About me
A rigorous intellect and blue chip business experience combined with personal warmth, psychological insight, and commitment to helping people be their very best
What I bring to my work - McKinsey professionalism and knowledge, psychological insight, and depth
Career history - Full-time coach for 8 years, after 19 years at McKinsey
Qualifications - Oxford degree and in-depth coaching training
Personal life - Love of the arts and of nature
What I bring to my work
The most important influences on my work are the years I spent in the demanding environment of McKinsey, my studies in psychotherapy and psychology, and my personal interests in meditation, yoga and literature.
McKinsey professionalism and knowledge
I spent 19 years at McKinsey, and loved the place. It’s a very demanding, fast-moving organisation, committed to the highest professional standards. McKinsey’s values of intellectual rigour, striving for excellence and making clients’ interests paramount were important to me. I still try to bring them to everything I do.
My McKinsey years also exposed me to the firm’s vast knowledge on leadership, teamwork and organisational change. This helps me grasp situations and issues quickly, and think about them in a structured way. I also bring in the experience of working across countries and cultures, and with client organisations in sectors from mining to luxury goods.
Insights from psychotherapy and psychology
While I was at McKinsey, I experimented with the idea of becoming a psychotherapist and completed a year of training.
Although I decided to focus on coaching rather than therapy, this training is a big influence on me. In particular, I try to work with Carl Rogers’ principles of being client-centred: genuine, empathetic and non-judgmental. And I also draw upon formative psychology, sometimes known as leadership embodiment: working with the fact that our physical bodies both contain and condition our experience.
I’ve also dug into positive psychology – the psychology of human flourishing – and find that working with strengths is particularly productive in coaching and training.
Depth from meditation, yoga and literature
For a long time, I’ve practised meditation and yoga (in the Triratna and Iyengar traditions respectively).
This doesn’t mean I ask my clients to chant mantras or do yoga postures! But both practices foster stillness, humility, awareness, curiosity and compassion, qualities that I believe are core to coaching and training.
Similarly, my love of literature and language find their way into my work too. I find it very useful to work with story and metaphor as ways of reaching more deeply into a situation or challenge.
Career history
My coaching and training experience goes back more than 25 years, and I have more than 3,000 coaching hours under my belt.
I’ve been a full-time independent coach since 2012. My focus is on coaching individuals, with some leadership skills training for groups, and occasional speaking engagements. (For example, I’ve spoken about confidence at the head office of an international restaurant chain, and about women’s leadership at a leading global investment bank.)
It all started in the 1990s at McKinsey: early on in my career there, I found myself becoming a coach almost by accident, because that was how I could best help colleagues and clients be at their best at work.
In different roles in the firm over 19 years, I coached and trained McKinsey people to be effective communicators, team leaders and trusted advisors to their clients, and coached McKinsey clients to lead change, whether from a seat in the boardroom or in the thick of the action on the shop floor.
I also got involved in the firm’s efforts around women’s leadership, and spoke on that theme at the INSEAD and IESE business schools.
The red thread was always helping others to realise their potential.
My own team leadership in the UK was recognised by a McKinsey award, and later I got to grips with remote leadership, running a global internal change team with a complex, cross-functional, multi-stakeholder brief.
I started my career in the creative industries – my first job was at Saatchi & Saatchi, and I also worked in journalism and design.
Qualifications
Oxford MA in English Language and Literature
Qualified as a Meyler Campbell Business Coach, accredited by the Association for Coaching
CSA Diploma in Coaching Supervision
Association of Coaching Supervisors Accreditation
Accredited Strengths Profile Practitioner
Accredited to use MBTI (Step II)
Counselling Skills OCR Certificate
Facilitation skills certification from Interaction Associates
Personal life
I’m British, from the North of England, with Welsh and Irish roots. I won an Open Scholarship to Oxford to study English language and literature, a lifelong passion. From there I moved to London, which I love, and has been my main home ever since.
In London my husband David and I enjoy seeing a lot of theatre and art. We also have a bolthole on the beautiful East Kent coast, where we spend time outdoors, walking, swimming, kayaking and bird watching. In both places, above all we love spending time with friends.