A life coach and hypnotherapy specialist has set up her own business to help people achieve their goals.

With the dawn of the New Year, Pam Brown, a training specialist at Orange, hopes her business New Leaf will attract clients wanting to keep their New Year's resolutions.

Mrs Brown, who is a qualified neuro-linguistic programming practitioner, which means she can often detect people's opinions and emotions from their body language and speech, said her business was "life coaching with bells on".

She is also trained in hypno-psychotherapy, a combination of hypnotherapy and psychotherapy, which can help people with phobias and anxieties. But Mrs Brown, a registered member of the National Hypno-psychotherapy Council, offers simple life coaching, sometimes enhanced with hypnosis.

She has more than 20 years of experience of life coaching and development, and she has designed her business to guide clients through difficult life changes, career progressment, losing weight or stopping smoking.

Mrs Brown has worked as a trainer at Orange, in Darlington, for the past six years, and ran her own consultancy for seven years before that.

As part of her business, she will be running weekend retreat courses for individuals and companies who have expressed interest in sponsoring employees who they feel could benefit from her self-development techniques.

Mrs Brown said: "The main aim of New Leaf is to help people make those decisions which will undoubtedly benefit them in the long-run but seem too hard to facilitate right now.

"Through the many years I have trained and coached others, it has been extremely rewarding to help a number of people struggling to make all kinds of decisions. Many of us never achieve our goals, often lacking the motivation or even confidence to do so.

"I advertise myself as a hypnotherapist and psychotherapist but I am also trying to promote my self-development work, and these weekends which focus on people who want to make developments in their lives."

Any businesses or individuals interested in the self-development weekends, which are planned for this month, February and March, can contact Mrs Brown on 07966 189927.