Suzanne Proksa:
Welcome to the Suzanne show with me, Suzanne Proksa, HR and business strategist, former featured Etsy seller, plant addict, concert lover, gardener, landscaper in training, and human straight up obsessed with helping others and cheering on women. Here, we talk a little business, personal development, women's health, and a whole lot about things that matter, help people, and give them joy. Grab your coffee or your wine, Break out one of your hundreds of notebooks. Light that soy candle, and let's dive in. Hello, Suzanne show fam. I am here today talking with Kate Field about celebrating the creativity and fearlessness of older women. Kate Field is a life coach and therapist helping women to achieve their creative and career goals. Born in London, England, and now living by the sea in Dorset, Southwest England.
Suzanne Proksa:
Kate was a teacher for more than 25 years working in mainstream and special needs schools. Prior to becoming a teacher, Kate worked for 10 years in mental health services. She left her position as vice principal last year to set up her own business, coaching professional women, a qualified therapist and coach. Kate brings a wealth of experience with a no nonsense approach. Her clients are often older women looking to change or develop their careers. Kate embraces the changes that middle age brings and encourages everyone to live life to the fullest. She completed an MA in fine arts at age 55 because it was something she always wanted to do. And she sings with the acapella group academics.
Suzanne Proksa:
Welcome Kate. And please feel free to add to that intro.
Cate Field:
Hello, Suzanne. I am so, so excited to be on your show. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really looking forward to this.
Suzanne Proksa:
All right, Kate. So let's start with the basics. How did you start working with creative professional women?
Cate Field:
When I left college and I went to work in special needs, and I kind of drifted away a little bit, and then last year, I found that more people were contacting me in my life coaching practice about developing their own creativity, or they were creative people who were absolutely amazing at their jobs, but really struggled with other aspects of building their practice. And I just love working with really creative people.
Suzanne Proksa:
That has to be so rewarding. And I'm curious, what are the main fears that older women have when they're thinking about changing their careers?
Cate Field:
Yeah, it's really interesting because a lot of the women that I've been working with, they've always been very creative, but largely as a hobby, some of them have been in very creative careers like architecture or graphic design. But the fears that they have, especially if they've been out of the business world or the job market for a while because of bringing up family, for example, is this is the fear that they're not going to be taken seriously. They feel that the art world is a very young person's world. And so they feel slightly intimidated and their friends. And, and and their friends. And, and that is just so interesting. So I think it's that fear, fear of what other people might think, fear of making the fools of themselves, that that sort of thing.
Suzanne Proksa:
I'm sure that many people can relate to that. What are the challenges faced by professional women wanting to do something different?
Cate Field:
Working with professional women who have spent years getting to where they are, that is the that is the challenge. So for example, I'm working with a couple of women who are architects, 7 years of training at university, and then all of that work that they've had to do to build up their practice, to build up their reputation, they suddenly turn around and say, actually, I want to do something different, very different. There's the challenge in themselves where they say, I've just spent the last 20 years of my adult life working in this profession, and now I'm gonna do something else. Is that a waste of time? And then other people, again, other people coming in and saying, what are you doing that for? You know, you were really successful. You've done this. You've spent so, so much time. You've worked so hard to get where you are. What why do you want to leave? And and that, I think, is is a real challenge, especially for women who have gone into what society would consider to be very professional roles, like architecture, lawyers, doctors.
Cate Field:
And it's I think it's really interesting that we have this expectation that we'll go to school. We know what we want to do. We'll go to college. We'll go to university. We'll train in our profession. And that's kind of where we'll stay. Even though we know that that's just not true anymore and people have lots of careers, but I think it's more challenging for women who go into these high level profiles and then decide that actually they want to do something else.
Suzanne Proksa:
Thank you so much for those two overviews. So when you take both of those things into account, you know, the different fears that older women have and the challenges, if you're a professional woman, what do you tell people to help them navigate all of those feelings and challenges?
Cate Field:
It's a really interesting one. I start every session the for the first time with an identification of your core values, and when I'm working with a client and she's come to me because she's she's still thinking that she wants to change or she knows that she wants to change her career, not quite sure what how she's going to go about it, but often not quite sure what she wants to do. She knows that she wants to change and she's got some ideas, but actually narrowing it down to what it is that she wants to do can be a real challenge. So what I do is I go through a core values identification checklist, really. And it's something that I've produced over the years and I it's adapted and has evolved. And I give them lots of words to start off with. So we look at things like freedom, self respect, community, curiosity, personal development, creativity, family, all of those sorts of things. And I get them to really focus on maybe 5 core values.
