Where understanding yourself becomes something you can live.
Empower Life Academy is for women who want to know themselves better and use what they’re learning to make a difference in their everyday lives.
We bring together thoughtful ideas, practical tools, conversations and experiences that help you notice what’s happening within you, try something different and keep learning as you go.
Because understanding ourselves matters. But eventually, we have to live what we know.
Life can make a lot more sense once you understand yourself. But then you have to live it.
There is more information available to us than ever about why we do the things we do. We can learn about our patterns, attachment, boundaries, emotions, relationships and the ways our past continues to affect us.
And that understanding can be incredibly useful.
But there is a point where you have to close the book, finish the podcast or leave the therapy session and go back to your actual life.
The conversation you need to have is still waiting. Your body still reacts. The familiar pattern still turns up. You still have to decide what to do next.
Empower Life Academy is interested in that part.
We create practical ways for women to understand themselves and, importantly, practise what they’re learning in the middle of ordinary life.
Not perfectly. Not all at once. Just with a little more awareness and choice than we had before.
Empower Life Academy is a learning and practice space for women.
Through journals, workshops, conversations and practical tools, we explore the parts of ourselves that affect how we live and relate to the people around us.
That starts with Self, but it doesn’t end there.
How we are doing affects our families. It comes into our relationships. It follows us into work and into the way we handle money. It shapes what we give to and receive from our communities.
So our work stretches across four areas:
We don’t expect one woman to arrive needing everything.
You might come here because you’ve realised you’ve lost touch with yourself. You may be trying to change something in your family. Perhaps you keep meeting the same pattern in relationships. Or you might simply know that something in your life needs to be different, even if you can’t quite name it yet.
One of the things we’ve become wary of is turning personal growth into another thing women have to be good at.
You don’t get extra marks for knowing all the terminology. And noticing an old pattern doesn’t mean you’ll never do it again.
We’d rather get curious about what’s happening and give ourselves somewhere to practise.
That’s also why we don’t look only at our thoughts. Our Inner Map looks at five parts of our experience:
What am I thinking?
What am I feeling?
What’s happening in my body?
What needs saying or doing?
Who do I have around me?
They’re simple questions, but we’ve found they can take us somewhere useful.
Instead of beginning with How do I get rid of this part of me?, we can get curious about why it’s there. That changes the conversation.
The questions behind this work go back much further.
Our founder, Nicole Telfer, first started exploring them when her two boys were toddlers.
One day Nicole put one of her sons in the naughty corner. It was what parents were being encouraged to do at the time, but watching the light dim in his eyes made her stop.
She knew she didn’t want to parent that way. She didn’t yet know what to do instead. So she went looking.
Nicole began reading research and books about child development, attachment, parenting and relationships. When the books left her with questions, she started contacting the people who had written them.
They all said yes.
That became EmpoweredKidsTV.
Over the years, Nicole held conversations with leading researchers, authors, psychologists and practitioners, including Gabor Maté, Dan Siegel, Gordon Neufeld, Dr Shefali Tsabary, Diane Poole Heller, Rick Hanson, Kristin Neff, Dr Laura Markham and Byron Katie.
There was always another question to explore. And eventually, those questions became much more personal.
From the EmpoweredKids archive
How to Reduce Conflict and Gain Cooperation with Your Kids
Nicole’s note on this conversation goes here — what drew her to the work, what she was trying to understand, what surprised her.
Watch the conversation →
Self Compassion: Its Impact on Self Love and Resilience
Nicole’s note on this conversation goes here — what drew her to the work, what she was trying to understand, what surprised her.
Watch the conversation →
Keys to Build an Unstoppable Family
Nicole’s note on this conversation goes here — what drew her to the work, what she was trying to understand, what surprised her.
Watch the conversation →Nicole’s relationship of 23 years ended, and the things she’d spent years exploring through parenting and relationships began showing up differently in her own life.
She had been very good at coping. Less good at noticing how far away from herself she’d become.
So the reading and questioning continued, this time alongside therapy and her own inner work.
There was plenty she could understand intellectually. Changing it was another matter.
She could recognise a pattern and still repeat it. Know what she needed and struggle to act on it.
And that gradually changed the question underneath the work.
It wasn’t only: Why do we do what we do? It became: What helps us do something different once we know?
That question sits at the heart of Empower Life Academy today.
Nicole is a Global Operations Director, leading large international teams in customer experience.
Alongside her corporate career, she has spent years writing, interviewing, speaking and exploring the questions that eventually became Empower Life Academy.
She is the author of The Secrets of Connected Families and delivers wellbeing keynotes for companies and organisations, including Willis Towers Watson and The Investment Association.
Through ELA, Nicole also delivers Return to You workshops for groups and organisations such as Lipton Teas.
Nicole doesn’t position herself as the expert with all the answers. She goes looking for good work and people worth learning from. She asks the questions that come up when you try to put that learning into practice. And then she looks for ways to make what she’s learning useful in everyday life.
It’s the same approach that started with two little boys all those years ago.
We’re still building.
Today you can work with us through our journals, workshops, The Inner Map and the conversations and writing we share.
But the bigger idea is the Village.
We want Empower Life Academy to become somewhere women can come to learn, practise, talk honestly about what happens when they try, and find other people doing the same.
A place where experts have something valuable to contribute without being expected to have every answer. Where lived experience matters too. Where we can get something wrong, come back and try again.
And however much we learn about ourselves along the way, we don’t believe we’re meant to do all of it alone.
