“Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it”

Charles R. Swindoll

My approach to coaching is all about helping you gain clarity about the important things you want from your life and work, and then helping you set about achieving them in a self-aware, sustainable, effective and enjoyable way.

It’s also about helping you increase your self-awareness, improve your self-management (e.g. emotions, stress, anxiety, over-working), improve your relationships and generally develop greater psychological flexibility for what the world throws at you.

My work doesn’t fit neatly into the traditional categories of ‘executive coach’, ‘business coach’ or ‘life coach’ because each of us comes as a total package. Life and work are intricately bound together, and I always treat you as a whole person.

In addition to obvious and important improvement of your performance and success in your job or career, I can help you (if you wish) develop yourself in deeper issues, such as personal relationships, self-worth or what you essentially want from life. I also do a lot of work on much more practical matters, such as leading a team, building a business or managing a hectic workload. You will always choose what we will work on in any session.

My coaching approach involes partnering with you, in a psychologically informed process, to maximise your professional and personal potential

I use a blend of well-established, highly effective evidence-based professional coaching approaches, including positive psychology, emotional intelligence, ACT (acceptance & commitment theory/therapy), CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), transactional analysis, psychodynamic and stress management techniques. This is why I describe myself as a psychological & therapeutic coach .

I have deliberately undertaken a broad range of high-quality training and am always seeking to extend my knowledge and techniques further.

Specialism in stress management

Unusually for a coach, I have a special interest and particular qualifications in stress management and in dealing with patterns of unhelpful negative thinking that are the root cause of all stress.

My clients often have very busy, potentially stressful roles, and I help them develop life-long skills for intercepting and reducing their stress responses, allowing them to enjoy more healthy, sustainable and enjoyable lives, both in and out of work.

When designing a coaching programme focussing on stress, we will usually start with these ways of helping you understand yourself better:

• Understanding your history and experiences and how these affect your responses in the present

• key aspects of your personality that make you who are, and contribute to how you respond to stress

• The strengths and limitations of your current support system and how to make these more effective

• The impact of your current environment, including what you can and cannot control

We will then help you develop range of approaches and strategies to better manage your stress, including greater self-awareness, better self-management and taclking unhelpful thinking patterns.

My clients regularly report that our work in this area has been “life changing” for them.

Mental well-being / psychological flexibility

My coaching approach supports mental well-being and psychological flexibility, particularly for those in high-pressure roles, perhaps with significant family commitments too.

Please see my position statement on mental health.

Neurodivergence

Whether or not you've had an autism or ADHD assessment/diagnosis or anything else, if you think that any ND concepts may be relevent to you, I provide a neuro-affirming space for you, as a self-identifying ND person myself, to allow you to explore your 'mental wiring' and how you interact with the world. We will work at your pace and attend to your needs from coaching. See my Neurodiversity Coaching page for more information.

Powerful alliance

Our coaching relationship will be a ‘designed alliance’ between us, in which:

• I really care about your goals, your values, and your vision of what a fulfilling life looks like to you.

• You will learn very useful (sometimes fascinating!) things about yourself, about your approach to work and life in general, how you tick, what you really want in life.

• We can help you make the big decisions you wish to make, address the choices calling for your attention, tackle anything you’re stuck with, do the planning that needs doing to take you forward towards your goals

• We can look at and make sense of the various patterns, motivations and unhelpful habits that may be currently present in your thoughts, feelings and behaviours as you navigate life, along with areas of strength and areas of stress.

• You will be able to spot and learn how to overcome unhelpful habits and tendencies that block, undermine and distract you. This will include us exploring the emotions and beliefs present in your life, not just the ‘facts’, in a safe, professional and non-judgemental setting.

• We will be very honest and open with each other, creating some deep conversations.

• I will challenge you where it’s needed and helpful – supportively and confidently.

• We will create a space where brilliant development and transformation can happen for you. 

• You will find me supportive, non-judgemental, embracing difference and open to discussing whatever you wish to bring.

• I provide an affirming space for exploring any neurodivergent aspects you may have.

Greater clarity & perspective

I will help you significantly increase your perspective and understanding of yourself and your situation, to allow you to become really clear about:

• Who you are – and who you want to be

• Where you are right now – and where you want to go

• How you want to be working, living, thinking, behaving - both right now and in the future

• What drives and motivates you

• Common patterns of thinking/feeling/behaving you experience which may be worth exploring

• What may be blocking, derailing, frustrating, distracting or stressing you

A great deal of our thinking and decision-making is not based on clear, rational logic (as we’d like to believe it is). It’s actually based on emotions, faulty assumptions and unhelpful beliefs about us and the world. We make most decisions initially with the emotional parts of our brain and then rationalise and justify them with logic a second or so later (“cognitive back-fill”). We are sometimes very good at kidding ourselves as to the true orgin of our decisions. The more intelligent we are, the more creatively we can kid ourselves.

This may be the most important thing you can learn in coaching. If our consciousness were a car, our emotions would be in the driving seat - but we usually don’t realise.

I can help you significantly improve your thinking skills and help you learn to reduce the times you are hi-jacked by emotion-based responses. In this way, I can support you to make substantial changes in your life and to take the actions that may be necessary to achieve your aims and achieve a more fulfilling life.   

Effort

Coaching with me is more than just some interesting conversations and agreeing on some action points. My aim will be to help you transform – across your whole life, if you wish.  I can help you radically improve your awareness, clarity and control in everything you do – producing positive shifts that will be with you for the rest of your life. Changes that may positively ripple out through your family, friends and colleagues.

