In my ‘previous life’ I have been an accountant, business consultant, business turnaround specialist and business coach, and I have been self-employed in one form or another for over 25 years.  

So, why would I now want to make a dramatic shift and start something completely different such as providing teaching courses and coaching the people who own and run the businesses, in my early fifties and effectively try to build a new enterprise from scratch? 

Well the truth is that it is not such a big shift in terms of the nature of the work, rather it is more of a shift in terms of the marketing and delivery, but it is still a big challenge and risk. However, my work has always been about people and that is the aspect in each of my career phases that I always enjoyed, I just didn’t always realise it! 

Since my late teenage years of watching the original ‘TV Troubleshooter’, Sir John Harvey-Jones, on the BBC, I always had a particular interest in seeing people in challenging business and life situations and how they dealt with those situations. Along the way I learned, just like the business owners in those early ‘Troubleshooter’ programmes, that; 

it is your thinking and consequent actions which create all of the circumstances in your career, business and personal life, both good and bad.

However I only began this learning in my late thirties/early forties, around about the time that my marriage was ending, and I had the opportunity to work with a wonderful counsellor/therapist who in the course of our work together introduced me to concepts as wide and varied as boundaries, self-acceptance, passive aggressive behaviour, saying ‘no’ and the fact that being ‘selfish’is a good thing, as well as many other concepts that I had never been exposed to before. My reaction was, and still is, ‘Why are people not taught this stuff in school along with other life skills?’

The other revelation for me was the visibility and understanding that I now had in dealing with everyone from clients, my kids, my family, my ex-wife, business colleagues, friends, and new relationships amongst others. It doesn’t mean that I was suddenly all seeing and all knowing and that my behaviour changed overnight, it didn’t, but I did start to make sense of a lot of things and over time I developed a greater sense of understanding and awareness with people. That was a huge positive and it played a huge part in improving my life.

As a result my consulting and coaching work began to change. I found myself having as many conversations with business clients about personal issues and challenges, as I did business conversations. In fact, many of the challenges that people experienced in their businesses were a direct result of beliefs, decisions and behaviours that were also impacting on their personal lives.

It became clear to me that in the same way that I knew very little about life until my early forties, this was also the case for my business clients and when I began to share with them some of my experiences and learnings then they too began to understand many things about their own behaviours, thought patterns and the consequent impacts on their lives, their families and their careers/businesses.

As I delved more into coaching, psychology, energy work, health and wellbeing and spirituality I also learned how to recognise and challenge the unsupportive stuff in my life and that when I applied the learning, my circumstances changed for the better.

So, driven by a determination to find the ‘whys’ of my own challenges, I crossed the paths of many great teachers, both in person and through their writings. I studied coaching with various teachers, devoured books both physical and on audio, took online courses, listened to podcasts and most importantly I just did the work.

Today, I am still learning, still changing and still growing.

So, having stepped away from business consulting work (working hands-on in businesses), I now work with business owners who want to work both on their businesses and most importantly, on themselves. The business sizes vary  but the owners share the fact that they all founders of the business. They share a desire to improve their circumstances, take full responsibility for their situation and they are open to learning and using thinking as the catalyst for the change they want to create.

The process is not complex. We just start with the problem or issue in hand and from there we explore, challenge and create possibilities through teaching, mentoring and coaching.