About Me

If you're trying to work out whether I'm the right person to talk to, this page is an attempt to give you a genuine sense of who I am and how I got here. Not just the qualifications, but the human behind them.

How I arrived here

From my first management role, I was more interested in understanding people than managing them. For example, why someone was struggling, what was really driving them, what was getting in the way. That curiosity made a difference. Building genuine trust rather than managing from a distance meant people felt safe enough to open up. Once we got to what was really going on, people surprised everyone time and time again with what they could achieve – including themselves.

I worked for many years at Microsoft and when I left, coaching felt like a natural development of what I loved most: guiding people to understand themselves better and begin to thrive. My teams had seen it in me and encouraged me to make it official. It was genuinely rewarding work but I kept arriving at the same limit: the things that were really holding people back sat deeper than coaching could reach. That's what eventually led me to train as a therapist.

What unlocked change

There was also something more personal going on. I was trying to meet expectations that felt increasingly out of sync with who I was, and I wasn't showing up as the person I wanted to be. I pushed harder, which didn't help. Eventually I recognised I needed a different kind of support.

Taking that step into personal therapy had a big impact. In that space I found compassion and clarity I hadn't experienced before. It helped me recognise how my past, including experiences at boarding school and navigating the world with a neurodivergent mind, had shaped the patterns I was still living with. I also came to understand that how I saw myself and related to others was the result of trauma: not a single event, but the accumulated effect of earlier experiences. With this understanding not only came a greater sense of ease but also a way forward to live differently.

Looking back, taking that step was one of the most important things I've ever done. If I hadn't found the courage to pick up the phone, I'm not sure I would ever have worked any of this out.

That combination of things, the curiosity about people that had shaped my whole career, and having sat in that chair myself, is what brought me here.

What I believe about people and change

You might have been struggling with difficulties for a while, without seeing a way out. Some people even come to therapy believing that they are somehow broken. But this feeling comes from layers of coping and self-protection that have built up over time. We sometimes call these adaptations: the ways we learned to survive. Strip those back, and there's usually someone much more whole underneath than they'd come to believe.

Most of the patterns that cause problems in adult life once made sense: the things we avoid, or the roles we grow into without quite choosing them. They were ways of coping, surviving, getting through. The problem isn't that we developed these behaviours, but that they tend to outlast their usefulness. They may run on quietly in the background long after the original situation has changed.

Therapy isn't about fixing what's wrong. It's about understanding what's there, and that kind of understanding tends to change things, rather than just helping you manage them. It brings a real shift in how someone relates to themselves, and from there, to everything else in their lives.

Sometimes, particularly if trauma is involved, awareness by itself doesn't bring about the level of change someone wants: the adaptations still remain, leading to feelings and reactions they want to change. This is where somatic work can be particularly powerful, working directly with the nervous system to help find a different way to respond and loosen those old ways of coping that have become so deeply embedded.

I also believe the therapeutic relationship itself matters. Feeling heard and understood by another person isn't just a helpful side-effect of therapy; for many people it's part of what makes change possible in the first place. That's something I take seriously, and it shapes how I am with the people I work with.

What many people find, over time, is a kind of freedom. Not freedom from difficulty, but the freedom to choose how to respond to life as it actually is, rather than as it was when those patterns first formed.