Take a load off, have a look around
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Cost + Plans
Cost, Payment Plans, Sliding Scales
Usually for clients paying their own invoices, the contract will be worked out on a basis of €100 per session. A different tariff is applied when the invoices are being treated by an employer or insurance, and will be determined on an individual basis. Payment plans are available, the options are to pay everything upfront, to pay in two instalments, or to pay for the first and final two sessions upfront, with subsequent payments for every session before the two final sessions.
Sliding scale reductions are offered (especially to beings from the LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and disability communities, single parents and unemployed people), subject to discussion, availability, and mutual agreement. I always want clients to see our work together as a big investment in themselves, but I also want my work to be available and accessible to people when they need it most while modelling financial self-respect and boundaries of time, energy and access. The freely-accessible work I do online is funded and supported by donations to my Patreon, which allows me stability and the ability to give back to others in need. If you are interested in joining this (it is a pre-requisite for joining The Deep Duckpond), you can find the various tiers, benefits and support systems available at www.patreon.com/jowalduck.
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Contract details
How do the contracts work?
This will depend on the client, and who’s paying the bill. As I am a certified business and life coach – all coaching (including recovery coaching) should theoretically be able to be submitted to HR as part of a coaching/training package provided by your employer and potentially some private insurance companies.
There is usually an initial consultation where we’ll uncover and explore what you want to work towards and decide if it’s a good fit for us to work together on this specific topic at this specific time. A first contract is normally comprised between 8 and 12 sessions, with sessions to be held every week or two. After completing the initial contract, we may decide to move on separately from that specific topic and/or our coaching relationship, we may move towards ‘maintenance’ sessions (every two to four weeks), to sign an additional contract to further develop the initial work, or a new contract altogether to work towards a new, separate goal. Any subsequent contracts could be weekly or biweekly (the monthly sessions are reserved for ‘maintenance’ work) and could be anywhere between 8 and 20 sessions long.
There is a clause in every contract explaining that – should the client wish to bring a premature end to the coaching relationship, the final two sessions initially planned must be paid for, and should be attended wherever possible. This ensures an opportunity for closure, with mutual growth and understanding coming from these sessions.
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Who do I work with?
Who do I work with?
Generally speaking, as a coach I work with women and queer people of all genders. That being said, if there is a cis-het man who thinks that working with me in particular will be beneficial to him and his journey, I am open to exploring that possibility. I tend to do the best work with people who have intersections which run alongside mine: queer, trans, in recovery, anti-diet culture, anti-diet, HAES (health at every size), sober, sober curious, living with anxiety, spoonies, feminists, neuro-spicies, navigating major life changes, ‘in grief’ – and those who know, love and/or work with them. This isn’t a shopping list on which all boxes must be ticked to work with me, but to give a general flavour of the kind of people with whom my work and I tend to have the most satisfying and powerful results. I work either with ‘the main characters’ directly, or with those in their entourage (who are the main characters in their own lives!) who want to navigate their person’s struggles and triumphs and evolutions as gently and kindly as possible for all concerned.
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What do I do?
A whole range of things, but it all comes down to accompanying people on their journey to a life that’s more suited to their needs, desires and values. Every person has a different path, so each coaching relationship is different according to the person, their goals, their needs, and their wishes. I use skills, tools, and experiences from my own life and recovery, from neuro-linguistic programming, transactional analysis, internal family systems, systems-centred training, positive psychology, yoga, non-violent communication and more. These are always offered up as invitations, never instructions, and always in agreement with, and consent from, the client. I am not an expert in my clients’ lives (they are!), although part of my job is to learn how they work best, what they respond to, their motivations, needs, values. I truly believe that the people I work with already have the answers and the keys inside them – my job is to help them find that inner knowledge and wisdom, and help them create the structures and practices to bring that out in a sustainable way to improve their overall wellbeing. We also – genuinely – often have a lot of fun doing it. Just because it’s profound, heavy work doesn’t mean we can’t hold ourselves lightly and lovingly through it.
