About
Bio:
They say 'you are how you coach'. A typically clever coachy thing to say. But it's true, my life experience and learning characterise my approach.
Born in London in 1972, raised in middle-class Buckinghamshire, I was a prodigious academic and musical child, and very unruly. My dad (a musician) died when I was 13, ending my musical enthusiasm and beginning a lifelong journey with masculine identity, grief and retrieving creative purpose.
By the time I was 16 I thought I knew everything. Then a psychedelic experience shattered my clever little world-view, and started a lifelong interest in personal transformation and enquiry into the unknown (and some dark chapters of addiction and depression).
I dropped out of university to be an entrepreneur, intoxicated with early stage Bransonitis, and fortuitously stumbled into an Anthony Robbins workshop. Synchronicity, clarity and flow erupted. I went health-mad and got seriously ambitious, with business projects and with spiritual development.
Through the 90s I had a string of successful startups, that all went disastrously wrong. I had cutting-edge ideas (London's first juice bars; an early-stage internet project on sustainability) but was long on inspiration and short on aptitude. Plus, my motivations were all skewed: puffed up with privilege and spiritual ego I was chasing other people's dreams to cover up for unspent grief. I was totally lost, but couldn't see it and when the juice business went down – 50 employees and a lot of debt – I crashed, slowly. I didn't like the worlds I was moving in, or who I was becoming within them. The spiritual groups I'd been involved with had collapsed in politics and delusion, the vivid clarity of my 'awakening' times was a memory. All that was left was morning-pages and my yoga practice. So I got rid of my possessions, bought a guitar and went to India.
I stayed for over 3 years, ending up in business with a friend from Delhi; living downtown, fully immersed. I did a lot of chi kung and yoga; took some amazing pictures, and landed a broadcast film project on call-centres; studied permaculture, biodynamics, biogas systems and took a lot of trains.
I thought I was going to stay, but fortune tripped me up again, into an shamanic ceremony, which swept me off my yoga mat into a deep enquiry of shamanism and some long periods in South America. It also seriously reactivated my social conscience, and I launched another environmental media project.
After 3 years and a lot of trying, it burned out, and took the last of my entrepreneurial zeal with it. As that door was closing I discovered the constellations work and knew instantly that it was the opening I’d been waiting for.
I spent the following 11 years in training and development and along with marriage, two children (and another business) I’ve become a good example of finding the way along the long and winding road to a deeper calling.
My practice incorporates threads of all this experience, with a particular focus on helping people to find and develop the work they love (their art) and how to manage a balanced life in the tumult of success, and ordinary modern life.
I’m also passionate about the growth of purpose-driven organisations (or evolutionary organisations, as Frederic Laloux puts it) and have coached some wonderful start-ups and small organisations. After putting down my entrepreneurial ‘hat’, it’s deeply satisfying to find there is a way to put this experience to good use.
If you’d like to find out more, or book a call, make contact now.
Training
Systemic work:
Systemic coaching: The Whole Partnership
Systemic Ritual: Daan Van Kampenhout
Family Constellations Practitioner: Centre for Systemic Constellations UK
Other training:
Non Violent Communication: Foundation and Findhorn Intensive
Process, Shadow work and emotional fluency, 4 year development group: Deep Soul Connection
Chi Kung, yoga and meditation: many week-long, fortnight & 4 week trainings over 25 years
Dedicated pursuits:
Healing foods and natural lifestyle
Somatics, body intelligence, natural movement
Sexual energy cultivation
Breathwork
Grief work
Men's circles and retreats
Progressive parenting
Shamanism, ceremony & sweat lodge
Permacultural design