Who am I?
My name is Ife. I thought it would be helpful to give you the phonetic spelling, but that didn’t change much… are you ready? Here we go: [ife]
I was born in 1987, graduated in 2009 as a social worker in Gent followed by one year of statistics and HRM at the university of Leuven, married my true love in 2010 and became a proud mom to two supercalifragilisticexpialidocious kids.
The first 7 years of my career, I worked in HR: recruitment and selection, training and evaluation, payroll and loads of administration filled my days more than you could know. But whenever I saw a chance, I fled my desk and ran into production. The personal contacts with the supervisors, check-in with the new starters, catching a glimpse of the production process… it filled me with energy.
The superficial and hectic HR-world left me unsatisfied and I longed to make at least a little contribution to a better world. I was grateful when I got an opportunity at a Social Assistance Organisation. This completely changed my life. For the first time in my career everything made sense. I was born to do this.
I felt enormously privileged every time a client let me into their world. Day after day, I got to experience the struggles that haunted their daily life and I was grateful that I could, at least a little bit, support them in their fights. This left me with an admiration and deep respect for everybody with a disability. Following my desire to empower my clients, coaching-ife was born.