About

Hello, I'm Vivian

Coach, mother, expat and someone who has started again more than once.

Vivian d'Espagnac, founder of The Unfold Space

My story

I spent 25 years in financial services, in the UK and Singapore. It was a career built on listening carefully, earning trust and helping people make difficult decisions about the things that matter most to them. That, it turns out, is also a fair description of coaching.

But my real education came from life itself. I have lived in 4 countries across Asia and Europe, raised two sons along the way, and learnt many times over what it means to adjust to life as an expat: new cultures, new rules, and a new version of yourself in each place. That journey gave me a deep sensitivity to how differently love, family and duty are understood across cultures. It also brought me through a long international divorce that dismantled the future I had planned. I know how disorienting it is to become someone new when you never asked to. I also know, having come through it, that what you build afterwards can be stronger than what was there before.

The study that changed everything

Some years ago I came across the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest scientific study of happiness ever conducted. For more than 85 years, researchers followed hundreds of lives from youth to old age, expecting to find that happiness came from wealth, fame or achievement. It did not. The study's conclusion is beautifully simple: good relationships, more than anything else, are what keep us happy and healthy. Not how many we have, but how warm and real they are.

That finding put words to everything my own life had taught me, and it is the reason The Unfold Space exists. If relationships are the foundation of a good life, then learning to build them, repair them and sometimes recover from them is the most important work any of us will ever do. My role is to walk beside you through that work, in a calm and private space free of judgement, so you can find your own way to happiness and a life that feels genuinely fulfilling.

Watch the TED talk

Training & background

Coaching at The Unfold Space focuses on your future and is not a clinical service. As my psychology training completes, the practice will grow with it. That is the "unfold" in the name.

"The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in."

Morrie Schwartz · Tuesdays with Morrie

Shall we talk?

15 minutes, free, no obligations, just a conversation about where you are and whether I can help.

Book your free 15 minutes

or ask Vivian a question on WhatsApp

WhatsApp Vivian