About Gemma Crane

My journey was not at all traditional. My parents split when I was just four years old, I was bullied at school, and at aged sixteen I left high school with no qualifications after failing most of my GCSEs. I felt like a failure. However, having started singing and dancing at just three years old and with a love of performing I have had amazing opportunities to travel at various periods of my working life to Japan, Turkey and Los Angeles and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Our personal journeys make us who we are, and I would not have changed a thing, as it has all lead me along the path to where I am today.

After leaving school I spent a brief period working in retail. At seventeen, I secured a job in personnel for a large retailer and worked my way up to Recruitment Manager. I then went into retail sales and as Regional HR Advisor, I travelled all over the UK. The people, training, support, and investment in me was amazing. The business believed in training and development, and I undertook coaching courses and became an NLP Practitioner which I love. It was from this moment I could feel my life was going to change.

The best investment you can ever have is on yourself. I find it interesting that people learn everything about different topics and spend hours researching however, very few learn anything about themselves and never invest the time 'you' deserve in getting to know you. I have always had limiting beliefs and fear that I would be on my own like my mother, and have nothing, which was all an illusion. I did become a single parent for a short while, but I continued to work on myself. I can honestly say that coaching has changed my life, and I would highly recommend it. I realised that I now felt complete freedom. I also realised up until this point in my life I was always worried about what people thought of me and others' opinions. That is no longer the case. It feels incredible! Coaching has enabled me to release all the trauma that had built up inside me from relationships, my childhood, being bullied, failing my GCSEs and the list goes on.

I genuinely believe that self-image is something that should be taught in schools. It is something that I have had to work on personally. You can have all the knowledge in the world and the best exam results, but, if our self-image and inner dialogue is based on our childhood and conditioning, and that is not positive, then you will not become successful. Likewise, those who have come out of school with no exam qualifications and lack of knowledge become successful because of their self-image.

In addition to the NLP, because of being spiritual, I am drawn to a more holistic HR approach and completed the basic theta healing course. This utilises working with the creator to heal and clear the mind of fears and blocks which are preventing them from moving forward, which gave me a different perspective of coaching from a different modality.

I am currently an Elite coach of the Bob Proctor Gallagher Institute and learning Psycho cybernetics and how the universal laws and Quantum physics help people achieve the life they want.

This was when I had an epiphany. There are huge benefits to organisations when incorporating the learnings from this programme and mindset, together with NLP, which looks at the neuro, language and behavioural patterns learned through experiences and programming and the ways these patterns can be changed to help employees achieve the desired outcome. Including in people strategies would help to keep employees, create a better culture, reduce absenteeism, and improve productivity and performance.

Work life balance and priorities have changed for many of us now. We look differently at the world and what is expected of us. This means employers need to make sure that they are tapping into what makes people happy, so when recruiting they identify skillsets, 'loves,' and 'passions' to identify how they can add value and contribution to an organisation. Examples of this include reviewing role profiles in their roles, what tasks do they enjoy, what hours do they wish to work and looking at Hybrid working plans or even forty-eight-hour fortnights or four day working weeks. Benefits and incentives organisations put in place do have a significant impact on how appreciated their people feel. If you have a happy workforce, then you get the best output from them, and they contribute and add value consistently.