This is the story of how a girl from a Montessori learner became a woman who crossed continents, survived heartbreak, and turned a life of “software coding” into a calling: assiting people rewrite the inner code that runs their lives.
I was sixteen, still at school, when someone first called what I did “coaching”. At my Montessori high school, a teacher asked me to support a younger learner who was struggling. There was no grand plan, no certification, no official title. Just two teenagers, a desk between us, and a quiet, shared hope that things could get better if we listened to one another.
Montessori had already planted a seed in me: the belief that we each carry an inner teacher. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I instinctively trusted that if I listened carefully enough, that inner voice in both of us would show us what to do next. It felt less like giving advice and more like gently stepping aside so that this inner guidance could speak up.
Wanting to Teach, Struggling with the System
By the time I was six, I already knew I wanted to be a teacher. It was as clear and simple as a constant variable in a programme: goal = "teach". So I did the obvious thing: I went to Teacher Training College to become a chemistry and biology teacher. On paper, everything lined up. In my heart, though, something was off. My Montessori upbringing had trained me to trust curiosity, freedom and inner guidance. The traditional school system wanted obedience, uniformity and silence. It felt like trying to run a modern, flexible application on a rigid, outdated operating system. The values simply didn’t compile.
After two years of teaching in the Netherlands, I realised I had gone from school to school to school, only ever changing sides of the desk. I knew theories, but not life. I could explain photosynthesis, but not heartbreak. I could mark exams, but not read my own longing for something wider, wilder and more alive. I needed an adventure big enough to shake my assumptions loose.
A Six-Month Trip that Turned into 40+ Years
That adventure called itself Lesotho – a landlocked country inside South Africa that I had never even heard of before I booked my ticket. I planned to stay for six months. Life smiled gently and replied, “We’ll see about that.” I ended up staying for twelve years, because there, in the mountains, I met the man I had been looking for: Anthony Scott. We married in 1985 and moved to a remote village called Mpharane, where we ran the local family trading station together. (And 40+ years later, I still live in Southern Africa)
Mpharane stripped life back to its essentials. No municipal services, no phone, no television. We laid a 1.5 km pipeline from the river to our house. We ran our lights and computers on solar power, with a generator humming as back-up. We composted what we could and burned what we couldn’t. Our only “network connection” was radio contact with Anthony’s parents in Mafeteng, sixty kilometres away. It was harsh, beautiful and utterly real. Every day, the land asked: “What do you truly need?” and quietly deleted the rest.
In this remote trading station, survival, love and innovation intertwined every single day.
A Century-Old Business, Reengineered Off-Grid
Our trading station sold everything from nappies to coffins. On the surface, it was just a rural shop. Underneath, it was a quiet, solar-powered revolution. We installed computers, scanners and a self-developed point-of-sale system, all running on solar energy. In the early 1990s, in a remote Lesotho village, we became unlikely technology pioneers. Without fully realising it, I was learning to think like a systems architect: how to keep things running when there is no grid, how to design for constraints, how to build resilience into everything.
I learnt computer programming in this so-called “third-world” country. Between serving customers and managing stock, I was also learning off-road motorbike riding and barefoot water-skiing. I wasn’t a natural at the skiing – I tumbled more times than I can count – but eventually I managed a one-minute run. That minute taught me something I still teach my clients: the body, like the mind, learns through repetition, bruises and the decision to get up one more time than you fall.
💡 Quiet Lesson: Resilience is not glamorous. It is built in the dusty, repetitive moments when nobody is watching and nothing seems to be working yet.
Discovering Brain Gym: A New Kind of “Programming”
While we were in Mpharane, a visitor changed the trajectory of my life. Dr Carla Hannaford from the USA arrived and introduced me to Brain Gym®, also known as Educational Kinesiology. For the first time, I held in my hands a set of tools that could shift behaviour with surprising ease. It felt like discovering that the human mind had an API (Application Programming Interface) I had never been told about – a way to send gentle, precise “requests” that could transform old patterns into new possibilities.
In 1993, I qualified as a Brain Gym practitioner and trainer. There wasn’t much demand for it in rural Lesotho, so I practised on whoever came to visit. Friends and family would arrive for tea and leave having had their first Brain Gym session. I used to joke that I had stopped programming computers and started reprogramming people’s minds. If my life at that time had been written in code, it might have looked something like this:
class LifePath:
def __init__(self):
self.location = "Netherlands"
self.role = "Teacher"
self.inner_calling = "Spiritual Mindset Coach"
def move_to_lesotho(self):
self.location = "Lesotho"
self.role = "Trader & Solar-Tech Pioneer"
def discover_brain_gym(self):
self.role = "Trainer & Coach"
def reprogram(self, belief: str) -> str:
return belief.replace("I can't", "I can learn to")
life = LifePath()
life.move_to_lesotho()
life.discover_brain_gym()
new_belief = life.reprogram("I can't change")
print(new_belief) # "I can learn to change"Behind the humour was a deep, growing realisation: our beliefs are not fixed constants. They are variables. And when we change them, the whole programme of our life starts to run differently.
“Why Are We Making a Living, If We Could Be Making a Life?”
Even as our trading station became more successful, Anthony and I felt a quiet ache. Our hearts were drawn to spiritual growth. We dreamt of opening a retreat centre, a place where people could step out of the noise and hear their inner teacher again. We loved the teachings of Paul Solomon and even travelled to the USA to attend some of his workshops. Anthony would often ask, half joking, half pleading: “Why are we making a living, if we could be making a life?”
