MY LIGHT BULB MOMENT
Digital entrepreneur Louise Chunn
Louise Chunn, 61, started therapy platform welldoing.org after more than 30 years as a journalist. she lives in London with her husband and has three children. FROM childhood, all I had ever wanted to do was become a journalist. By my mid-50s I’d won several journalism awards and been editor of five magazines, stretching from Just Seventeen, to Good Housekeeping, to Psychologies.
My time at Psychologies had been different to other magazines I’d worked on. The psychologically based content was new to me, and it seemed to resonate with others.
I wanted to work with what I’d learned there, and do it online, but I didn’t have a clue how. I had realised, though, that after more than 30 years in the corporate world, I wanted to run my own life and have more independence.
Thoughts swam around in my mind for months, but the light bulb moment came suddenly in the middle of the night, when my husband (also a journalist) and I were lying awake at 3am brainstorming what on earth I should do next.
Shortly before this, I had decided to see a therapist. A redundancy from a previous editorship had left me bruised and lacking in confidence. I’d gone from someone with high status who was often asked to give talks, to feeling as if I would never work again.
It was a dark time. I’d gone on to edit Psychologies, but some of my insecurities, about work and being a middle-aged woman, remained unresolved and caused anxiety. Talking to a professional for an hour a week helped greatly.
But finding that therapist had been difficult, with hours spent wading through dozens of profiles on directories and badly designed websites, without knowing which style of therapy was right for me.
I decided there must be a better way to find a therapist. What if I built a directory like a dating site that matched people to the therapist best suited to them? It would also be filled with content from the therapists and those who see them, so that potential clients would have a better idea of what therapy is about. It could give expert wellbeing advice, too.
That’s exactly what I did. It’s been hard, but after five years, welldoing. org has nearly 600 therapists across the UK, and 100,000 page views every month. And the best bit? I know it’s really helping people. There’s nothing better than a client who found their therapist through us saying: ‘You saved my life.’
welldoing.org