We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sophie French a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Sophie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s talk legacy – what sort of legacy do you hope to build?

I hope to be remembered for helping women break out of the boxes they’d found themselves in! I hope people will say “she really saw me and what I was capable of – she held space for my dreams, it was perhaps the first time anyone had done that, and encouraged me to give myself the permission I needed to break out of my limiting boxes and break free into the life I truly wanted to live and the things I truly wanted to bring to life!”

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

I’ve been a coach & healer helping women to activate their deepest visions + the confidence to bring them to life for almost 10 years! I help my clients to get out of their own way, to believe in themselves, to release their fears at a subconscious level so they can bring to life the things they dream of! I help them to become the woman they always wanted to be and to feel lit up by the soul work they bring to the world!
My work is deeply rooted in unplugging from the noise of everyone else and coming back to the things that are true for you – what your soul truly desires, what you uniquely are wanting to create, what you’re dreaming about bringing to life, and I help you make it happen!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I’d been supporting women to bring their dreams to life for years, and over the course of a year I began to see a theme of the women working with me finding the strength and courage to leave the relationships they’d felt unhappy in for a long time – predominantly I was supporting women to break out of harmful / volatile / emotionally abusive relationships.

It was about a year later that I found myself in a relationship that was emotionally abusive and volatile and physically abusive too – and it took so much strength to break out of it. Luckily it was only for a few months – my clients had been having to exist inside of these relationships for years – but these months took such an intense toll on my nervous system and mental health that eventually I experienced a breakdown – after ‘running’ from myself for a while, it became clear I needed to stop, drop and listen to myself and feel the intense feelings that my poor body had been holding for me.

It took me around two years to bring myself back from that place – there was a point I genuinely felt as though the wind had been knocked out of me and I was having suicidal ideation. It was then I needed to take a step back to take deep care of myself and take each day at a time. I’d been so used to living so freely and confidently for a long time, that this episode was a great shock for my system and it took a while to recover.

But it was the breakdown before the breakthrough!

I look back now, two and a half years on, and I’m back spending some time in Bali where I was living at the time, enjoying the most beautiful experiences with my dearest friends, I feel a deeper sense of purpose and fulfilment in my work than ever – and I truly believe that this experience needed to happen so I could support women in an even deeper and greater way for the rest of my life. Rather than it being an experience that destroyed me, as I thought it would at the time, it was actually something that broke me down so that I could build myself back up. It was my chance to reach rock bottom, and dig deeper, stronger, roots and foundations in order to build my way back up bigger, stronger and with more love for myself and my work than ever before.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

During this time in my life, I also had a business income stream collapse almost overnight – it was a regular income and I freaked! It meant that I had to pivot a while and reconfigure. I feel like I lost a lot that year and had to build again from the ground up!

But I made it work! As I was in recovery, I was finding it hard to have the energy to work a full-time job so I decided it would be good for me to find a job where I could rest and recover and have some peace after such a wildly volatile and confusing time! I started looking into dog-sitting and before I knew it, I’d been put in contact with a lady that ran a dog-sitting company, and I was booked out all summer! I got to stay at these absolutely beautiful houses and hang out with the sweetest dogs! It was one of the most healing summers of my life – spending time with these sweet and soulful pups and bringing myself back to life in the process! I was also helping out my Dad with his casino company at the weekends which was so much fun – I absolutely loved being at these beautiful venues and having such laughter with the guests! While doing this, it also meant I had the space and time to work on my poetry book that I published the following year!

It was a year and a half I needed to really recharge and restore my energy and find myself again, and to reset and rebuild the strength to help others in their lives, to navigate their emotions and to find their strength again after times of turmoil and distress.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sophiefrench.co
• Instagram: sophiefrench.co