Two amazing women: my student and her favourite thriller writer

This can't wait until Monday: I need to say 'thank you' now.

I feel very lucky to have spent Tuesday evening in the company of these two amazing women at Waterstones, Piccadilly:

The one on the left is Amerie. She’s fourteen, and I’ve been her LAMDA communication and performance coach for getting on for a decade.

The difference between coaching and teaching – and why discovering the vocabulary of coaching gave me language for where I wanted my career to go (along with language for the best kind of teaching I’d experienced or given) – is it isn’t going in only one direction. It’s not one person imparting knowledge or wisdom, one person receiving. You’re in a thinking partnership: bringing out what’s already there, the coach a sympathetic provocateur to the thoughts and feelings that make that client who they are. That’s how we bring our words out in their best form, their truest self, whether that’s business and personal life transformations or, in the case of Amerie’s LAMDA Exams, speechwriting and public speaking. Whoever the client and whatever the situation, the end product is an authentic, unique voice. My job is to encourage that voice through celebration of the interests and values that are already there.

That’s how I discovered the second amazing woman in this picture: through Amerie’s growing confidence to share with me her interests and values so we’d discover together the writing and speaking she really wanted to do, and that’s why last night I met her favourite thriller writer.

I read Daisy Darker on Amerie’s recommendation and Amerie’s aunt: the fourteen- and the forty-year-old had read the same novel at the same time, texting each other back and forward as they progressed. I was still surprised (really I had no reason to be) when I DID NOT SEE THAT TWIST COMING AT ALL, as hadn’t either of them. I can still feel the chill sliding up my spine as I realised what had been so softly in front of me the whole time. I won’t tell you what it is. I’ll tell you about Tuesday night at Waterstones.

Alice Feeney, the other amazing woman in this picture, gave what is categorically the most generous author event I’ve ever seen. I was so glad to be sitting beside my teenage public speaking student for this brilliant example of what an audience relationship - and, actually, what adulthood - can look like, when we are true to ourselves. Alice talked about how life was before she got the agent that changed everything, and how ‘I know you can do better’ from an agent who didn’t take her (at the same agency where she ended up) was what changed in her, so that everything else could follow. The darker side that had always been there stopped being denied and started being explored and celebrated.

When we stop defending ourselves against not the audience but our fear of them, and start reaching out knowing what we have is what they’re here for and how much richer all our lives are though connection, something exquisite happens. It happened tonight. I came away deeply aware that the ten years Aice Feeney’s had that led to her being the event in the bookshop she remembers ‘visiting and wishing’, wasn’t something she ever knew was coming. It came through writing her way into her own voice. The closer she got to herself, the closer she got to her audience, to us.

I cannot begin to do justice to the generosity, clarity and authentic joy of how Alice talked to us about her writing and writing life, and how they have become what they are now in the week of her event at Waterstones Piccadilly with us (when she said it was like an evening with friends, I absolutely felt it) and the night before in a joint event her own favourite thriller writer, Lisa Jewell. It was wonderful to hear a writer who works all day and a lot of the night remind us that’s not what it has to look like: many of us are daytime or night-time people (I’m a daytime person, though I do second the importance she puts on kitkats or, as I have it, Emergency Work Chocolate). Every writer, she made very clear, needs to find their own way. That’s how you get to ‘eye-leaking’ happiness in doing the thing you love. Your way will not be someone else’s way. You need to listen to your voice not just to write but to make your life look how it needs to for you.

Above all, I’m happy Amerie got to see such a genuine audience relationship, bringing your truth to your people and connecting through it. How coaching, writing and speaking enrich all our lives and connect across ages and decades. Just as interviewer Louise Minchin and Alice used to pass each other in the BBC with no idea they’d be where we all were last night, so we can absolutely trust a future we cannot see is possible. It was a privilege to see such genuine unapologetic gratitude and celebration. This kind of writing life is possible. This kind of audience relationship is possible. Ten years can change everything, if the actions you fill the days with are ones that move you closer towards your voice. We need to practise living each day in that belief, because our actions are what make it true.

Thank you to a third amazing woman who truly made this happen: Catherine, Amerie’s mum. Here’s to many more adventures.

For more about LAMDA communication and performance coaching, visit www.rachelknightley.com