I look at the client’s current situation in a holistic way, taking into consideration familial, professional, financial and health imperatives. My work is not about finding Even More Things clients *should* be doing to improve their lives – it is instead about finding what works for them and what doesn’t, what brings joy, what fills their cups – doing more of that, and less of the things which drain them of energy and vitality. I will *always* encourage clients to be kind and gentle with themselves, while recognising the current socio-political climate, the collective and individual of trauma of everything that’s happened globally since late 2019 as well as the weight of trauma experienced by marginalised people, whether in terms of physical ability, health, race, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity. We have individual responsibility in terms of how we look after ourselves in any given situation, but there is a deep, primal need for community and structural care – self-care alone is not enough. If you’re looking for a shouty muscular coach to kick your ass and blame you for not grinding and hustling your way to your first billion or 8-pack … respectfully, I ain’t your girl.
Having the three coaching hats (business coaching, life coaching, recovery coaching) means often the lines get blurred. I rarely do pure business coaching anymore, unless there is another element where I know I, and my skillset, will be of greater service – business coaching for trans and/or queer people, or within the recovery communities, or post burnout, or with chronic illness, to give a few examples. A lot of the life coaching I do is also linked to recovery, whether recovery specifically from alcohol or other drugs, or from co-dependency, people-pleasing, eating disorders / disordered eating, diet culture at large, the white supremacist cis-hetero patriarchy … when we move away from these substances and behaviours and state-sanctioned structures which kept us (relatively and situationally) safe, but then trapped, for so long – a LOT of shit tends to come up. So a lot of the life coaching I do is based around that – sifting through the shit and finding the nuggets we want to grow into big strong metaphors.
Who am I without my addictions, how do I honour my own damn needs while juggling familial and professional requirements, how do I move away from people-pleasing without telling people to go stuff themselves, how do I appropriately tell those people to go stuff themselves, how do I fall back in love or lust with my partner when I’m no longer drunk, or lovingly leave them to start the next chapter of my life? All these questions and more tend to arise once we step out of our comfort zone – in order to keep moving, growing, healing with love and respect for ourselves and those around us, it’s important to address these concerns in a healthy way, rather than ignoring them or reacting to them impulsively. Recovery coaching itself is such a beautiful area of coaching where we get to find what is currently holding us back in patterns or relationships (to people, substances or physical/mental states) that no longer work for us, and instead work to find and build healthy, stable structures where we can get our underlying needs met without resorting to unwanted and unhelpful behaviours and substances.
This is me
I’m Jo Anne Walduck (pronouns she/they), in my late 30s, a Brit who’s lived in France for almost all my adult life, a trauma-informed business, life, and recovery coach, a cat lover, a woman in recovery, a writer, a dreamer, a napper. A storyteller and a delighter in the growth and healing that happens when we turn our nurturing energy inwards and let it overflow outwards, rather than focussing on everyone else and gasping for the dregs. A trans femme living with chronic illness and fatigue, a human navigating the waves of generational trauma, familial grief, and queer joy.
After a decade working in the education system in France, teaching the present perfect, conflict-competent communication, and international negotiation skills, drinking and smoking more and more to ‘cope with’ the stress brought on by needing to work more and more to pay for the increasing wine and cigarettes consumption … I hit burnout in 2018 and was lucky enough to be able to leave my teaching contracts and be supported by the French state while I got myself sorted and figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up. Yay socialism! Having grown and healed through some top-notch therapy for years, finding ways to navigate my anxiety, to connect with emotions and my body, the choice for my next act was between training as a psychologist or as a coach. For various reasons, I chose to train as a coach, following a 9-month course by Coaching Ways France, ending with an ICF-accredited PCC level professional and life coach certification in October 2019.
To give myself a bit of an energetic boost as I launched my practice in late October 2019, I decided to take a month off the booze. I ended up spending the month working on my sobriety, learning from and supporting others on their own journeys, spending hours talking with beings around the world about their hows and whys. At the end of the 28-day challenge, I extended it to 3 months and shortly after, to a full year, knowing that the initial month was a huge achievement, but was also only a gorgeous taster of some things to come – if only I’d known what was to come, I may have not made that decision, but I’m SO glad I did! What came in quick succession was quitting cigarettes, realising that I was ‘trans enough’ to explode my life, coming out, my dad getting diagnosed with a second cancer, pandemonium descending, getting sick in April 2020 and not getting consistently better since then, navigating various lockdowns and restrictions on my own, running the marathon of administratively transitioning as a foreign trans person in binary and bureaucracy-heavy France (in the middle of Brexit fallout and pandemia), the standard highs and lows of discovering life in sobriety, starting the recovery journey from disordered eating and diet culture, the heart-breaking end of various dear friendships, finding ways to have a relationship with my dad which honoured both his struggles and my authenticity, suddenly losing my stepdad, then my dad, while old family trauma came seeping out the walls … it has certainly been an action-packed first quarter of the decade.