In 1994, we became parents to a beautiful little boy. Life felt full and promising, yet we still felt stuck between duty and destiny. We didn’t know how to step out of the shop and into the spiritual work we longed to do. It’s strange how often we wait for permission to follow our deepest calling, as if life must send an official email saying, “You may now begin.”
The Day Everything Changed: Grief and the Power of Forgiveness
That “email” arrived in the harshest possible form. In 1996, Anthony was shot and killed in an armed robbery. In a single, shattering moment, my husband, my business partner, the father of my child and the co-dreamer of our future was gone. There are no elegant metaphors for that kind of pain. It is raw, unstructured data flooding every system at once, threatening to crash everything you are.
I was profoundly grateful for the spiritual training I had received through Paul Solomon and other teachings. I had already learnt about the power and necessity of forgiveness. That didn’t mean I didn’t feel the hurt. It meant I refused to let it calcify inside me. Forgiveness became my way of preventing a permanent internal bug – a piece of malicious code – from taking over my life.
📌 Quiet Truth: Forgiveness is not saying “it was okay”. It is saying, “I choose not to let this define the rest of my story.”
Make a Life: Turning Pain into a New Beginning
In the wake of that loss, I finally made the change we had been unable to make together. I started my company “Make a Life”, which later evolved into “The Life You Want”. I began teaching Brain Gym and offering individual sessions long before “coaching” became a fashionable word. My work shifted from programming computers to supporting people in reprogramming their own minds. It felt as though all the threads – Montessori, teaching, Lesotho, technology, spirituality, grief – were slowly weaving themselves into a new, coherent pattern.
I tried returning to the Netherlands with my young son, but Africa had already written itself into my bones. In 1997, I moved back to Johannesburg – a big city where I knew only one person, armed with a modality almost no one had heard of. It was daunting, but I was not building alone. Again and again, I felt a kind of Divine support nudging doors open just wide enough for me to slip through.
A Blended Family, Humble Pie and Deep Learning
In 2001, I married again – this time to a widower, Cobus Kok. Overnight, I gained three men for the price of one: a husband and his sons. I have never seen myself as particularly motherly, so becoming part of a blended family stretched me in ways I hadn’t anticipated. In our household, everyone learnt to participate in the chores, while I naturally took on many of the maintenance jobs I had practised in Lesotho. We were rewriting the “household script” together, line by imperfect line.
Living in a blended family was not easy, but it became one of my greatest teachers. The hardest lesson was this: if I wanted to change the dynamics of a relationship, I had to start by changing myself. My ego protested loudly. I ate my fair share of humble pie. But slowly, through many honest conversations and quiet internal shifts, we created a more harmonious home. What I was practising in my family, I was also beginning to teach my clients: lasting change is an inside job.
Lifelong Learning: From Allergies to Germanic Healing Knowledge
I have never stopped learning. Since 1979, I have been blessed with close friends, three of whom are medical doctors. Their world fascinated me, but I never felt called to study conventional medicine. Instead, I followed a different curiosity: how does the body express what the mind and heart cannot yet say?
I trained as an allergy practitioner with NAET (Nambudripad’s Allergy Elimination Technique). It was deeply rewarding to watch people become free from symptoms that had constrained them for years. I still remember the joy on children’s faces when they could drink a milkshake for the first time in their lives. Later, through extensive Theta Healing training, I qualified as a medical intuitive in 2014. Now, I am studying Germanic Healing Knowledge (GHK), which sees illness as beginning with a conflict – an emotional or psychological shock that leaves its trace in the body. When we identify and resolve these conflicts, the body is freer to heal itself. It is a very different model from conventional medicine, yet I see how they can complement each other.
Becoming a Spiritual Mindset Coach: Rewriting the Inner Code
My spiritual grounding comes from Paul Solomon, A Course in Miracles and many other teachings. My practical grounding comes from Montessori, teaching, Brain Gym, NAET, Theta Healing, GHK and the relentless classroom of everyday life. Together, they have shaped me into what I now call a Spiritual Mindset Coach. I have seen, again and again, that when we address things at the root – our beliefs, our unresolved conflicts, our self-sabotaging emotions – we can find internal solutions for external challenges. Health, wealth, relationships: they all respond when the inner code changes.
If I were to express my work in pseudocode today, it might look like this:
def transform_life(state):
state["beliefs"] = resolve_conflicts(state["beliefs"])
state["emotions"] = release_self_sabotage(state["emotions"])
state["choices"] = align_with_inner_teacher(state["choices"])
return state
current_state = {
"beliefs": ["I'm not enough", "Change is dangerous"],
"emotions": ["fear", "guilt"],
"choices": ["stay small", "delay dreams"]
}
new_state = transform_life(current_state)
print(new_state)Of course, human beings are far more complex than any script. But the essence remains: when we change what we believe about ourselves and the world, our emotions soften, our choices expand and our lives begin to reflect a deeper truth. We stop merely “making a living” and start, gently and courageously, to make a life – The Life You Want.
Your Story, Your Inner Teacher
My origin story is not a straight line. It is a series of loops, crashes, restarts and unexpected upgrades. From a Montessori classroom to a remote trading station, from grief to forgiveness, from programming computers to reprogramming minds – every chapter has whispered the same message: “Listen within. There is more to you than you have been told.”
If there is one thing I hope you take from my story, it is this: whatever conflict you are facing – in your body, your bank account, your relationships or your sense of purpose – there is an inner teacher within you, waiting to be heard. When you begin to change the inner code, the outer programme of your life cannot help but respond.
And if you would like to explore if I can support you on your journey, you can book a 15 free call where we can explore what you want and are we a fit. Use the button below to book.
