For women
finding voice
Somewhere inside you, the story is already there.
I would love to help you find it.
Turn your experience into language,
your language into your story,
and your story into a presence
that is unmistakably yours.
Does this sound familiar?
You’re ready for something bigger, but need a little clarity first.
You’re standing at the edge of a room you’ve always wanted to enter, but you’re hesitating.
You know what you want to say, but it’s hard to put it into words.
This is where we begin.
One to one, we find the story you’re already living, the one that is uniquely yours.
When you can see it clearly, something shifts. And then the fun begins.
The Shift
After working together, women show up differently. They speak up in rooms where they used to stay quiet. They see their own achievements in a new light. They walk into conversations with greater clarity and confidence, and a story about themselves that finally feels true.
How We Work
Story Advisory
Every engagement begins the same way: with deep listening. We take the time to understand the narrative that has been forming across your entire career. The values, the pivotal moments, the philosophy you have lived without yet fully naming.
From there, the work moves outward. We identify the throughline of your leadership story. We build the language that organises your voice across different rooms and different audiences.
The writing and creative work – speeches, frameworks, written pieces – develops in between our calls and is informed by everything we have uncovered together. The coaching calls are where we think. The written work is where that thinking comes to life.
Narrative Coaching
Everyone carries unspoken narratives: assumptions, patterns, and inherited scripts that shape how we show up in the world. Narrative coaching brings those stories to light.
Together, we slow the pace. We listen for what is shifting in your role, your relationships, or your sense of self, and begin to re-author how you move through change.
The women I work with arrive already accomplished. What they are looking for is a thinking partner who will take their story seriously, help them find the language it deserves, and stand beside them as they step into more visible and more consequential rooms.
I am currently taking on a small number of new clients.
Thanks to Mary-Brennan’s support, I rediscovered my long-lost inspiration and confidence. She helped me see my achievements in a completely new light and reminded me of my own worth at every step. Very quickly, new opportunities started to appear. I began speaking up, meeting people, and putting myself out there again — with certainty and purpose.”
About Mary-Brennan
Stories have been an integral part of my life for as long as I can remember. Reading board books at bedtime, watching E.T. for the first time and feeling heartache for an alien puppet, learning how to journal through the strange and mysterious years of middle and high school.
Story really came to life when I studied Creative Writing at University and learned to search deeper for the right words, the right emotions to move a story along. Story carried me to Prague, where I arrived in my early twenties and found, in Kafka, Havel and Hrabal, a particular kind of company.
Story led me into my first career where for twenty-five years I worked alongside CEOs and executives, helping them find the words for what mattered most. It was meaningful work, but eventually, my health asked me to slow down, and in that slowing I found something I had not been looking for.
David Drake’s Narrative Coaching arrived at exactly the right moment, the way the right books always do. It named something I had always felt — that the stories we tell about ourselves are not fixed, that they can be retold to suit who we are becoming.
To sit with someone as a coach and thinking partner, to listen without agenda, to help them find the threads that pull them forward, that is a place I truly love.
And that joy led me somewhere unexpected. Throughout my career I had watched women move through organisations with brilliance and poise, building careers in rooms that were not always designed for them. And I kept wondering: what happens when they are ready for something more? When the question changes from what next to who now?
It was that question that led me to develop Story Advisory, a space where narrative coaching and communications work together, where the inner story and the outer voice are no longer separate things, and where a woman finds both the words that feel true and the confidence to say them out loud in the rooms that matter most.
And somewhere in all of it, I became the writer I had always wanted to be. I long dreamed of writing a book, but never quite dared. It was narrative coaching, the same process of re-authoring I share with clients, that helped me find my way in. My debut novel, Small Heart, Crooked Spine, is complete and I am querying agents. It is, in its own way, the truest thing I have ever written. And proof that the work I invite others into is work I have lived myself.
“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.”
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Let’s Begin.
Every engagement begins with a conversation.
Typical engagements include:
Story Advisory: A blend of coaching and narrative strategy to help you find your voice and prepare for high-stakes events, transitions, or public moments.
Narrative Coaching: Three- to six-month partnerships that explore the stories shaping your leadership, your decisions, and your impact.
Ongoing Partnership: Flexible, long-term support for leaders navigating continuous change, multiple initiatives, or evolving leadership challenges — a space to reflect, refine, and sustain your story over time.
Sessions are conducted online or in person (in Prague).