About Marianne Welsh
Career Coach, UK

Marianne Welsh, a career coach in the UK, works with experienced professionals who lack direction and struggle to find fulfilment in their careers. She helps them take charge of their careers and find the courage to live their dreams.

My passion for coaching began after I left university when I discovered I loved the process of looking for a job. 

Identifying my skills, gifts, and passions, finding a role to suit, and convincing an employer that I could do that job was so fulfilling. But then, I began to wonder how I might help others to do that.

I decided I wanted to be a career coach, but I didn’t have a career, so I figured that was my first step!  

So, I chose a role in a similar field and decided to become a recruitment consultant.

I was then led into the world of Human Resources, where I worked for over ten years, first for Arthur Anderson and then Deloitte, both global professional services firms.

My ambition and unhealthy need to prove myself took me off my original track and led to burnout in my late 20s, where I lost vision and hope for the future. 

When my professional HR career ended, I dipped my toes in career coaching and came alive.

It was a coach who helped me pick up the pieces of my life. I discovered it is possible to live a life fuelled by passion and vision instead of fear and performance. 

About this time, I got involved in a career coaching start-up company where I had the opportunity to pull together all the pieces of my career in a role that brought me a tremendous amount of fulfilment.  

Although this particular company only stayed afloat for a few years, this was a hugely formative time for me. I developed my coaching skills and learned how to build a business from scratch—no mean feat.

I still had a hunger to discover how to use my gifts and skills to bring about the greatest impact, so I took a role as Business Development Director for a social transformation charity, Resurgo Trust.  This fuelled me even more, and I enrolled in a 3-year intensive leadership development programme in the USA, which completely transformed me as a leader from the inside out. 

As this programme ended, some clients I had worked with previously began to knock on my door.  

Something inside me began to realise that the career coach dream wasn’t over after all.  

Through my own personal transformation, I realised that I was perfectly positioned to pick up career coaching again.  I was confident in who I was as a person, had grown in resilience, and had some powerful career experiences behind me.  

I hired a coach to help me stay accountable for my decision to go for it and not shy away.  I figured at this point, I would prefer to go down in flames and know I had at least tried. 

Giving it one last shot was the best decision because now I can categorically say that I love every moment of my work.  Helping others to step into the driving seat of their career and seeing them enjoy their work and have an impact on the world around them brings me so much joy.  I can’t think of anything else I would rather do.

I believe that every person has been designed uniquely and for a specific purpose.  

I can’t think of anything more exciting than a world where each person lives the life they were meant to live.  

Not only would they feel happy and fulfilled, but they would most likely be successful at what they do and bring real impact to the world around them.  

Whether it is a ballet dancer bringing delight to an audience, an architect designing a space that brings joy to a family, to a scientist who finds the next groundbreaking cure for cancer, when we do the things we love, the world is a better place.