Today we’d like to introduce you to Alison Pothier & Jules Williams
Hi Alison Pothier & , it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Alison Pothier & Jules Williams met in London, England in 2014.
At the time, Alison, an American born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, had been living and working overseas for 20 years. A specialist executive coach to C-Suite, management team and advanced leadership, Alison founded Inside Out Retreats, offering intuitive coaching, workshops, retreats and transformational programs in personal growth and spiritual development.
Previously a C-Suite investment banker, Alison transferred from Wall Street to London at 23 years old. By 30, she was the Global Head of eTrading for JPMorgan Futures & Options, leading the organization through an industry-wide shift from open-outcry pit to screen-based trading. A young, high-flier, she was a rare female leader in a male-dominated industry. She married a colleague named Jules in a castle in Scotland and soon fell pregnant. To the outside observer, she was deemed a success and her life seemed a fairytale full of dreams come true, but within herself, there was a void – one that no amount of money, title, position or material gain could fill – and the word ‘success’ was questionable at best.
Alison knew she had been dancing out of step with herself.
Recruited into investment banking straight out of Boston College, Alison was a humanitarian at heart born with a sense of purpose, a hunger to serve and a desire to make a meaningful impact on her world. So, when that world came crashing down, it was an invitation to forge a path back to her true authentic self.
On her wedding night, Alison had gone to bed in tears telling her sisters, “He’s going to hurt me”. Imagining she just had cold feet, she shrugged it off and fell asleep, but was awakened in the night by a booming voice in her castle chamber saying, “Yes he is, AND you’ll be alright”. Sat straight up, she searched to find the voice speaking to her, but peace poured through her body until only the word ‘and’ remained. So, she married that day, trusting everything would ‘be alright’. Years later, the news of her husband’s ongoing affair with an office assistant paralleled the news of her failed pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage as well as the news that the lump in her breast had just tested irregular. When the dark night enveloped her, Alison felt forewarned but ill-equipped for what was about to become The Great Reset in her foundation as well as her life trajectory.
By day, Alison continued to excel in her work, sporting a brave face and a sudden loss of weight that attracted compliments more than scrutiny. By night, alone in her home against the backdrop of her very public divorce and a corporate landscape of opportunists positioning for her role, Alison was navigating a very different world. Guided by dreams that really were coming true and first-hand encounters with spirit, she was being shown a different path forward, one that aligned to a deeper purpose that she was promised would one-day make sense of all she was about to endure. Documenting everything in hundreds of journals, the collision between her human and spiritual realities launched a profound and inspired journey of the human-spirit that reconnects them.
Recruited into UBS in 2005, Alison became a Managing Director & Chief Operating Officer for UBS Futures & Options, culminating in the strategic acquisition and integration of the ABN Amro Futures & Options Business. The day she joined UBS, Alison launched Inside Out Retreats, her center for personal transformation and spiritual self-development helping others navigate their journey back to their authentic self and its actualization. Already a visionary strategist and business leader, Alison launched her professional coaching practice in parallel to her corporate career while honing her skills as a natural intuitive and energy practitioner. She studied with shaman and spiritual teachers around the world.
Dreams guided her eventual exit from investment banking in early 2008, telling her “the [fruit] market she was standing in was going to collapse as a result of someone pulling a piece of fruit out of the bottom of a pyramid” and it was now time to “get out of the frying pan and into a fire set to burn off all her skin and bones, but return her to the essence of the true soul she is.” Not your average dreams, she had learned to listen to them, leaving the industry behind to step full time into her business. When the market was brought to its knees in mid-2008, Alison was already on hers, folding towels at her wellness center and beginning her new life as a full-time intuitively guided coach, trainer in intuition and energy practitioner.
Today, Alison combines her skills as a seasoned industry executive together with her profoundly guided intuitive insight. She is a specialist coach to C-Suite and senior executives as well as private individuals going through periods of transformational change. Alison offers 1-1 sessions as well as workshops, retreats and events dedicated to the development of intuition, emotional freedom, energetic congruence, creative expression and aspirational alignment in life and leadership.
In 2011, Alison was featured alongside world-renowned changemakers in the movie, ChoicePoint while she began to outline her inspirational story for her upcoming novel series.
It was through Inside Out Retreats and the guidance of her dreams that Alison met her real Jules in 2014.
