if you asked Sharon Tomkins to describe coaching in one word, she would have to choose hopeful. When she talks about coaching, she doesn’t begin with techniques or leadership frameworks. She talks about people finding the courage to take one small step forward. For her, coaching offers something fundamentally – hope and promise for the future.
“Even if they’re very little baby steps…” she says.
It’s a perspective that has been shaped over decades. Before coaching became Sharon’s vocation, it was something God had quietly been preparing her for through ministry, leadership and a lifetime of walking alongside people.
An early experience of faith
Sharon’s first experience of church was a confusing encounter with hymnbooks, prayer books and not being quite sure what she was meant to do with any of them. “I used to walk to the local Anglican church on my own,” Sharon explains. Her parents saw church as a simple way to arrange childcare while they enjoyed some Sunday morning peace. The Sunday School had two classes–one for kids whose parents went to church and a group Sharon describes as ‘the outcast group.’
From this shaky beginning being exposed to Bible stories and hymnbooks, Sharon’s faith grew and developed through her experiences in a youth group and then Girls’ Brigade. She reached the point where she knew and loved Jesus for herself.
Girls’ Brigade became far more than a youth program for Sharon. It was in the safety of this youth program that she first experienced the joy of being mentored and mentoring other young women. That season of ministry laid the groundwork in preparing Sharon for her future ministries. In time, Sharon and her husband helped plant and pastor a church, where years of caring for people through discipleship, mental health challenges and pastoral ministry quietly equipped her for a different kind of leadership.
A Call to Coaching
After spending ten years pastoring, Sharon and her husband sensed God calling them to New Zealand. Like many families starting again in a new country, there were practical decisions to make. They needed work, they were raising three children, and Sharon found herself asking a deeper question: “How do I use everything God has taught me?”
“I felt like God directed me towards coaching,” she says.
Over the course of her ministries Sharon had a passion for understanding and supporting people, it was this desire that helped Sharon see that coaching would be a great fit because it’s all about releasing people’s potential. Sharon describes it as being able to have conversations that help people to move forward and not stay stuck.
Working to help grow and nurture others was incredibly rewarding and was the catalyst that led Sharon to train to be a health coach, building on her previous work in exercise science. Yet, as she delved deeper into her training, a quiet conviction began to stir: could health coaching be more than just the physical? She began to dream of a more holistic approach that would serve to reach beyond the body and concurrently nurture the mental and emotional landscapes of those she served.
That question eventually led her to help develop New Zealand’s first health coaching course alongside a cardiologist from Perth, laying foundations that continue to shape health coaching today.
Looking back, Sharon can see how God had been preparing her long before she knew where He was leading. Years spent in pastoral ministry had taught her how to walk with people through life’s hardest moments. Her training in mental health and exercise science gave her another way of caring for people. At the time, they felt like separate chapters. Later, God would weave them together.
That moment was ultimately what connected her to Arrow.
Coaching centred on Jesus
“I was looking for a coach,” Sharon explains, “I needed a Christian coach and I wanted somebody who doesn’t just coach me but really challenges me if my work aligns with what God wants for me.”
By this point, Sharon had spent years coaching in both Christian and secular settings. Coaching itself hadn’t changed, but something still felt incomplete. She longed for a place where Jesus wasn’t simply acknowledged, but welcomed into the conversation.
That search eventually led her to Arrow. She was looking for a coach herself. But as she experienced coaching through Arrow, she realised she’d found a place where coaching excellence and Christian discipleship weren’t competing priorities. Coaches could openly talk about Jesus, pray with those they coached, and hold people not simply in positive regard, but as people created and deeply loved by God.
“Our Christian worldview, our Christian beliefs, our way of being is honoured in that space,” she says. “We can talk about Jesus. It’s not that the coach is doing anything magical. It’s that God’s already done the work for you. The coach is just asking the question so that you find it.”
Before long, Sharon began serving Arrow in a contract role, delivering coaching and supervision. She loved contributing to the organisation but never imagined herself in a permanent leadership position. When the Leadership Development Manager role became available, she assumed Arrow would need someone based in Australia. Living in New Zealand, she quietly ruled herself out.
Instead, she found herself praying for the right person.
“I was praying, ‘Lord, they need someone with these qualities… someone committed to excellence, someone who loves coaching, someone who loves Jesus.'”
Then Arrow’s CEO, Kylie, asked Sharon a simple question: Had she not applied because she lived in New Zealand?
The conversation surprised her. Kylie invited Sharon not to submit an application immediately, but to pray and discern whether God might be calling her into the role.
As Sharon prayed, something slowly became clear. The qualities she had been asking God to provide in someone else were the very experiences God had been cultivating in her over decades of ministry, coaching and leadership.
Looking back now, Sharon smiles at the irony. “I was praying for the right person,” she reflects, “and not thinking about myself at all.”
Today, as Leadership Development Manager, Sharon helps shape Arrow’s coaching initiatives, including Coach Mastery and Leadership Labs, equipping Christian leaders to coach with confidence, integrity and a distinctly Christ-centred approach. For Sharon, it doesn’t feel like a career move so much as the continuation of a journey God began many years earlier–giving her the opportunity to combine her secular coaching experience in a Christian environment.
Coaching as forward momentum
At its core, Sharon believes coaching is a natural stepping stone for leaders to be led by Jesus, lead like Jesus and lead to Jesus. Sharon continues to be passionate about coaching for everyone, not just executives or ministry professionals alone.
Sharon hopes Coach Mastery will equip a new generation of leaders to ask better questions, create healthier conversations and lead with greater wisdom and humility. She would love to see coaching become a natural part of Christian leadership–not because leaders need all the answers, but because they know how to help others discover them.
“Any investment that you make in yourself, it is great for you, but it’s probably better for everybody else in your world around you.”
Coaching with a spiritual focus has helped Sharon keep Jesus at the centre of all of her life and work, and she believes it can do the same for others. “Coaching is one of the ways you can help to lead more like Jesus really,” she says.
When Sharon reflects on the little girl who walked alone to Sunday School, unsure which hymn book to hold or where she belonged, she can now see God’s faithfulness through every chapter that follows.
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