I’m Emma Wyatt, a writer, certified life coach and mind-body practitioner, and the founder of The Second Act Studio.  

I spent decades being other people's person. 

In my twenties, I was an actor. I loved it - the aliveness of it, the sense of being fully myself on stage. Then life did what life does. Motherhood arrived. Sensible decisions were made, I retrained as a teacher and got on with it.

I was good at teaching. But for over twenty years, my creative self waited quietly in the wings.

What I didn't fully realise - until I couldn't ignore it any longer - was the cost of that silence. Without creativity, I became increasingly unfulfilled. Flat. At times genuinely depressed. Something essential was missing and I couldn't name it, only feel its absence.

I tried to fill that absence. A decade ago, I started an improv company - but found myself teaching it rather than doing it. The hunger remained, unsatisfied.

Then lockdown happened. And in the enforced stillness, I realised quite how unhappy and unfulfilled I really was. I quit my secure and well-paid university post to find something more meaningful. I was still clueless - in three years, I went through six different jobs and four different business ventures. Searching, exploring, but nothing fit. 

Until my son left for university. And something unexpected happened. The empty nest didn't just leave a gap - it cracked something open. A need so deep and wide I couldn't not act on it.  The creative life I had quietly set aside came rushing back, insisting on being lived.

I started acting again - small parts on the stage and screen. I returned to film - my first love, the thing I studied at university alongside drama - and began writing screenplays, one of which has been commended at the British Animation Film Festival and selected for two other festivals. The creative life I'd set aside in my twenties turned out to be still there, waiting patiently. 

I trained as a life coach because I needed one. I know what it's like to stand at the edge of your second act feeling simultaneously excited and terrified. To have given your creativity away - to your children, your career, everyone else's needs - and to wonder whether you can find your way back to it. To have a dream that keeps quietly insisting on itself no matter how many times life gets in the way. To wonder, in your forties and beyond, whether it's too late, whether you're good enough, whether anyone will take you seriously.

It isn't too late. You are good enough. And I'm going to help you prove it to yourself. 

The Second Act Studio exists for women 40+ who know there's more. More creativity, more aliveness, more of themselves waiting to be expressed - even if they're scared - to finally put themselves first. 

I'd love to work with you.