Performance Coach
Word Spin

Nicola H

0.00.00 “To actually hear classical glade, that’s me right there, so if he’s working ray, loving that party life, clean fitted clothes, which our dress come red and silver, for like the river hypnotic we now deliver smooth”. My name is Nicola H or for another word, Nicky Blaze, which is my stage name. I’m a performance coach and I live in Liverpool. A performance coach is somebody who teaches other people how to gain confidence in performing.

0.00.30 I work for myself. I run my own company called Word Spin. The work that I do is a lot of spoken words. I tend to write about just real life situations or stories of my own I’ve been through or scenarios that could really make a difference. I enjoyed school. Well I did and I didn’t. There were times I would tend to drift into my own world because I wanted to get out of school and dance,

0.01.00 cos I was a dancer when I was really young, from the age of 3 to the age of 11, and I did ballet, I did tap, I did jazz and modern. I left school at the age of 15 because I became a young mother at the age of 16. I didn’t leave with any education. I then decided after having a child at the age of 16 that I still wanted a career. At the time, being a young mother was very difficult. I don’t regret it but obviously if I could make a choice to do things differently I would have done things differently.

0.01.30 It was difficult not having a partner who should have been there and not doing the things he was doing. But you know you have to just move on and do what’s best for you and that’s what I did. My parents, my mother, she’s works in the youth service at the moment but she used to be an art teacher. And my father, he works for himself and he’s like a building constructor.

0.02.00 My mother said she’d prefer me to go on to further education but my father, he was more the kind of person that just encouraged me to just earn a living and do what’s best for me really, as long as I’m doing the right thing. So they just encouraged me to, you know, make the most of my life really in a good way. This photograph is a, it’s very important to me because it’s in a place called Pole which is in South France and it was the first international exchange I went on when I was 17.

0.02.30 And that was the time I decided this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. I was asked to go there to perform, interact with different deejays, graffiti artists, dancers. We spent ten days performing, travelling round France and learning each other’s language. A friend of mine that was a next door neighbour came to me and I think he’d seen me performing live somewhere and said I think you should come down to the Princes Trust and become a member.

0.03.00 So I went to the Princess Trust, I signed up for a community grant. I rounded up 15 young people and took them Germany for ten days where they met all the musicians, they got to record, they got to be a part of another programme over there and it really, a lot of the international work started from there.

0.03.30 When I’m not working I tend to just be creative, obviously spend time with my children. To be totally honest with you, when I’m not working I tend to still work. In five years time I’d like to see myself doing the same but maybe just the projects growing on a bigger scale. I feel the work that I do definitely helps young people. I feel it helps young people because they come and tell me.

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