Thank you for coming to find out more about us, we hope you find it time well spent!

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I’m Jackie and I’m Pure Turtle’s creator and Chief Executive. Further down this page, Michael, who has been with me from the start (not so long ago!) as our Development Director, will tell you a bit more about himself. 

                                                                        

The work I do at Pure Turtle - mentoring and supporting leaders, offering specialised therapies and wellbeing interventions - is very different from my earlier careers, first as a newspaper and magazine journalist and then as a CEO and Board member of national and international charities.

 

In all, I spent 30 years leading and managing organisations. In some of those environments, I  found it very challenging, serving people experiencing the most severe disadvantage on a daily basis. People who are both deaf and blind, for example, and people born with severely disabling conditions.

Running a charity was both a privilege and an ever-changing challenge. I needed both a business head and a compassionate head, and to know how to support staff, who were both paid and unpaid, in stressful working conditions. 

Working hard to understand people in order to support them, and encourage their success, led me to study more about the human mind, (and a lot about bodies too!). I trained and qualified as a psychotherapist, and I studied mindfulness/ meditation and became a registered teacher. All this gave me new insights, which I still treasure, into the behaviours and brain processes that govern the way we think, feel, cope with life, and interact with others. Of course, in doing this I also learned more about myself too, finding out how to manage myself better and coming to new understandings about why I had either succeeded or failed in the past, at work and away from work.

Through learning, over those years, often from my own mistakes and shortcomings, and from the many wonderful people I worked alongside and shared successes with, and subsequently through seeing many people as clients in therapy, I came out with a very strong sense of what really makes things work. Simply this:

 

It is using kindness as the driving force in all you do.

 

This sense of the importance of kindness, not just as a nice little touch if you’ve got time, but as a powerful force, a currency for living life, inspired me to set up Pure Turtle. I wanted to see if we could make a success of a contemporary business with kindness at its core.

 

I would love it if you also felt inspired and motivated by the idea of taking the single value of kindness and using it as a rudder on your voyage through life. Please feel free to connect with Pure Turtle in any way that serves you - even if just to say Hi. Or we’d be very happy to connect with you on social media (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter) You’ll find more about our thinking around kindness further down the page.