Cate Field:
And then I link that with getting them to identify maybe 2 or 3 people who they really admire and the reasons why they admire them, because this is a really good way of identifying our core values. And then once we've got our core values, then you can start to think about what they actually mean to you and how you want to use these to navigate the, the job world and to think about actually what you want to do. Because when we do this exercise, some of my clients will come back and say, I've kind of gone off on another tangent. And I'm thinking that actually I'm interested in doing something else because they realized they wanted to change and they thought they knew what they wanted to do. But by identifying those, those core values and really thinking about how, how another job might fit into that, it really helps. So that's my, my starting point with my clients is identifying core values. The next bit, and I'm sure your listeners will, will understand this as well, is challenging those limiting beliefs because however successful you have been in one career, there's always that little niggling fear that you're gonna be absolutely rubbish in another one. And all of those limited, limiting fears and those limiting beliefs start popping in and, sabotaging, sabotaging our dreams.
Cate Field:
So again, I will work through those limiting beliefs. We'll challenge them. I'll get my clients to challenge them, and she'll write a whole list on why that they're just rubbish and not, there's no substance to them. And, and that, again, it's a very, very interesting exercise and it, it helps her to really think about what it is that she wants to do. And then following on from those two exercises, we start looking at mindset because then we, we've got a bit of clarity here. So what my role in this, at this point is to really help them to clarify exactly what it is they want to do and why they want to do it. And then the next step will be to, okay. What are we gonna do? Action.
Suzanne Proksa:
Thank you so much for that. I think that was probably super helpful for the audience that is listening in. So, you know, they get started. They've got some tips and tricks now.
Cate Field:
What are the next steps? The next steps are the really exciting bit because for some of my clients, they really, they know they want change and do something different, but they don't know what. So it's very much a brainstorming, daydreaming experiment, And I'm a very visual person and a lot of my clients are very visual because they're creatives. And so I encourage them to write a journal, or they could do it in a sketchbook or however they want to do it. It could be like a scrapbook. And then some of them will do it electronically as well, but the vast majority create paper journals. Some of them will buy a beautiful book, some of them will make their own. It's, it's entirely up to them. It's whatever works for them.
Cate Field:
But the exciting thing is just daydreaming about the sort of things that you might like to do and to just let your imagination go. No judgment, no questions about whether it's even possible and those sorts of things. It's a real daydreaming exercise, and I get them to just cover a double page in the sketchbook or in their journal to get them to doodle, to use colors and those sorts of things to really get their brains working. And this exercise can go on for, for a few days. And in fact, it's good for it to go on for a few days, sleep on it, come back with some other ideas. And then the next step is to look at what you've written and then highlight the ones that are really popping out to you. And that could be they're popping out because they're ridiculous. And it might just, yeah, that was a bit of a crazy idea and is not really what I want to do, but it might be some that would be, I'd like to do that for a while, just to explore what it might be like, and then perhaps go and do something else, because this is the thing, Suzanne.
Cate Field:
Once they start to understand that they can change their careers, the next change doesn't have to be the change they have for the next 20 years, does it? They could just do it for a year. They could do it for a couple of years. And that is absolutely liberating.
Suzanne Proksa:
Having been in the online space for a while and teaching mindset myself to women. I know that those challenges can come back and they can resurface, and that's something that we want to try to keep under control as much as possible when we're trying to go through a change like this. How do you suggest that women be ready for that and be ready to tackle it?
Cate Field:
Oh, well, because it that is such a great question because you're absolutely right. They can leave my sessions. My my sessions tend to go on for my programs for about 4 weeks, 4 to 6 weeks. They're, they're quite succinct, but I know that in 6 months time there could be little wobbles, and so I always have to do a check-in. So, which is great, because you can find out what people have got, got, like, as their dreams and what they're doing and, and all of that kind of stuff. But the other thing that I emphasize is having a group of women around them
Suzanne Proksa:
to support them. Now that could be a
Cate Field:
group online, people perhaps, women they've never met before, but it also could be girls they've known forever. For me, I am absolutely blessed in that I am still in contact after all these years with many of the girls I went to school with. Having other people around you who are cheering you on, picking you up, holding you to account. That kind of thing is so, so important. We can't do this on our own. We can't, we can't really succeed by ourselves. We need to have the support of other people, even if it's just someone to just check-in and just say, I'm doing this. What do you think? And they can say right there, well, that's stupid.
