My Story

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I spent much of my career helping individuals, teams and organisations perform, navigate change and improve. 

For 30 years I worked in the English National Health Service (NHS), including local and national Director roles. I loved much of it: the people, the pace, the complexity and the opportunity to make a difference. 

Like many people who build long careers, I became good at carrying a lot. 

Following the pressures of service recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic and losing my closest friend before our 50th birthdays, I started to ask different questions of myself. Not simply what do I want to achieve next but how do I want to live and work in the years ahead.

That distinction has come to shape both my own life and my coaching. 

The first half of a career often features recognisable markers: building capability, establishing credibility, progressing, earning, achieving and being recognised. 

Later, the questions can become more personal:

• What am I still ambitious for?
• How do I keep contributing, sustainably?
• Who and what deserves more of me?
• What does success mean to me now?
• And, if the next ten years went really well, what would they actually look like?

I don't think there's one right answer. The second half isn't necessarily about slowing down or stepping back. For some it means taking on their biggest challenge yet. For others it means changing direction, building something of their own, working differently or making more room for life beyond work. 

What interests me is making those choices consciously.   

Coaching has featured as part of my work for many years and eventually became a new direction in its own right. 

I began my formal training as an Executive Coach at Ashridge and subsequently Warwick University, completing a Masters degree in Coaching. 

A combination of practice, study and research has helped me become much clearer about the kind of coach I want to be. 

My approach is relational and systemic. I work with the whole person rather than separating the professional from the rest of their life. I draw on Socratic questioning to test assumptions and open up different ways of seeing things, and Gestalt principles to pay attention to what is happening in the moment, not simply the story we tell ourselves about it. 

Underneath the theory is something quite simple: I create space for people to think well. 

I help clients to understand what matters, see more clearly what may be getting in the way, make deliberate choices and turn those into meaningful movement.  

My own choices brought me to Andalucia. 

Living here has made me increasingly aware of something I had probably underestimated throughout a career spent in meeting rooms, offices and on calls: where we think affects how we think. 

Distance from everyday routines and noise creates perspective. 

Different surroundings interrupt familiar patterns. 

Walking, landscapes, history, food, conversation and simply having uninterrupted time can change the quality of attention we bring to questions that matter. 

That became the idea behind Ahora Coaching Retreats: three nights in Andalucia combining intensive one-to-one coaching with carefully chosen places and experiences. 

I subsequently made Ahora the subject of my final year MA research at Warwick, exploring the rigour and design of this intensive form of coaching and what clients experienced before, during and afterwards. 

The findings deepened my own thinking. Clients described the value of sustained, undivided attention and the relational trust that developed through the experience. At three months, participants described changes spanning wellbeing, clarity, relationships, boundaries, behaviour and significant professional decisions. 

It reinforced something important for me:meaningful change doesn't always begin with having better answers, sometimes it starts with creating the conditions in which we can ask and consider better questions. 

Today my work is centred on experienced professionals, senior leaders and business owners navigating the second half of their careers and lives. 

Some clients come to me at a clear transition point. Others are successful by almost every conventional measure but sense that something needs to change. Some simply want protected space to consider what the next chapter could be before circumstances make the decision for them. 

Across executive coaching, leadership development and Ahora coaching retreats, I tend to think through three interconnected lenses:

Capacity - What sustains me?

Contribution - How do I want to work, lead and contribute?

Purpose - How do I want to live and what matters now?

They reflect a belief that has become increasingly important to me in my own second half:

We can continue to achieve and contribute, while taking better care of ourselves and creating a life that feels fully our own. 

Supporting others to do just that is the work I want to do now.