Meet Lucy Maeve

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Sed ut perspiciatis unde.

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lucy Maeve. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Lucy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

In 2020, a month into the pandemic, I quit a 6 figure career in investment banking with basically no idea of what I wanted to do next.

A lot of people would have called it completely idiotic, and I’d be lying if I said that I’ve never felt it was kind of stupid, but in all honesty, it felt like I didn’t have a choice.

I’d been working in banking for 10 years before I finally made the call, 10 long years of kind of knowing it wasn’t right for me and yet being terrified to take any form of step forward. The money, the prestige, the sense of being ‘important’, kept me stucker than stuck.

And then, on a Thursday back in February 2018, one of those dark, damp days when it feels like the winter will never end, I found myself lying in savasana at the end of a yoga class, with hot, salty tears streaming down my face. It was bonus day at work, I’d got a 6 figure bonus that day and yet, somehow, I’d never felt emptier.

It took me another 2 years from that day to finally take the leap into the unknown. Two years where I spent 90% of my time outside of work trying to understand how it was possible for me to feel so damn empty despite having everything I’d ever wanted. Who was I to be unhappy when I had so much?!

I’m pretty sure that through that period of my life there were a few angels planted in my life. People guiding me along, gently whispering – this way, that way as I hacked my way through the forest of my own mind.

I started reading books about trauma healing. I went to sound baths. I found an EMDR therapist. I started breathwork. I started, for the first time in my life, to listen to my intuition and signed up for a yoga teacher training. I was prioritising myself and it felt good. Even though it felt scary to notice that I was losing certain people from my life in the process, life suddenly felt infused with possibility. Potential. Openness.

Two years of healing, and a journey that will no doubt be life long. What I found in those two years was that this pain I’d been harbouring for so long, the angst, the confusion, the doubt was the pain of living a life that wasn’t mine.

It was the pain of choosing every twist and turn of my life based on whether or not it would make others happy, whether or not it would make others proud, whether or not it would keep others in my life.

I was stuck living a life that wasn’t mine. A life that was so far from what the truest version of me wanted, that all that version of me could do was scream from the depths of me through pain, through angst, through fear, through anxiety, through confusion to try to get my attention. My self betrayal had started slowly, small yeses to things that were really a no, and had culminated in huge life choices, jobs, partners, homes that weren’t chosen based on my own view of success… but on everyone else’s.

From that moment, I embarked on a journey of slowly unwinding all the decisions I’d made that weren’t truly mine. This meant firstly facing the crippling fear I had around disappointing others as I started to define what success meant to me .

It meant leaning into the terror of asking for four months off work to re-assess where I was going.

It meant accepting that in asking for that time off, the veneer of being deeply committed to my career would disappear and thus my career trajectory would plummet. It meant:

– taking a huge leap of faith to join a group of 20 strangers to travel around South America

– accepting that my 6 figure salary wasn’t ever going to make me happy, however many expensive dresses it afforded me

– quitting my job with no idea what was next

– trusting that life had my back when I left that job in the middle of the pandemic

– leaving my home of 5 years

– letting go of relationships which weren’t meant for me

– deeply and fully redefining what a successful life meant to me and committing daily to creating that

Five years after I found myself sobbing on the floor of a yoga studio, my life is almost unrecognisable. I’d moved from London, to Mexico City, to Cape Town.

I’d started a business.

I’d deepened into my own healing. I’d found passion in the small moments of life. I’d found meaning. I’d found purpose. I was no longer swimming in a life that was defined for me by everyone else, but I’d finally found what it meant for me, to lead a successful life.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

When I quit banking in 2020, I had no idea what was next, but then suddenly my linkedin inbox was flooded with messages asking me ‘how I did it?’. How I managed to quit the job, how I found the courage.

My calling found me.

I work with men and women whose golden handcuffs are starting to feel more like a ball and chain. I help them rediscover who they really are underneath the ‘success’ they’ve achieved and support them to take steps towards a meaningful, fulfilling and heart bursting life.

I am not here to do boring (and pointless) coaching which pushes you from A-B. I’m here for the life shifting, paradigm busting work that changes lives. My work is informed by studies with Gabor Mate and Layla Martin as well as my own personal processes. It’s about understanding why we are the way we are, healing the parts which we’re holding onto but we don’t need anymore and then starting to take steps from the SPACE that we find in our hearts and minds when we are not longer clinging to who we think we have to be.

The thing that sparks pride in me the most is seeing how my clients go and take their lives by the horns after working with me and commit to really finding the magic in their lives again. Seeing their spark back means everything to me.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I heard this from a mentor years ago and it still sticks with me. Don’t teach something you haven’t fully learnt and embodied in your own life.

The work I do with clients is, of course, informed by deep studies into psychology and spirituality but in truth – the power of it comes from my own personal experience. It comes from me doing so much of this deep work for myself that I know the beauty (and the struggles) that come with it. I can teach from an informed place of knowing what it feels like to leave a BIG career and dive into the unknown I teach from an informed place of understanding the experience of being a single woman in her 30s.

I teach from my heart, from the deepest places within me, it’s not just me teaching and coaching based on principles I’ve learnt, they are principles I deeply commit to in my own life.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

“You’ll be happy when….”

It’s a narrative that is so deeply entrenched in our society that it seeps into the veins of each and every one of us. For me, it showed up as ‘you’ll be happy when you have x in your bank account/when you meet a man’..

The day I noticed that I had ‘x’ in my bank account, I sobbed more than ever (in a not happy way) and when I let in the first loving, beautifully committed man, of course there was a period of limerence.. and then, again, I was faced with the truth of me.

And that truth is an up and down, mixed bags of emotions which ebb and flow on the daily.

Happiness isn’t a permanent state, it ebbs and flows in the same way that sadness does. Having happiness as a goal linked to external circumstances is a recipe for an unfulfilled life.

Contact Info:

Website: www.lucymaeve.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lucy__maeve/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucy-puttergill

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Meet Lucy Maeve

Meet Lucy Maeve

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Lucy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

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