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Profile | Life coach reveals how a near-death experience shipwrecked at sea gave her the courage to change course

Carolyn Lee, a British-born mother-of-three, was rescued from a crippled yacht in a storm at sea while sailing to Hong Kong. It led her to make a fresh start

Lee tells Kate Whitehead how she realigned her priorities – choosing meaning over money and retraining as a life coach to help people

Reading Time:6 minutes

Life coach and author Carolyn Lee talks about being lost at sea, her dramatic rescue, and how she found a new life in the aftermath. Photo: Carolyn Lee

Published: 1:15pm, 24 Jul 2022

I had a dysfunctional childhood. I was born in Wigan, in Lancashire – northern England – in 1963 and I have a twin brother and a sister who is three years younger. When I was four, we moved to Cheshire, a county not far from Lancashire, and I grew up in Lynn, an upmarket rural community.

My mum was very unstable. She threatened to commit suicide quite a few times and had mental health problems, which were not understood back then. After many years of misery, my parents divorced in my early years of high school. Mum took all the money she was entitled to out of the house and dad went into a lot of debt to pay her off.

He worked for Seagrams, a large Canadian drink company, dealing with wines and spirits, and left for work at 6am and we had to get ourselves to school. We knew we were different from the people we were growing up with because we didn’t have a mum at home and money was tight. Although we lived in beautiful part of Cheshire, the experience was quite miserable.

Family values

When I was 18, I got on a management training scheme with Marks and Spencer, the British retail chain, and that was the start of my working career. When I was 21, I met Raymond (Lee), who was an actuary at Royal Insurance in Liverpool. He was seven years older than me, had two degrees, and was intelligent and interesting – he had a lot going for him. He offered me more.

I wanted to travel and see the world. We got married in June 1986 and Hannah was born the following May. We had a son two years later and another son two years after that. By the time I was 28, I had three children under five.

Carolyn Lee after being rescued while sailing from the Philippines to Hong Kong. She is holding a souvenir T-shirt from Maersk. A tanker from the Danish shipping company saved her, her family and crew. Photo: Carolyn Lee

Raymond’s (Chinese) mum disowned him when she found out he was seeing a Western woman. I didn’t expect her to be so racist, especially after I’d had three kids and two of them were boys.

Shipping out

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