About Joanna Shipley,
PCC Master Life & Equus Coach
I’m Joanna, and I coach people who are ready to live, work, and lead with more truth, courage, and humanity. My clients are often capable people: individuals, founders, leaders, practitioners, parents and teams who have achieved a great deal, but know something deeper is asking for their attention.
My work helps people bring their lives, leadership, relationships, and work back into sync with their heart and soul. Through a mix of holistic mentoring, Martha Beck Wayfinder coaching, leadership experience, nervous system awareness, intuition, and practical transformation, I help people cut through noise and reconnect with what is genuinely true for them.
From there, powerful change becomes possible. We can loosen the patterns that have been holding you back, make decisions that feel clear and congruent, and create a life or way of leading where your heart sings, your spirit soars, and what once felt impossible starts becoming real.
My background and education
I originally began my coaching training as a way to expand how I served people in my previous careers (mentoring, training and leading troops of soldiers and junior officers as a British Army officer, as well as mentoring holistic health professionals building their practices).
I’ve always believed that no matter where you work, or where you are in life, the “whole person” needs competent, transformative coaching to reach their full potential and be genuinely fulfilled.
And so I’ve devoted quite a few years to the mastery of coaching tools and techniques from many domains to understand what makes people tick (and what makes them happy).
As a natural life long learner I have many relevant formal certifications, many of which went deep and involved years of training. Some of the most relevant include:
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Martha Beck Wayfinder Life Coach Training & Instructing
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Wayfinder Master Coach Training
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Equus Coach Training
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Equus Master Facilitator Training for Teams & Groups (in progress)
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Personal Certified Coach (International Coaching Federation)
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Diploma in Adult Education
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Diploma in Integrated Energy Techniques including NLP and EFT.
Outside of certifications, I have been a lecturer, supervisor, teacher, a Resilient Leaders Elements consultant and an ICF Coaching Group Leader. I also bring 20 years of 1:1 therapeutic experience (which gives me a solid, trauma informed background) to the work I do.
Again, all this is in aid of coaching the whole person, to help them become the truest, most capable, happiest versions of themselves.
In the professional world, I have coached in a wide range of sectors, from founders, CEOs and Directors to academic professors, head teachers and senior military officers. Outside of those industries, I have coached solo entrepreneurs, creative folks and many regular people who want to make meaningful and lasting transformations in their life.
And through all the years, I’ve found that we all need the same things. (So wherever you’re coming from, there’s so much we can do together.)
Why I do this work
Before becoming a coach and facilitator, I've worked across a broad range of industries. I started work in the civil service as an economist, then moved to PR and marketing across the private sector, the NHS, and health authorities. I learned a huge amount about organisations, communication, and leadership, but I also learned what happens when people become disconnected from themselves, or experience poor leadership or even a lack of basic human decency. Life - and work - becomes unsatisfying, filled with conflict, and harder than it needs to be.
Wanting deeper challenge and meaning, I later joined the British Army as an officer. The Army taught me leadership, resilience, decision-making, and how teams and individuals function when the stakes are high. It also deepened my fascination with human behaviour: what helps people thrive, what shuts them down, and what creates trust.
Alongside all this, I was searching. I spent years trying to work out what made my own heart sing and my spirit soar, how to navigate life in a way that could still hold joy even in the darkest moments, and how to build a way of living that wasn’t based purely on performance or external success. (That is part of why my career has been so wiggly. I was following the thread of something I couldn’t yet fully name.)
That path eventually led me into integrated medicine, homeopathy, teaching, coaching, and decades of personal and professional study in human development, nervous system awareness, intuition, transformation and even spirituality. Over time, that searching led me to develop a grounded, practical process for helping people reconnect with what is true for them and build lives, work, and leadership from there.
I do this work because I know what it’s like to make the journey from the life you have to the life you want - and just how much a knowledgeable, experienced guide can accelerate the process of transformation.
What working with me is like
People often describe my coaching as warm, humorous, wise, and open-minded. I ask good questions, listen carefully, notice patterns, and help people cut through noise so they can hear what’s true.
And I use powerful, proven coaching tools, ones that work with your mind, body, emotions and, yes, spirit - to find the deeper answers for you. The ones that are underneath the recirculating thoughts in your head. With these tools, we unlock your intuition and discover what’s true and important for you.
