What I love about coaching, loved it from the first moment the penny dropped, was the turned on its head approach to working with people. I had spent almost 25 years working with people with acute difficulties like addiction, suicidal depression and all kinds of mental health challenges. And I, like many many other people had been skewed to thinking almost exclusively about the problem. All the time. The approach was based of course on what we call the medical model. Get the data, diagnose the likely problem and offer

When you body moves it is fulfilling its purpose. The human body has evolved to ‘do’ things. We did not evolve into passive blobs slumped on a seashore or a rock, under a tree or in a hole in the ground. We evolved to move. We walked, fran, danced, swung, swam, swayed and danced ourselves through our evolution. Our brains developed to be the control centre of this movement and it influenced our bodies to develop in ways that made its ability to control, our movements effective within the bounds

There is a much talk and discussion about the need for resilience across numerous contexts in behavioural health and organisational development. What I noticed through is that calling a person or group of people resilient can be either a criticism or a compliment depending on the context. So remainers in the Brexit vote consider Brexiteers resilient to what they feel are common sense arguments about the UK leaving the Eu. They cast their resistance as stubborn and unwise. What they don’t like is that the Brexiteer is resilient. Or at

Being resistant to change is not a bad thing. Not that you would know this in some professional psychological circles. Being change resistant is often used as a subtle insult to people who are not conforming with the objectives of therapeutic interventions, often because those same interventions are ineffective, badly delivered or just plain rubbish.In other contexts resistance is called resilience. Usually when someone wants you to change and you don’t want to they describe you as resistant and that is not, in that context , a compliment! When you

EnvironmentYour clients want change and results but the change and results they are looking for do not take place in neutral environments. Our minds and brain are locked into an embrace with the world around them. As events take place and sensory inputs are registered so responses in us take place. These responses are determined by a complex history of past responses (captured in memories) that provided either reward or discomfort ( pain even ) both emotional and physical.A person's environment provides a variety of sources of these inputs. Numerous

We all want to be more useful. That is good for our clients and good for our practice. Coaching is about brain change. We know that this is the case because neuroscience tells us that behaviour change is reflected in the physical properties and neural functioning of the brain. This is being increasingly supported by advanced scanning techniques. The health of the brain matters to ongoing functioning and the prospect of brain change. We want to have an optimal brain so that we increase the functioning of the brain and its