Venessa Cuthbert, BA - Expert

I am a life skills coach, business consultant, counsellor, career guide, holistic healing coach, change agent and personal development coach. I have spent 25 years of my working life in recruitment under the illusion that I am purely a sales person selling people.  In the past decade or so I have been on a journey of self-discovery and I realised that my role was more than just moving bodies from one company to another and that I had an ethical responsibility towards these people to assist and guide them in making the right choices before changing jobs. Whether I move a senior manager or an office clerk to another position there are so many people to take into consideration. I therefore play the role of change agent as well as a career guide as I often need to guide people on whether their reason for leaving might not be the right one and then helping them see why they should rather stay where they are, for the time being anyway.  Doing personality assessments and having these confirm all the things I had deduced about the individual in an interview absolutely fascinates me and has made me realise that through my years of experience I am able to understand people on a deeper level.

I have worked extensively with corporate and medium size enterprises doing consultation on the type of person that they require for their operation which requires a good understanding of both the employer and the employee.  I have counselled for years in an informal setting and my aim is now to take this into a more formal setting where I am able to impact others outside of my usual circle of influence.

Working my way through an Inner Healing Training course conducted by our church I wanted to know and understand more about spiritual healing, not only within the confines of religious doctrine but in the secular world as well.   I signed up for, and am currently in the final stages of obtaining my Bachelor of Arts Degree in Psychological Counselling. My aim is to bring my training and experience to companies and others outside of the church. I have always enjoyed people and in my own way have always been a counsellor and friend to those who have suffered under the abuse of others, more especially women.  I seem to be strangely drawn to those people that don’t know how to get out of abusive relationships and I have come to believe that we are drawn to others like ourselves. Through my own journey of healing in my late 40s I began to develop a deeper passion for helping others heal spiritually. Working with a movement called Kairos I did prison ministry, and this is where I was exposed to change management more earnestly. Not only was I changing, but my role was to help and facilitate change in those confined to prison walls through a system designed to bring healing and enlightenment to those with whom we came into contact within those walls. Studying Victimology I realised that the existing punitive incarceration system was counter productive, whereas moving to an integrated restorative justice could not only benefit the individual but impact future generations and change the face of the justice system. This will amount to change management, not only in the perpetrator, but in the minds of us as a collective society.

Studying Anthropology and being a philanthropist myself I am fascinated by and  interested in people and why we do what we do, how we get where we are in life and more importantly, how do we change our futures. Do people have the desire to change their lives or are they even aware that their lives can change and that they don’t have to settle. How do we change our conditioning and stand out above the crowd. How do we break the chains that we are sometimes bound by?  When does a man or a woman decide that they are ready for change, regardless of the repercussions of what others may think of them?  Through my own enlightenment and journey of discovery I discovered that “hurt people, hurt people” and that broken people do sick things to other people. Compassion has always been my strong (and weak) point and I can never just see black or white, but rather two sides to a coin; and have a morbid or fascinated curiosity about how a person gets to the point they are at.  But more importantly, how can this be changed so that destructive thought and behavioural patterns can be broken and that people can live a better life.

I am not immortal and I cannot heal the world, but I can make a difference in the life of one starfish at a time and perhaps this can replicate and thus make me immortal, in that, the change I made in one person’s life can be perpetuated into eternity ……