The Coach's Journey - build a coaching business with integrity

Many of us live out our lives while tied to our careers, our homes, our families and our friends. This can be joyous, but for some it is stifling. Ray Martin lived that life and achieved great success, even being named Daily Telegraph Business Leader of the Year in 2002 as the CEO of a company that developed business leaders. But when his personal life changed dramatically, he realised his work wa...

Bill Small’s voice is a powerful creative tool that has been creating songs and conversations throughout his life as a professional musician, entrepreneur and business coach. In this episode of The Coach’s Journey Podcast, Bill describes the challenge of blending his passions for music and conversation in order to create the life he wanted, highlighting key shifts in his mindset that enabled a bal...

Lindsey Lewis was a sensitive child. “The one crying about the bird that fell out of the nest,” as she puts it. Her intimate connection to living things was a challenge early in her life, but in this episode of The Coach’s Journey Podcast she describes how she harnessed the power of her sensitivity to become a passionate, brave and creative coach. Throughout her life as a magazine editor, communic...

Henrietta Nelson has always been interested in people’s minds. She describes how, during a decade spent working as a solicitor specialising in insurance litigation, she would study her colleagues’ faces, observing their drives and motivations. After a friend recommended a two-day course at The Coaching Academy, Henrietta felt the pieces begin to fall into place. Becoming a coach has given Henriett...

In this episode of The Coach’s Journey Podcast, I invited a true master of the art of listening to interview me about my own journey and the transformations that have happened – and continue to happen – along the way. Raquel Ark, the founder of listening ALCHEMY , deftly opens up a conversation in which I share what it was like to realise that my life was not what I wanted it to be, and how the pa...

Claire Pedrick was speaking at the ICF Conference in 2019 when a publisher approached her and said: “Have you got a book in you?” That book is Simplifying Coaching , and in it Claire offers a rallying cry for filtering out the noise of the coaching industry and honing in on the very human essence of transformative conversations. In this episode of The Coach’s Journey Podcast, Claire traces the ste...

How can we be free to do the work we love? This is the fundamental question at the heart of my conversation with coach, community builder and eternal adventurer Allegra Stein, who is navigating a crucial turning point in her multifaceted career. Following on from our first conversation on the podcast , in this episode Allegra and I tackle an issue faced by coaches at all levels: how to stay creati...

Jennifer Garvey Berger has a new book out, called Unleash Your Complexity Genius . It is the fourth published work by the co-founder and CEO of Cultivating Leadership, and when she says that her books are getting shorter there is a sense that it's because she's honing in on the rich essence of her life's work. In this episode of The Coach's Journey Podcast, Jennifer and I share a conversation that...

Robert Stephenson no longer carries trinkets in his pockets. His need to wear crystals that represent his spirituality has lessened. This, he says, is because he has come to embody the meaning of those items in his very being. This shift has characterised an important period in Robert's life, in which he has departed from his role as director of Animas Centre for Coaching and launched his own coac...

When Lucy Ball found herself throwing golf balls into buckets at Deloitte in the mid-90s, she became caught up in the first sparks of the corporate coaching boom that would sweep through countless industries in the decades that followed. In our conversation, she describes how the people she met during that time – such as GROW-model creator Sir John Whitmore – offered a new leadership pathway, whic...

"Working online is not the future; it's today." These words from John Monks, the co-founder of facilitation and coaching practice Curve , will resonate powerfully with many listeners of episode #39 of The Coach’s Journey Podcast who, like John, have been bringing people together in an era of change. John, who along with Lizzie Shupak wrote Closer Apart , the definitive guide to running online work...

Last year I was totally delighted to appear on a podcast called The Coach's Compass, giving me an opportunity to dive deep into all things coaching with host Clark Luby. In the episode, Clark - a listener to The Coach’s Journey - turns my favourite starter question back on me by asking me to recall when I first came across coaching, and that takes me back to a crucial juncture in my life and caree...

