My Approach

How the work actually works

Most coaching operates at the level of behaviour. What you're doing, what you should do differently, what habits to build. It is a useful starting point. For most senior leaders, it is not sufficient.

Behaviour is downstream of something else: The mental models you operate from, the assumptions you have never examined, the patterns that were once adaptive and are no longer serving you. That is where this work begins - and it is why the results tend to outlast the engagement.

Grounded in psychology, not convention

There is no shortage of coaching frameworks. Most of them are useful. None of them are sufficient on their own.

My approach is built on chartered psychology and behavioural science - on what the evidence actually tells us about how people develop, how performance degrades under pressure, and what conditions make lasting change possible. This means the work is rigorous in a way that frameworks alone cannot be. It also means I am willing to go to places that framework-led coaching tends to avoid.

The whole person, in their actual context

Leadership does not happen in a vacuum. It happens inside organisations with histories, politics, funding pressures, and cultures that shape behaviour in ways that are often invisible to the people inside them. A leader's performance is always partly a story about them - and partly a story about the system they are operating in.

I hold both. The work attends to the individual (their psychology, their history, their patterns of response under pressure) and to the organisational context that is either enabling or constraining them. This means the engagement cannot be delivered to anyone. It is built around you and the specific reality you are navigating.

This is particularly relevant for leaders in organisations undergoing structural or financial change. When the external environment is turbulent, it becomes harder to separate what is a genuine strategic challenge from what is being amplified by your own response to pressure. Getting that distinction right is often where the most important work happens.

Comfortable with discomfort

Genuine development requires encountering the edge of what you currently know. That edge is rarely comfortable. My job is not to make it comfortable - it is to make it safe enough to stand at.

Sessions are sometimes challenging. Assumptions get examined. Patterns get named. The goal is not to feel better after each conversation, though many clients do. The goal is to think differently, and to carry that thinking into the work that matters.

What this looks like in practice

Every coaching relationship is centred around the same question: What is actually getting in the way? Not what you think is getting in the way. Not what your organisation or your board thinks. What the evidence (your behaviour, your patterns, your context) suggests.

From there, the work is collaborative and iterative. There is structure, but it serves your outcomes rather than a fixed curriculum. The measure of progress is straightforward: Are you performing differently in the situations that matter most?

The Performance Gap

This approach is also the intellectual foundation of The Performance Gap - a newsletter exploring what psychology, learning science, and organisational behaviour tell us about leadership performance. If you want a sense of how I think before we speak, it is the best place to start.

Read The Performance Gap. Subscribe.

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