Because of my background - from corporate environments to the Army, from healthcare to spiritual practice - very little shocks me. I can hold space for complexity, grief, ambition, uncertainty, contradiction, leadership pressure, reinvention, and people who are outwardly capable but inwardly exhausted.
Our work together will always be grounded in reality, but it does not stop at analysis. Together, we look honestly at what is happening, what matters to you, what wants to change, and what kind of next steps would bring you into greater alignment with yourself and your life.
Much of my work is about helping people move beneath the noise of everyday thinking, confusion and inner conflict, and into a deeper kind of presence with themselves. In that space, it becomes easier to hear your own wisdom, recognise what is genuinely true for you, and find answers that cannot always be reached through analysis alone.
Some people experience this as spiritual; others simply experience greater clarity, stillness or connection to themselves. No particular belief is required, and nothing is ever imposed. We work in partnership, and you choose what feels useful and right for you.
I’m interested in helping people become more honest, more congruent, and more deeply connected to what is really true for them. From there, better leadership (at home or at work!), healthier relationships, clearer decisions, and more meaningful work tend to emerge naturally.
I work with individuals, founders, leaders, practitioners, and organisations who want to build lives and cultures with more integrity, courage, and humanity.
(If that sounds like you, I’d love to speak with you. You can book a free Explore Call with me here and I can talk you through your options.)
Our work together can take many forms: 1:1 Zoom sessions, phone calls while we both walk in nature, and even Equus coaching, where we work with horses to draw out the roots of your thorny challenges.
A word about Equus Coaching
Working with horses fundamentally changed the way I understood communication, leadership and transformation. That’s why I’m so passionate about offering it as an option to my clients.
Horses respond to authenticity, nervous system state, clarity, and congruence. They notice immediately when someone is trying to perform confidence instead of embodying it, or when someone says one thing while feeling another.
That honesty makes them extraordinary coaching partners. As we interact with horses, they respond in every moment, always in the present.. They are like an external manifestation of the body’s own wise compass and counsel, reflecting our truest path back to us with a compassion and clarity that can be hard to access through thought alone.
And when clients work with horses, the work is ‘felt’ and visceral - creating experiences that stay with them, guiding them for months or even years.
Again and again, I’ve watched people leave Equus sessions with a level of clarity they have sometimes spent years trying to “think” their way towards. The horses help people access insight far beyond intellectual analysis, reading our wants, wishes, emotions, and nervous system with an honesty that is both humbling and deeply accepting.
They are non-judgemental. They see us as we truly are and accept us as we truly are. The interaction leaves people with a visceral signpost they can carry through the weeks and months that follow. Their responses act as a “force multiplier” to the impact of coaching.
This work often reconnects people not only to clearer leadership or decision-making, but to a deeper sense of presence, trust, and aliveness. It has also informed and deepened my coaching practice away from horses, whether on Zoom or in person, because their presence and wisdom has become embedded in all the work I do.
What I believe
I believe we all have an internal guidance system. Some people call it intuition, or inner wisdom, or just a sense of “knowing”. Whatever language we use, I believe most people already know far more about what they want and need than they realise.
But modern life often rewards disconnection. Overworking. Constant productivity. Image management. Performing certainty. Ignoring our bodies. Suppressing emotion. Choosing safety over truth. Burnout.
Eventually that costs us in all domains of life and work. It affects our relationships, our health, how we lead our organisations, and our basic sense of meaning.
I believe there is another way: a way of living and leading that is grounded, emotionally intelligent, spiritually aware, and sustainable. And it’s not perfect, endlessly positive, or detached from reality. It’s just deeply honest.
I believe the more truthful with ourselves we become, the more effective and peaceful we become. That listening to the mind alone is not enough, and that the heart has intelligence. That wisdom often emerges when we choose to practice becoming quiet enough to hear it.
And I believe when people reconnect with what is genuinely true for them, they naturally begin creating lives, relationships, and organisations that contribute something healthier to the world around them.
That, to me, is meaningful transformation - decisions that resonate and change that sticks, because it’s rooted in the truth of who we are and what we want out of our life.
What clients say about our work together
To learn more about the ways I can work with you (or your organisation), go to any of these pages for more details:
Or, if you want to speak to me in person about your options, you can book an Explore Call - a free, no-pressure call where we can get to know each other and I can step you through options for what kind of coaching will be best for you.
I look forward to hearing from you - and helping you take your next steps towards transformation.
Joanna