Cate Field:
What are you doing that for? And it's a bug or it could be, yep. I think then that is an absolutely brilliant thing to do, but I don't think you should do it right now. Maybe you need to do this first. It's those sorts of things, a group of people, 1 or 2 is fine, that you can bounce ideas off and that you can just, it just helps you, helps you stay grounded. So that is the, the momentum and that is the ongoing, ongoing thing that is just so, so important.
Suzanne Proksa:
When you think about the women that reach out to you, that you can help, that you have great success with, you. What are these women like? What are their goals? What are they trying to do?
Cate Field:
Oh, Suzanne, I love talking about my clients because they are all so interesting. So I'm going to talk about 2 of them. So one of them is a textile artist, hugely successful, very, very, very creative, but she's now thinking that she just wants to develop that career path a little bit more, do some more television, do some more book writing, this kind of stuff. And what she's found is that she she was putting up her own barriers. She was getting people coming to her, asking her to do these things, and she was letting her own fear and anxiety hold her back. So as she put it, she kept herself on a very low level because it was very safe. It's been absolutely brilliant working with her. I'm still working with her at the moment.
Cate Field:
I've been working with her since just before Christmas and, oh my gosh, already she is doing things that she thought she might like to do, but has got a little bit scared, well, very scared about doing and had just been putting them off, you know, huge amounts of procrastination. So seeing her come into, well, just absolutely blossoming has been been brilliant. The other woman that I've been working with completely different. She's worked in social services for the last 25 years. She's in her late forties, but she has always had this sort of idea of running her own art groups, maybe a bit of art therapy, perhaps bringing in older people to tell stories through creating art and design, and this whole narrative storytelling. She had no idea how she was going to go about doing this, so we just talked through it. And this was an idea that she'd had in her head for years, a long time, and that was a big step for her because she was in a very secure, high managerial post within social services as government. It's a government position.
Cate Field:
And she had a lot of resistance from some members of her family because of the whole kind of financial risk and all of this, that sort of thing. But we were able to really work that through so that she did a bit of half of the time working in her job and then slowly developing her creative business. And this is what's so, so wonderful about the work that I do is that I work with so many different women. Who've got different backgrounds, who are looking to do different things. And so for for for me, it's just every day is interesting. It's, it's wonderful.
Suzanne Proksa:
We know the fears women come across. We know the challenges that they come across. We now have some tips to kind of get past that, but also work on that when these things creep back up. And I am sure that there are women out there who have heard you say, hey, these are the kind of women that I work with that would like to know how they can work with you. So how do they reach out to you? What kind of programs do you have available?
Cate Field:
Yeah. So I do a 4 week and a 6 week group coaching program, and that can be found on my website, which is katefield.com. That's Kate with a c. And I'm also on Instagram at, at Kate Field. And I put quite a bit of content on there as well. I do some one to one and I do some programs as well, which has quite minimal input from me, but I do a very extensive video program for my clients.
Suzanne Proksa:
That sounds fantastic. So at this point of the show, I always like to ask my guests to just talk about 2 or 3 things that they would love for the guests to walk away with action items or just things they want people to remember. What do you want the audience to walk away with from this episode?
Cate Field:
Oh, I love talking about this. The main thing, Suzanne, is that it is never too old. You are never too old. It's never too late. You are never too old to follow your dream, to do the things that you want to do. So it doesn't matter how long you have been in your professional career. If you think that you want to go and do something else, then go and do it. That that is kind of the, the real big thing, because that is a mindset change, isn't it? That is, this is what I can do.
Cate Field:
This is who I am. And the next thing is to really, really think about what it is that you want to do and how that fits in with your values. So if you have been thinking that you want to change your careers, your career, there must be a reason why. So what is it? What what is niggling at you? So don't ignore it. Don't ignore that little voice because that can just start you on such an incredible journey.
Suzanne Proksa:
All right. Fantastic. This has been so much gold in one episode. I am so excited to be able to share this. And, Kate, I really want to thank you for spending the time with me and talking about this important topic. And I look so forward to seeing you around. I know that I see you on Instagram and such, and so I look forward to chatting with you again in the future.
Cate Field:
Suzanne, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me on. It's been really, really great. Thank you.
Suzanne Proksa:
I hope that you loved this episode. If you did, give me those shout outs, show me some love on iTunes, give me a rating. And, hey, if you wanna know where to find me, you can find me on pretty much all social media at suzanneproksa. That's suzanneproksa, and, that's suzanneproksa. Proksa. And you can also head over to my website Suzanne probsa.com. Until then, I'll see you in the next episode and here is parte music for
Cate Field:
you.
