One-to-0ne Mentoring

This is where you can get my personal, tailored help with that Creative Project you find yourself struggling with.

If you have a creative project or idea that you’d love to achieve, but are struggling to get it started / get it done / believe you’re capable of doing it, I would love to mentor you and see you succeed.

• You have a creative project that you desperately want to do or finish but somehow you never seem to get around to it and time goes on…

• You already have a creative practice but find one particular project is eluding you, usually one that matters a lot to you, is a step up in some way, or is a jump to a new way of working.

• You have an idea for a book and everyone keeps telling you you should write it, and you do too.

• You’re thinking of becoming a professional freelancer but are scared to make the leap.

It’s about finding your confidence in your natural ability to create; the natural unselfconscious confidence that lies beneath all your stories. It’s about knowing how to work joyfully and consistently, without self-sabotaging and procrastinating. It’s about getting that project off the ground and running.

If you’ve ever left a workshop or finished reading a book with the vision and clarity to start/reignite a creative project with gusto, with your inner critic, feelings of imposter syndrome and fear of failure no longer running the show, you’ll know how wonderful that feels. If you also know what it’s like for this feeling to wear off and for the old self-sabotage and imposter syndrome to slowly return to centre stage, you know how demotivating this is. We’ve all been there.

So let's not just delay the return of your inner critic, but work together to explore and discover for yourself a very different way of experiencing your creativity, your inner critic and the stories you tell about them.

There’s a completely new relationship to be had with our personal creativity, what it is and the stories we tell about it, One where we recognise it for what it really is: life itself; where the respect is mutual, where we know how to be in the right place for inspiration to find us (often not where we think), and where our creative lives can flourish.

Why work with me?

I’ve spent 30+ years combining my work as a creative practitioner: writer, storyteller, theatre-maker and speaker, often collaborating with other artists on a wide variety of arts projects, as a creative-learning and creativity consultant and trainer in the education and heritage sectors, and I teach my own workshops and courses for the public and businesses, about how story and life dance together to create our personal experience of the world and what this means for how we live and work.

My creative practice and my teaching/mentoring are equally important to me, one always shedding new light on the other.

I‘ve been a storyteller and teacher all my working life. I was over 50 before adding writer - three commissioned books - and theatre maker to the list, both of which found me discovering a totally new way of experiencing my own self-sabotaging behaviour and inner critic. (Many years ago I ran away from a writing course in the middle of the week because…well, it mattered so much…!)

I was over 50 when I took a show to the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time on the Royal Mile at The Scottish Storytelling Centre, fulfilled a long-held dream of living on a Scottish island for four years, obtained a Masters by Research at the University of Edinburgh on my storytelling practice and how and why we tell stories, and published a book about story and landscape in collaboration with sculptor Marjan Wouda, a project we’d been promising we would do for years!

I’ve known what it’s like to be at the mercy of a fiendish inner critic, serious self-sabotage and seemingly never-ending procrastination. Now I also know what it’s like to be 100% certain that even if I see them knocking around, I’ll never be at their mercy again. There’s clarity in this. There’s also a wild freedom.

How to find out more

For 1-to-1 mentorships the first step is a free 30 minute call on zoom, with absolutely no obligation to go ahead, so that you can see if I’m a good fit for you, and I can find out more about you and what you’re looking for, to make sure I feel I can help you.

From here there are a few options: One month (2 sessions), 3 months (6 sessions) or 6 months (12 sessions) all tailored to suit your creative needs and the needs of your project. In practice, the sessions can be spaced out to suit you, providing they’re all taken within these time frames.

If you want to book a free call or have any questions, email me at: jah@storywheel.co.uk or click the link: