For 10 years Clare McGregor worked as an executive life coach to chief executives, charity bosses and senior police officers. It was rewarding work. But five years ago, McGregor made a turnaround in her own life, and decided to focus part of her time on working with prisoners at Styal women’s prison.
“Most of the professionals I had worked with were already brilliant,” she says. “Meanwhile, many people near rock bottom lack belief in their power to change anything at all. So it dawned on me that those people – who are never normally offered coaching – are among those who would benefit most from it.”
Styal, in Cheshire, was her nearest prison. She called the governor. “When can you start?” was his response.
She soon found that in spite of the obvious lifestyle differences between the two groups of students, there were surprising similarities. “Successful people are often good at hiding their lack of self-esteem,” she says. “You would be amazed at the number of people at the top of their profession who have real self-doubt. And sometimes clients in prison can seem extremely confident, but that can be a mask – just like people in the boardroom.
“The biggest difference was that, unlike in the prison, I met very few professionals who had given up on life.”
It was anger, she says, that motivated her to offer her services. “I was angry at the unfairness of the world. I wanted to do something that would help bring some balance back to people who had lost their way for whatever reason.”
Her techniques are fundamentally the same whoever she is teaching, she explains. “I think most importantly we look at what is holding them back. Helping clients to work out their strengths and values – that’s helping them work out who they are – and then help them work out what they want to change and how to make the changes happen.”
The problems many of the women in Styal face, she argues, are linked to what life has dealt them. “It is harder to make sense of right and wrong when your mother allowed your uncle into your bedroom or your alcoholic father beat anyone within reach.”
According to the most recent Prison Reform Trust factfile [pdf], 53% of the almost 4,000 women in prison in England and Wales report experiencing emotional, physical or sexual abuse as a child, compared with 27% of men, and 46% say they have suffered domestic abuse. In a 2013 Ministry of Justice study almost half were assessed as suffering from anxiety and depression. A third had been permanently excluded from school, and a 2012 MoJ report suggests 47% have no qualifications.
McGregor’s informal prison work developed into a charity, Coaching Inside and Out (Ciao), which was registered in 2013. McGregor says she has often found that coaching can spark a desire for further learning. “It can underpin everything else and motivate people to want to change their lives – and, more importantly, give them the belief that their lives are worth changing and they are worth any benefits that may come of it. If you think you have no hope and you think you have no options in life, then why bother learning?”
She is sure that a lack of education contributes to many of the problems she has seen. “Having no qualifications doesn’t mean someone is not bright. But I would never be enjoying the life and work that I have without the education I experienced.”
After graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in classics, McGregor worked in the voluntary sector as a fundraiser and policy developer before resigning aged 30 and training at Newcastle College as a life coach. She paid herself a basic wage and banked the rest of her earnings. So when public sector spending slowed and her business went quiet, the money she’d made in the prosperous years enabled her to make the decision to offer her services free of charge.
Now she has written a book, Coaching Behind Bars, in which she tells the stories of some of the women she has met in Styal.
One, Rebecca, McGregor’s first client in Styal, had a “shameful” secret that she had hidden from her partner. But after the first coaching session Rebecca wrote to her partner “confessing”. He replied to say he already knew and loved her anyway. “It lifted a great weight off my shoulders,” Rebecca says in the book. “The hiding caused me loads of depression and stress. At first I thought ‘How’s anything going to change?’ But I started to feel better about myself, I don’t know why. If anyone’s going to change anything it’s gotta be me. I’m so glad I started these sessions.”
Weeks later, against expectations, Rebecca was assessed as suitable for home detention curfew, released on a “tag” and was home with her children.
Tess was a long-term prisoner on a life sentence who described her life there as “groundhog day”. After being coached, she took courses in prison and became a source of support for other more vulnerable prisoners. “It’s given me so much confidence, it’s unbelievable,” she says. “I never thought I would say you could feel independent in prison – but from this experience, I do.”
McGregor acknowledges the harm caused to the victims of some of the women she has coached. “There are no excuses for much of what our clients have done,” she says, “but some of the things that have happened to them as well are equally inexcusable.”
She cautions against prejudice about women in prison. “You can see stereotypes if you look for them. Yet all of society is in there too. I have seen pale, ill-looking women come blinking into the sunshine from the depths of the wing, resembling prisoners in Siberian gulags. Others are like the best-dressed Wags or your nextdoor neighbour.”
When I ask McGregor what her most memorable interaction was with a woman in Styal, she looks away for some seconds and then tells me about Alex, who at first looked so full of fight yet was utterly crushed. “I said to her: ‘What do you want from coaching?’ She just looked straight back at me and said ‘hope’. I love the fact that humans are humans wherever they are – in a prison cell or in a boardroom.”
Coaching Behind Bars by Clare McGregor (Open University Press, £16.99). To order a copy for £16.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