Conor McCarthy is the host of the First 10 Podcast , where he interviews business builders on their first 10 customers, sparking valuable conversations about how fledgling businesses grow their first roots. By inviting me onto the podcast, Conor offered me the chance to reflect on how my coaching practice began and how it evolved as a business, from my very first tentative steps through to where I...

To use her own words, Jean Balfour "spectacularly failed" the assessment of the Ashridge Accredited Coach Training programme. But this setback fuelled a massive growth journey that led Jean to become clearer about who she is as a person and set her on a path to becoming a Master Certified Coach (MCC). In this episode of The Coach's Journey Podcast, Jean traces the steps of her career from training...

At the end of last year I published a book called How to Start When You're Stuck , and since then I have found myself seeing everything through the frame the book presents. My book is about overcoming resistance, procrastination and fear through something I call 'The 12-Minute Method', and in this episode of The Coach's Journey Podcast I bring this idea into focus. I go back to the very start of m...

In a world where the attention we give people lasts just 11 seconds on average, Anne Hathaway is a believer in the transformative power of listening and being heard. She compares the experience of being truly heard to that of being loved, and this forms the heart of her work as a coach, supervisor and leadership developer, providing people with generative attention and spaces in which to heal and...

The name listening ALCHEMY came to Raquel Ark in the middle of the night, evoking ideas of how art and science could combine to distil and purify the act of listening. Soon after, she was asked to deliver a number of workshops on listening, giving her the confidence to build a career around the subject to which she has devoted her life and turn listening ALCHEMY into a business. As her recent TED...

Having achieved success running a popular clubnight in London and living his life by "trusting serendipity", Mike Toller wondered whether he could make more of a difference in people's lives. That thought was the beginning of his journey to becoming a professional coach and a psychodynamic psychotherapist . The world of coaching opened up to him through conversations with Phil Bolton , who trained...

Myles Downey has been playing tennis all his life. But now, at the age of 62, he is relearning to play the game in a way that’s aligned with his identity and his unique take on genius. A global authority on performance, coaching and leadership, and the author of classic coaching tomes such as Effective Modern Coaching, Myles says tennis has been instrumental in shaping his view of people and how t...

It's surprising to learn that one of Phil Goddard's earliest memories is of standing on the fringes of a playing field, away from everybody else, on his first day at infants' school. He has since focused his life and career on building intimacy and connection but he recalls that early memory with affection because, he says, it reminds him he has always been a people watcher, fascinated by what mak...

Fiona Setch has faced seemingly impossible situations in her life. From caring for terminally-ill patients during the HIV/AIDS pandemic of the 1980s, to experiencing a devastating loss to COVID-19 through a nursing home window in 2020, life's biggest challenges have, she says, changed her. Those hardships have given Fiona the gift of being able to be present when faced with death, and a rare abili...

When Inga Umblija received an innocuous email from a recruitment firm over 10 years ago, she could never have known the impact it would have upon her life. The email contained a message from Phil Bolton ( Episode #2 ), in which he outlined his strategies for career change. Inga took the bold step of reaching out to Phil and set in motion a conversation that, over the years that followed, became fi...

Saying yes has shaped Robert Stephenson's life.  Accepting opportunities and seeing where they took him propelled Robert as he became a trained actor, a narrative coach, and the director of Animas Centre for Coaching - one of Europe’s largest coaching schools. While this optimistic disposition has guided him through a career that he thinks of as "a quest", he has not shied away from difficult...

Coaching in your flow state is like playing jazz, according to Jacinta Jiménez, who has devoted herself to studying the psychology of performance and behaviour change. Striving to become a dancer at a young age taught Jacinta invaluable lessons about flow, drive and resilience, and her passion for the arts spills forth when she speaks about how it almost consumed her. Jacinta, driven to keep other...

Kim Morgan has a mantra for everything she does. It's about the learning space, and its power as a vehicle for change. That space is one she grew up in, with parents she describes as very psychologically aware, and Kim went on to train as a humanistic person-centred therapist before finding herself in need of "something grittier". Via Freudian psychotherapy and neuro-linguistic programming, she di...