Jules, an avid Welshman, grew up in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire. Acutely psychic from childhood, he had an uncanny ability to gauge people and situations with transparent clarity and understanding. With no family history or frame of reference for his intuitive sensitivity, he soon realized his gifts made some adults around him ‘uncomfortable’. Deeming it safer to suppress his connection with spirit, he deferred his strengths to sports and physical world endeavors as he grew older.
Gaining a four-year honors degree, Jules qualified as a teacher specializing in physical education, but travel abroad reconnected him to his intuition and returned him home to himself. Launching a personal training studio on his return, he began in parallel to rekindle his natural abilities through deep personal exploration and an intensive study of the soul, spirit and the role of the subconscious in healing.
While training his clients, Jules began to see and understand the source of their inner wounds and the stories holding them back from achieving their goals. Sharing his insights with that same transparent clarity and understanding he had as a child, this time his gifts were met with embrace as he helped his clients transcend personal limitations. Stepping onto his life-long path, Jules began to coach clients and facilitate group processes through workshops and retreats, applying his intuitive gifts to help others understand and heal themselves. Able to get to the marrow of someone’s emotional backstory, he created visualizations and programs to help clients access their subconscious to be able to identify, understand and reconcile core emotional blocks and the stories sourcing the repetitive negative patterns in their lives. Whether anchored in a past event in their life, ancestral patterning or a cellular memory from a past carnation, Jules began to guide others to heal and reframe cellular scripts. He published his first book, The Weigh Forward, to apply this process to those struggling with weight, shape and body issues.
In 2004, Jules was asked to be one of the founder psychics on Sky Television’s new Psychic TV channel. After five years in front of the camera, Jules was so conditioned to piecing together people’s stories he decided to get behind the camera and help others tell their stories. Launching a production company, Jules became a documentary filmmaker. Among his many projects, he wrote, directed and produced 35 episodes of Sky Arts flagship program, Living the Life, guiding two well-known personalities through a deeper conversation. Leveraging his intuitive capabilities to draw out the inner story, Jules began connecting everything he does back to one common thread – helping people tell better stories … with their lives.
As an adult, Jules confided in his close friends that he was going to marry an American woman who worked with people in the same way he did. He had been living and working in London for 10 years and by 2014, had given up on the idea of ever meeting the American woman he already knew in his soul. Walking down a hidden cobblestone lane in Richmond-Upon-Thames, he stumbled into Inside Out Retreats on Christmas eve, drawn in by a picture on the wall of the intuitive coach who owned the space, Alison.
Alison was in the USA that day, preparing to move back after 20 years abroad. She’d been having dreams telling her that spirit was sending her someone on Christmas and that she would need to return to the UK to reconcile with ‘Jules’ after all these years. The story of that reconnection is a book, but suffice to say, Alison would soon meet the Jules that would finally make things ‘alright’.
Jules and Alison married in 2015. Now living in Malibu, California, they work together serving people around the globe with their many gifts of intuition, coaching, healing and storytelling. Both natural as well as trained intuitives and energy practitioners, they are coaches, trainers in personal and spiritual development and facilitators of workshops and retreats. They serve an executive as well as a private client base, offering traditional and alternative approaches to honing better beliefs, telling better stories, deriving better outcomes and realizing evolutionary change … by working from the inside out.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
In a world built on distraction, polarization and narratives of disconnection – with self, others and nature – the greatest challenge has been to bring to the table people who understand the importance of deep soul-level reconnection. In these times where the ‘artificial I’ is threatening to replace the need for the ‘actual I’, for those valuing authentic connection, expression, meaning and purpose, self-actualization is the most significant investment one can make.
Jules and Alison thrive on the challenge of working that muscle within themselves daily as the consciousness in the world continues to shift and change. Valuing all that is real in this world, their passion remains supporting others on the path to remember and reconnect with their authentic selves.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Owners, Inside Out Retreats LLC
Intuitively Guided Executive & Personal Transformation Coaching
Actualized Leadership Development Programs
Intuition Training & Spiritual Development Workshops & Retreats
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
A husband and wife team, Jules and Alison offer individual sessions as well as tailored workshops, events and retreats. They are also available as speakers, hosts, facilitators and storytellers, through film, writing or podcast. Open to collaboration, they work with others in complement to their programs. Please feel free to reach out and discuss any opportunities to support you in transforming your self, your leadership or your business through these evolutionary times.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.insideoutretreats.com
- Instagram: https://www.juleswilliams.com
- Facebook: https://www.alisonpothier.com
