get out of bed. Called in sick. Unable to shift the deep pain in her heart for weeks.
It was one of the first moments in my life when I started to acknowledge that my response to this situation was not ‘normal’ and that maybe, just maybe, there was something not quite right about my brain..
That was the beginning of my awakening: I jumped straight into trauma therapy (having never experienced any real trauma in my life..) and some deep healing practices, including the breath practice that I now teach.
Through those processes, the thought mechanisms that were keeping me stuck in ‘must be perfect and make everyone proud’ mode started to melt, and with them, my desire to stay in a career that was entirely misaligned.
It was as simple as realising that my response to that situation was not ‘normal’ and getting support. That simple moment of noticing changed the trajectory of my life.
What would you say to someone who was feeling stuck, frustrated and confused about their path forward in life?
Go inward.
When we feel stuck, we often desperately desire to find an ‘answer’ externally: a new job, a partner, or a new home. Our automatic response is to try to make the stuckness go away by finding something that will give us a (false) perception of moving forward (new job, partner, etc.).
A lot of people spend their whole lives on this hedonistic treadmill, searching for the next hit of dopamine and never getting to the root of what the stuckness is about. In my world, stuckness comes from a deep inner knowing of a direction that we want to move in which is being stalled by some deep-rooted beliefs or trauma imprints which tell us it’s not safe to go in that direction, so we stay ‘stuck’.
Choosing a random, different, direction just for the sake of moving forward, will not solve this issue, it will just resurface down the road when the ‘newness’ of the thing you chased after wears off.
When we’re ‘stuck’, the truest version of us is whispering and in conflict with who we ‘think’ we should be. Our job is to go inward, to find support and to understand how to unshackle ourselves from who we ‘think’ we should be so that we can become who we are.
If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?
Despite deeply believing in the work that I do, I worry about the coaching industry, I honestly do. Since the pandemic, the industry has grown incredibly fast – as ‘Instagram’, location independent, makes 6 figures in your first year, coaches started to take off, and it, understandably, became more and more of an appealing space to work in.
The problem, however, is as a relatively unregulated industry, there are a lot of people offering overpriced services which underdeliver on their promises because the people offering those services are underqualified in what they are doing. This is damaging the reputation of what is, at its essence, powerful, life-changing work.
I’m not 100% for the regulation of the industry, but I do urge people who are looking for coaching to do their due diligence on the people they choose to work with, especially if they have any desire to do ‘deep’ work. Coaching, when done properly, can be paradigm-shifting work – I just worry that, with the amount of slick marketing from underqualified people, the industry's reputation will become muddied as consumers lose trust.
I always say to people to ask questions of the people they trust to work with them in their deepest spaces:
don’t get lured into paying on the first call with them (don’t even get me started on this!)
check that they are still in ‘the work’ themselves
who have they trained with?
what do they mean when they say they are trauma-informed?
Your journey is worth a couple of questions!
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