About Jess
I lost my zest before I lost my marriage
I am Jess Drayton. I founded The Zest Life in Wellington after separating while raising two small children and holding a career together.
In brief
Jess Drayton is the founder of The Zest Life, which supports mothers through separation and helps them get their zest back. She built it after her own separation, while raising two small children and working full time.
She has personal lived experience of separation, alongside a background in programme leadership and guiding people through change, and training as a yoga teacher. She is based in Wellington, New Zealand and works online with women anywhere. She is a coach, not a counsellor or a lawyer.
How this began
A few years ago I was living what we call the white picket fence life. I thought I was happily married. Working full time, two small children, the house, the career. From the outside it looked like I had it all.
Then my marriage came to an end.
What I learned, and now teach
What I remember about the months that followed is how quietly it all came apart while life carried on around me. School runs. Workdays. Turning up and being the reliable one. Competent everywhere. Present nowhere.
What I found hardest was how scattered the support was. Emotional help sat in one place. Practical and financial information sat somewhere else. Parenting guidance often felt written for a household that no longer existed. I spent an enormous amount of energy piecing it together at exactly the point I had the least energy to spare.
So I built what I could not find.
I kept performing well through all of it. I was very good at managing. It cost me a great deal, and I would not recommend it.
The other thing I learned is that the fog is not a character flaw. Your body reads separation as a threat and responds the way it was built to respond. That is why you cannot think straight, and why decisions feel impossible. Once you understand that, the first job stops being the paperwork. The first job is bringing your body back to something like safe.
And zest is not a feeling that arrives all at once. It is built through small actions, every single day. You do not wait until you feel better to act. You act first, and the feeling follows.
We do not choose our hardest experiences. We do choose the narrative we attach to them, how they shape us, and what comes next.
How I work
Slowly, and in order. I do not push you towards a decision and I do not treat urgency as a virtue. Most of the pressure in separation is manufactured, and very little of it survives being written down and sorted.
I have personal lived experience of separation. That is the part that matters most to the women I speak to, because I am not describing something I have read about.
Alongside that, my working life has been programme leadership and change management, which is really the work of helping people move through something disruptive without losing themselves in it. This is the same muscle, applied to something far more personal.
And I am a trained yoga teacher, which is where the breath and body work comes from. Regulating your nervous system is not decoration. It is the reason the practical side becomes possible at all.
Together, that is why this work is structured and practical as well as gentle.
What I am not
I am not a counsellor and I am not a lawyer. I do not treat mental health conditions and I do not advise on your legal position.
What I do is help you understand the landscape, prepare for the conversations, steady yourself enough to have them, and work out what you actually want next.
If you need clinical care, I will say so. If you need a family lawyer, I will say that too.
Speaking and writing
Through 2026 I have been speaking at events about losing your sense of self and finding it again. About what actually helps when a life comes apart quietly while you keep turning up, and about why small actions matter more than big plans when you are in the middle of it.
There is a second conversation I would like to have more often. Separation gets treated as a set of separate problems. A lawyer for the legal part, an adviser for the money, a counsellor for the feelings, and a parenting course somewhere else again. Very little is built to hold the whole of it at once.
The woman in the middle is the one carrying the join between all of them, usually at the point she has the least capacity to do it. That gap is what The Zest Life exists to close. If it is a conversation you are having at your event, I would like to be in it.
Contact me for speaking events at jess@thezestlife.co.nz.
Contact
- jess@thezestlife.co.nz
- Book a call
- Free 25 minute conversation
- Based in
- Wellington, New Zealand
- Working with
- Women in New Zealand, Australia and further afield. Everything is online, by phone or video.
- Business
- The Zest Life Co Limited, trading as The Zest Life
I answer emails myself. If it takes a day or two, that is why.
Find me elsewhere
Substack is where the longer writing lives.
Start with a conversation
Twenty five minutes, free, phone or video. Tell me where you are and I will listen. Then I will be honest about what might help.
Not ready for that today? The free self-check takes about ten minutes and tells you which part of this is loudest right now.