Coaching
What is coaching?
As a coach, I help people achieve their professional and personal goals, by providing space for reflection, support and challenge. Coaching focuses on where individuals are now and where they want to be in the future.
Coaching can address and impact on a wide range of issues including relationships with a manager or team; developing leadership style and skills; work-life balance, and managing work and life transitions.
How does it work?
As coach and potential client, we meet to explore the potential focus of coaching, and then agree a way of working together. After this, a course of coaching usually involves four to six sessions of one to two hours in length, covering a period of six to nine months, as discussed and agreed between coach and client. The coaching ends with an exit session.
Coaching approach
I am a relational and person-centred coach who works with whatever my clients bring to coaching.
I work confidentially with individual clients to focus on potential and performance by providing a safe space to explore issues, using powerful questions, careful listening and an integrative approach.
In a business context, I work with potential, emerging and existing leaders at every level.
I live in Edinburgh and can work with clients at their home, workplace, or other suitable location – and, of course, online or on the telephone.
In my coaching work, I draw from a range of coaching models:
Grow
Goal/Topic: what do you want to talk to me about?
Reality: what’s actually happening?
Options: what could you do about it?
Wrap up: what are you definitely going to do about it?
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Gestalt
Awareness leads to change
Working with all the senses
Working with the ‘whole’
Working in the here and now
Using self as barometer
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Solutions Focused
Encouraging responsibility for behaviour
Accessing resources
Next steps, rather than past steps
Future inspiration from others
Future inspiration from self
Inner Game
Where ‘interference’ is what gets in the way
Coaching focuses on the gap between potential and performance
‘Self 1’ is the place of the inner critic and of self-doubt
‘Self 2’ is the place of natural ability, relaxed concentration, trusting the body, and of ‘flow’
Co-Active Coaching
The client as natural, resourceful, creative and whole
Coach training and qualifications
I am accredited as a Professional Certified Coach with the International Coach Federation.
I developed and refreshed my coaching skills with with a Professional Practitioner Diploma in Executive Coaching from the Academy of Executive Coaching in 2024, building on my initial AoEC Practitioner Diploma in 2011. ​​In 2016, I completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Coaching and Mentoring at York St John University.

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I have regular supervision, with an accredited supervisor, to support my work. This is a confidential space for me to reflect on my coaching and other work, and to develop my practice.
I am a member of the International Coach Federation and am governed by the ICF Code of Ethics in my work.
Mentoring
I have training and extensive experience in mentoring, and in the design and the development of mentoring programmes to support learning and development in organisations.
For me, it feels important to distinguish between coaching and mentoring. The skills and process are similar, in that I use active listening and ask clarifying and open questions, but the approach is different.
When I’m mentoring, I bring and share some of my work and life experience in support of the client’s learning and development process. In coaching, my task is to stay fully focused on the client and what they need from the coaching conversation; my work and life experience, and how these might relate to the client’s work and life experience, are less relevant.
When a client is clear that they want a combination of coaching and mentoring, I am happy to adopt the role of ‘Coach mentor’.
