I have been coaching and mentoring for a few decades now. Originally, I trained as a corporate in-house group coach. Since then, my own personal and professional development journey has been to enhance my skills and experience in both coaching and training. I have successfully studied for multiple coaching qualifications and consider myself a ‘full spectrum’ coach. I don’t believe life comes at you in neatly packaged chunks, so I have sought to be knowledgeable and skilled in coaching around all areas of life that I’m likely to come across in my practice – hence the full spectrum! Of course, coaching doesn’t require me to have subject matter knowledge, just coaching process skills, but I do find the subject matter knowledge in many fields (business, management, communication, conflict, relationships, etc) comes in useful when mentoring has been contracted as part of a coaching programme. I belong to a number of major international coaching and mentoring organisations, such as ICF, ICI, EMCC, AC, and so on – and I assist some of them in their advocacy and activities.

As I approached achieving Master Coach level in qualifications and experience regarding the delivery of coaching and mentoring services, I turned my attention to acquiring training qualifications and simultaneously shifted my historic training and seminar facilitation practice to be more focused upon neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) in general and coach training in particular.  I am now a Coach Master Trainer and a NLP Master Trainer. The coaching and mentoring, and the NLP training, represent two of the parts to my business Summit Services Limited, which I have been running since 2011. The other part of that business relates to tertiary education, particularly in the areas of postgraduate research in NLP based coaching and coach training (I am myself pursuing a doctoral qualification in this area).

Prior to 2011, I had a corporate career rising to a number of senior positions (eg Commercial Director, GM, Sales Director) with some major global corporate organizations (including American Express, British Airways, Heineken). This gave me immense experience in strategy, organizational development, management and operations. It also gave me a thirst for personal development and lifelong learning, and I was fortunate to receive and provide a large amount of this during those years. Of significance within this was that the training was predominantly NLP based and the coaching/mentoring was most effective in embedding my learning in terms of my ongoing values, beliefs and behaviours.

In 2011 I left corporate employment and embarked on a period of entrepreneurial activity – I set up 7 businesses. This was a tremendous additional personal development activity and I learnt so much from this too. Resulting from this were my own workshop facilitation, training and coaching activities which I have continued to this day. I found that I had truly discovered what I enjoy most in life – helping others in their own personal and professional development. And connected to this, in more recent times I have also added becoming a coaching super-visor to other coaches and taking on governance roles in organisations.