I’m fascinated by how people learn, develop and transform. From 22-years communications coaching and 16 of them focused on career transition, leadership, influence, presenting, board presence, recruitment and promotions, I know the boxes ticked by assessors, HR, hirers, head-hunters and recruiters. With 31-years training groups, designing learning, and running teacher training and academic development, I have the tools to build capability. How did I get here? Feeling blocked as a grad in Midland Bank (now HSBC) was springboard to a radical journey spanning sectors and continents, instilling intrigue for comms theory and learner pedagogy. My study and career then scaffolded toward helping others. Find out more below.

Of my total 23,500-hour history facing clients and students (training, facilitating, coaching, lecturing and teaching since 1993), about 7,600 of these (since 2002) are with industry professionals, managers and senior leaders, and both executive and non-executive directors.

Along with receiving 550+ hours private- and public-sector CPD in management training, leadership and communication skills, pedagogy and learning methodologies, assessment systems, coaching approaches, and the principles and practice of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and NLP, I also have an undergraduate Commerce degree, a postgraduate degree in Communication Management, and two Trinity College accredited teaching qualifications.

For five years, I led and delivered departmental CPD and a highly-accoladed university teacher training programme, plus delivered CPD at conferences and other organisations and institutions in London, the Netherlands and Czech Republic.

For two decades, alongside my coaching and training enterprise, I supported finance, management, IT, business studies and economics courses in Higher Education, providing academic development training. I received a Duke of Edinburgh award for authoring a text-book, English for Management, in 2009 and wrote its second edition, due in 2024.

I gave up my contributions to Higher Education during the pandemic due to my other training and coaching demands, which require my full focus.

I am hungry to understand people and their development. This drew me into training, coaching, CPD, teaching, teacher training, and assessment for 30 years. Pragmatic, I fix on results.  

I am not a life coach. Nor am I a sector-dedicated business performance coach using work shadowing or mentoring, except as it relates to communication. Neither am I a qualified psychotherapist, despite that I draw strongly on empirically-based psychological studies.

Mine is a communication focus. Through deep dives and moderated effort, I help high-calibre individuals gain executive presence, optimise leadership or career transition, self-promote, become employable, and succeed at interview and other recruitment steps.

I have associate roles as a trainer, training developer, webinar speaker and coach at four London-based consultancies and providers. Almost all my remaining clientele, and most of my volume, are referrals and returners.

My most consistent wins are getting people jobs and promotions, developing leader competencies and gravitas, repositioning personal brands, boosting influence, helping with performance anxiety, and developing speeches and presentations. I love this.

I work beyond the superficial. Never pressing you into a carbon cut-out.

At the outset, I recognise your uniqueness, your natural competencies, perhaps your team-management style such as in the Magerison McCann framework, perhaps your neurodiverse superpower, your learning style and perceptual construct biases (Gregorc, De Bono, Gardner, Drexler Sibbet and others).

In other words, all coaching is entirely bespoke to you. There’s zero life-coach hype, no standard trademarked ‘top tips’, very few magic wands and only the occasional silver bullet.

Three decades in this has given me a deep understanding of how L&D works best: in higher education circles, we talk about ‘developing the learner’ and ‘learner autonomy’, empowering you to take the wheel, the basis of coaching best practice. So, I ignite your ‘metacognition’ (self-awareness on your thinking and development) largely through critical reflection and self-analysis, but also via core principles of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) in working with your belief systems, and its less-empirical but common-sense ‘cousin’ NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) which, despite its critiques, gives us plenty of old-fashioned wisdom.

Every properly credentialed executive coach and performance coach will be intimately aware of the interface between the conscious and subconscious, as explored by Barry Smith and Nicholas Shea. 

But it’s not all about ‘-isms’. No one learns to swim without jumping in water, so roll-your-sleeves-up practice is central to everything. I use principles of competency-based learning with continuous assessment. I use cycles of scaffolding conscious awareness through guided reflection, applying it in role-play if a skill. This is based on the ideas of David Kolb and Lev Zygotsky. Everything is in your career or workplace context: relevant and experiential.