You will need courage and a willingness to go deeper, to bring out and look at your hang-ups and the things you like to avoid.  It will take commitment and will involve you accepting some purposeful challenge from me.  I will provide you with a safe space to explore everything that holds you back from achieving the life and the career you really want. 

Commitment

I usually work with my clients for at least 6 months. As a minimum, I ask you to commit to an introductory packge of an initial Discovery session plus 6 standard sessions, since this tends to be the shortest period needed for some coaching goals to be achieved and some meaningful change to take place. 

In my experience, clients who manage to achieve long-lasting, significant positive change need 12 or more sessions.

We will generally meet once a fortnight wherever possible, since this tends to be the optimal period between sessions to create the best coaching outcomes.

Coaching is about agreeing actions and committing to making significant changes in your life, so we will regularly co-design 'homework' for you to do in between our sessions.  A lot of the changes and improvements you seek will be based on the thinking and practicing you will do between sessions.

The Big Stuff & the Small Stuff

There are two aspects to your life that we will work on – what I call the ‘big stuff’ and the ‘small stuff’.  

The Big Stuff

The Big Stuff is about me helping you develop a compelling vision of your life and work – a way of being that you choose, not one that just ‘happens’ to you. I will assist you in taking control and ownership of your present and your future. 

At the start, it’s about you getting really clear about your core values and your purpose in life - the things that really matter to you. It's then about working out where you want to go and how to get you there.  You can decide whether we focus more on your work or your life overall – our coaching will reward all aspects of who you are. 

The Small Stuff 

The Small Stuff of life is just as important as the Big Stuff because you have to wade through it every single day. It’s about your behaviour at home and at work – habits, ways of thinking and looking at things. This includes relationships, hang-ups, inner critic/saboteurs, stress management, time management, procrastination, perfectionism, over-working, avoidance, motivation and so on.  

As a coach, I can give you - in a confidential, one-to-one setting - the time and space to work out how your ‘best self’ can turn up every day. I help you find success and fulfilment through the power of making good, powerful choices at every turn. I support you in changing from merely reacting to situations to strategically responding to them in accordance with your goals and values.  As a result, you become more focussed, more self-aware and more successful at what you do and how you do it.   

Dialing up your self-awareness

One of the key things my coaching does is to support you in significantly growing your self-awareness.  Improved self-awareness always enables constructive change, and can transform your career and your life in general.  Seemingly little things, like why you react a certain way to things, what you prefer to avoid doing, where you procrastinate or get ‘stuck’ – these are all worth exploring.

Heightening your awareness of how you tick, and how you would prefer to tick, can bring about amazingly positive changes that can ripple out through your whole life and those around you too.  Once you learn to spot unhelpful patterns in how you think, feel and behave, you can quickly learn to step out of them, which in turn can produce significant change and improvement in your life in a very short space of time.

As I’ve mentioned above, the key is to see how we make most decisions with our emotions and then rationalise and justify them with logic afterwards. As you get more adept at spotting this taking place within you, and taking counter-measues, you can have enormous personal growth and achieve all sorts of things at work and at home that you were previously struggling with.

One very swift and powerful way of doing so is through the Positive Intelligence method, which can be separate to our other coaching work or woven into it.

I also use many incredibly helpful techniques from the world of ACT.

The mechanics

I coach face-to-face, via video call (e.g. Zoom or Skype) or on the phone.  Our sessions will usually last 1 hour. For face-to-face sessions I normally work from The Practice Rooms in Cotham Hill, Bristol.

We will start with a Discovery Session.  Here we will talk about the coaching, find out more about you, work out your coaching goals and explore import aspects of you, such as your values and what you want from life.  Then we move to regular coaching sessions.  We will get stuck into the Big Stuff and also look at the Small Stuff as it comes up. 

Based on the latest research on effective coaching, I offer a minimum of 6 sessions following the Discovery Session. In the sixth of these sessions, I invite you to review your progress against your coaching goals and how we both feel the coaching is going. Some clients are satisfied with just 6 sessions, while many others prefer to continue for several months. Achievement of true and lasting growth and development tends to happen in sessions 6-12.

These sessions will usually be weekly at first and then move to a fortnightly pattern. This frequency is based on evidence that this is a highly effective period between sessions, allowing you to process the contents of the last session and take action on any steps we agreed, while maintaining forward momentum.

I am also available to you between sessions, to a reasonable extent, by phone, WhatsApp or email if something urgent comes up that you would like some support with before our next session. 

Investment

Your investment in coaching requires effort, time and openness to change, as well as money.

I offer my coaching in a number of differently priced packages depending on your situation and who is funding our work.

Further details of the available packages, together with my terms of business, are available upon request and will be provided as standard when you agree to a chemistry session. 

Chemistry Session

I can provide you with a chemistry session (see below) which gives you the opportunity to try me out, entirely free of charge and with absolutely no strings attached. You will experience some powerful coaching in order to give you lots of information with which to decide whether to sign up to some paid sessions.

Next step… or simply to find out more

If you wish to try some coaching with me - or even if you aren’t sure but would like to know more - the next step is to contact me to book a free 1-hour chemistry session.

In our chemistry session, as the name suggests, you can try out my coaching and see if we get on with each another, entirely free of charge or commitment.

I will send you a short, confidential questionnaire before the chemistry session, to obtain a few key facts about you, and we will spend an hour together in which I will provide you with a powerful coaching experience, entirely free of charge and without any obligation to go further.

What my clients say…