Like many of you, my career has taken a non-standard path. I wont bore you with the details, but my interests have led to a happy shaping of my professional life into a handful of areas I love.
Coaching and Leadership
The spark for me was lit many years ago when I began coaching triathletes and endurance athletes. Creating a training program for an Ironman triathalete, working with someone on their nutrition strategy, or consulting on lifestyle desing, these were a lot of fun and appealed to the optimisation nerd in me, but it was when I found the missing piece of the puzzle and started working with athletes in a more focused way on their mindest and behaviors that I began to really fall in love with coaching and human development.
Fast forward, and a lot of coaching acreditation programs, certificates, diagnostic training, tests and most importantly experince, mistakes and lessons, later I’ve seen enough personal transformations, (including my own) come about through coaching to be passionate about its value in contributing to the changes that help people thrive.
An interest in leadership development was inevitable in retrospect, just combine a growing focus on human development and roles as braod as heading up a decent sized digital marketing practices to being part of small cross functional consultung and delivery teams to sitting on the leadership team of a business during a time of huge organisational change. It was in these roles, during the conversations with other leaders and through trying, (and not always succeeding) to become a leader myself that I becase fascinated with the challenge of leadership and the opportunity to help create leaders who make a significant positive impact on the world.
Strategy and
Design
You can probably gather from the stick figure art that I’m no visual designer. I’m more of a “let’s crack out an inordinate amount of Post-It notes and see if we can help a group solve a problem.” kind of guy. Things like; aligning on some well-formed goals, unpacking complex situations, ideating on how we might do things differently, testing those ideas and creating a plan to turn them into a reality. I first cut my teeth in strategy and design when I worked in digital marketing and I was hooked. I enjoyed any opportunity to get stuck into experience design or CX projects so much that I decided to make it a focus. It’s a skill set I’m really glad I invested in and one that influences how I think about problem-solving.
Something about the process of design thinking and strategy development appealed to my inner nerd. I love building models, frameworks, strategies and stories. Given my general fascination with systems and processes and the fact I grew up playing tabletop war games and Magic the Gathering, this shouldn’t be surprising.
The principle of human centric design is one that immediately made complete sense to me. Making the consideration of how our designs impact the humans they touch fundamentally core to the design process seems like a no brainer. If we are not making things to improve peoples lives, I’m not sure what we are doing!
This fascination with human experience is also the cross-over point in this little Venn diagram and ultimately one of the interests that really fires up my drive to keep learning.
Most of my time right now is dedicated to my work at Leaders for Good, but I’m always open to a conversation.
If you’d like to discuss how we might work together, a couple of helpful things to note…
I commit to all engagements on a case by case basis only where I think I can genuinely add value.
I take the mutual overlap of principles, goals and temperament seriously. I want every engagement to be not only beneficial but enjoyable for everyone involved.
If all this sounds like your cup to tea, please drop me an email on [email protected].