I draw on practical frameworks such as of Peter Fischer on leadership transition, Jo Owen and others on influence, Costa and Kallick’s Habits of Mind, Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, the great folk at The Mind Gym, and Laura Liswood on diversity in business. I keep abreast of thought leaders such as Daniel Coyle on workplace teams, and organisational psychologists like Renee Bellamy Booth, Stanford’s Carol Dweck on Growth Mindsets, and psychologist Angela Duckworth on grit, as well as relevant findings from psychology and neuroscience as it emerges.

I am keenly informed by contemporary HR practices, across law, consulting, finance/banking, and innovative tech. I read Korn Ferry’s daily output and have their ‘FYI’ (competencies bible) for reference.

I am shaped by seminal thinkers on leadership through history, like Kurt Lewin (on groups within firms), Schein, Hosftede, Triandis (on cultural difference across silos and firms), the philosophical takes of Confucious and Gandhi and later Drucker, Handy, Mintzberg and Fiedler, and recent leadership legends Jobs, Gates, Obama, Merkel, and image-management wins like Jacinda Arden, plus the many modern-day gurus at the Harvard Business School, when it comes to inspired leadership.

My practice is also cross-fertilised by older leadership coaches like Ken Seigel, David Allen, Barbara Moses, and Brian Tracey, as well as the more cutting-edge like Tim Ferris and Susan Jeffers on facing difficulty.

I am an expert in the linguistic and para-linguistic sides of communication, but am also inspired by speakers on this like David JP Phillips. Communication lies in language, and I draw on a range of disciplines and experts, such as Tony Lewis, Steven Pinker, David Crystal, Guy Cook, Michael McCarthy, and Noam Chomsky (for explorations of power through language) and Michael Halliday (for Systemic Functional Linguistics, which greatly informs the analysis of business communication).

In sum, my techniques are never unfounded or in isolation; they are never simply a set of games devised by exuberant failed actors or self-professed gurus without formal education. They draw widely and are evidence-based.

My own organisational leadership experience spanned challenging roles: departmental line management of several teams, one of them very large at 31 individuals, as programme manager implementing strategy and managing operations within the public sector, which was on the heels of an earlier remit bringing about culture change in a bureaucratic institution embittered by sustained and toxic industrial dispute. Years later, I provided consultancy for a quite significant departmental restructure in a similar environment.

In the last two decades, I have coached and trained in leadership development and communication with senior professionals and executives in many of the world’s largest and most powerful companies, giving me intimate insight into their leadership issues and complicated work contexts, which have varied massively across size, industry and sector.

At post-grad level, I studied organisational communication in depth, and have worked briefly in media relations.

I am not prone to fads, unlike some coaches. Given my experience, I can distinguish the genuine parts of a trend from the bits that are re-packaged old ideas in new clothing. As well as those that are just plain nonsense. Staying firm in evidence-based learner psychology, I will never toss about silly coaching jargon.

Contributing in universities has instilled a strong belief in evidence-based and robust critical thinking. With three decades in education, including e-learning production, authoring and publishing, pedagogy and teacher training, course design and management, I have the calibre of expertise found on committees that design coach and trainer accreditations.

Coaching quality and ethics are important. I am guided by the code of ethics drawn up by the European Mentoring and Coaching Council competency framework for coaches and mentors. I guarantee to train and coach only within the remit of my expertise. Where client needs fall outside of this, I invite them to be referred to a third-party practitioner, such as a workplace mentor, therapist, psychologist, ENT doctor or financial adviser.

I guarantee never to exploit a client and aim to bring the greatest benefit (within the client’s wishes) at the lowest cost possible. Unlike many life coaches and therapists who see clients in long-term financial terms, I seek to quickly and efficiently deliver on goals and discharge a client happy. My reward lies in your independence, not your dependence.

I pinpoint key areas for improvement and finish the coaching course with communication or performance gains that are clear. In other words, my deliverables are articulated and measurable, and they are strictly limited to within my scope of specific professional expertise.