Through all of the above, what has kept me on my path of recovery (never linear, never replicable, always heart-centred) has been community and connection. Queer community, trans community, spoonie community, yoga community, grief community, sober community, anti-diet community, neuro-spicy community. It’s been therapy and coaching and yoga and writing sessions and co-supervisions and long walks and talks with friends who get it. I had to (was able to) learn to recalibrate my ‘coping mechanisms’ for things which actually worked for me and didn’t compromise my values or my recovery. I’ve invested time, energy and money in courses and workshops, 1:1 coaching on boundaries, people-pleasing, trauma-informed therapy and coaching, and have completed training on recovery-specific coaching (hello, the Recovery Coach Academy) and a 30-hour Sober Curious Yoga Teacher Training (hi, the Mindful Life Practice). I’ve held space for others, and – crucially – I’ve allowed others to hold space for me, and allowed myself to take up that space. It truly takes a village – and sometimes we have to create the villages that don’t yet exist, we can’t find, or don’t have access to.
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Petit mot pour les francos
Lettre à mes amix francophones,
Ce petit mot est pour vous demander de patienter (peut-être longtemps – je l’écris en début d’année 2023). Vous l’auriez remarqué par ma présence sur La Toile, je n’écris pas beaucoup en français en ce moment. Il a fallu que je fasse un choix par rapport au temps et à l’énergie que je consacrais à mon travail, et le choix pour l’instant est de me consacrer à l’anglais. J’écris un bouquin, je travaille avec mes client.es anglophones, je fais plein de petites formations et interventions après une grande formation en ‘recovery coaching’ l’année dernière, et je n’ai pas le temps de tout traduire en français. Ceci dit, si vous venez sur mon petit site parce que vous m’avez déjà vue sur les réseaux, ou que vous m’aviez entendue sur un podcast en français, sachez une chose – je suis prête à, et serais ravie de, travailler avec vous. La formation de base que j’ai faite pendant ma reconversion, c’était en français et pour un public francophone. Ce n’est pas de votre faute que le mot ‘recovery’ n’existe pas en français, ce n’est pas de votre faute que j’aie arrêté de boire après ma certification et que je me sois concentrée plus sur le recovery coaching que le coaching professionnel ou le coaching de vie pur. Ce n’est pas de votre faute que l’apocalypse soit arrivée en même temps que je débutais mon activité de coach, et qu’avec la migration sur Internet de Toute La Vie, ce soit accompagné d’une migration plus axée vers l’anglais.
Je n’ai pas les mêmes documents ou ressources tout prêts en français que ce que j’ai en anglais, mais de toute façon, dans le coaching, c’est vous la ressource. Je suis juste là pour faire miroir, poser quelques questions, vous accompagner dans l’exploration des réponses à celles-ci, et vous aider à prendre conscience de vos propres connaissances et croyances, et surtout d’à quel point elles peuvent être boostantes ou limitantes.
Le monde du recovery coaching peine à percer en France, et je veux faire partie de la vague qui y arrivera, mais pour l’instant, je dois surtout m’assurer de garder mes pieds sur Terre. Si tu m’as vue ou rencontrée sur Internet et que ce que je fais en anglais t’intéresse – je suis ouverte à travailler en français avec un public francophone, c’est juste un peu plus facile si tu as des notions d’anglais – surtout pour les concepts qui n’existent pas trop encore dans le monde et la langue de Grand Corps Malade.
Si tu es gros.se, trans, fatigué.e, queer, malade, sobre, expat, immigré.e, en questionnement, intéressé.e … envoie moi un mail ou un message, on trouvera bien quelque chose – que ce soit avec moi, ou de plus adapté.e.
Jo Walduck Coaching 