Fifteen years in organisations, six of them coaching inside them.
I am not a coach who has never done the job. That turns out to matter more than any qualification.
I was a head of department who was very good at a job I had stopped believing in.
It took me two years and a great deal of unnecessary misery to work out what to do about it, largely because I kept asking people who had an opinion about what I should want rather than questions about what I actually did.
I trained properly afterwards, I am accredited with a recognised coaching body, and I have supervision every month like any coach worth hiring. But the reason clients say the sessions land is that I have sat on the other side of the desk and I know what the constraints really feel like.
Four things I hold to
Two of them cost me work fairly regularly.
Six sessions, then it ends
Coaching should be time-limited. Open-ended arrangements are good for coaches and rarely good for clients.
I will refer you on
If what you need is therapy, medical help or a lawyer, I will say so early and help you find it. Coaching is not a substitute.
No guaranteed outcomes
Anyone promising you a promotion or a new career in ten weeks is selling something. What I offer is better thinking and a plan you own.
Confidential, with two limits
Everything stays between us except a risk to your safety or someone else’s. Those limits are set out before we begin.
Four things you can expect
Nothing mystical, and no whiteboard exercises unless they are genuinely the fastest route.
Mostly questions
I talk considerably less than you do. If I am giving you advice for an hour, you have hired the wrong thing.
A written summary
Within a day, covering what we covered and what you said you would do. It is the record you will actually reread.
Something to do
Every session ends with a small, specific, testable action. Not homework — an experiment you were going to run anyway.
Contact between sessions
Short messages are included. If something happens in week two, you do not have to sit on it until week three.
Small and deliberately bounded
I cap concurrent clients so that nobody is fitted in around the edges.
Start with the free half hour. Decide nothing else yet.
A good number of those conversations end with me suggesting you do not need coaching at all.