I learned early to notice what wasn’t being said.

I grew up with a father who was extremely violent and was thrown out of my own home at seventeen. You learn to read a room fast when you have to. You notice what’s changing in someone, what might be coming next. That instinct never left me.

I eventually built and ran companies for 20 years, which taught me a huge amount about people, ambition, fear, relationships and leadership. It also taught me a lot about myself.

I had a lot of self-awareness. I could see many of my own patterns clearly and explain them pretty well, but I still kept getting caught by them.

Around the same period, a business partnership fell apart and my marriage ended. I remember looking at some of my own behaviour and asking, “how the hell did I get here?”

I thought I was stuck. What changed things for me was learning the difference between moving from fear and moving through fear.

When I moved from fear, fear was making the decision. Moving through fear meant the fear could still be there, but I could still choose to move toward the life I wanted.

That was also where my own coaching journey began. Therapy had helped me understand where a lot of it came from. Coaching helped me work with what was happening now, what kept repeating, and how to make a different choice when the pattern showed up again.

I trained through the Somatic Academy and later went deeper with Elementum. What changed for me was realizing how much information shows up before we have words for it. You feel it in the tightening, the hesitation, the change in tone, the impulse to pull away or take control.

What I want to give clients is a shortcut. Not around the work, but through all the years I spent understanding my own patterns and still repeating them.

At some point I started wondering, where’s the loyalty program?!

Personal growth can become another thing we overdo. You can understand yourself incredibly well and still not live differently.

The insight has to lead somewhere, into the choices you make, the relationships you have, the way you lead, and the life you’re actually living.

I still love the moment when something that has been running quietly in the background becomes visible and a person suddenly has a choice they didn’t realize they had before.

There can also be a lot of humour in this work; it does not need to be heavy. This is why I often incorporate play or movement into my coaching.

One of my very first clients wrote: