Before I became a coach, I spent 15 years as a Technology Consultant and Project Leader at Accenture, Deloitte, and boutique firms across Amsterdam, Singapore, and Australia. I was good at delivery. I understood systems, complexity, and pressure.
What I kept seeing inside large organisations was leaders who were technically excellent and personally stretched thin. Capable people who didn't trust their own judgment, and high performers running on patterns they'd never examined. Some had built significant careers and weren't sure why it felt like so little. I also watched colleagues with genuine political savvy deliver strong outcomes for the firm and get promoted as a result.
Conventional consulting didn't have much to offer that. You'd diagnose the problem and build the deck. The organisation would nod, implement half of it, and six months later the same dynamics would be back. I got tired of treating symptoms.
That frustration is what took me to INSEAD. The Executive Master in Consulting and Coaching for Change is eighteen months across eight modules, deep dives into the hidden drivers of human behaviour and the dynamics that organisations rarely acknowledge out loud. At the same time, I was flying to San Francisco to train as an Integral Coach at New Ventures West. INSEAD gave me the theoretical architecture. New Ventures West taught me the practice of sitting with someone and working at the level that matters.
Running alongside all of this, from 2013 to 2015, I studied Gestalt Group Dynamics with Dr David Lines at Relational Change. That work changed something. Gestalt trains you to attend to what's happening in a room right now, beneath the stated agenda. Working with David opened up my understanding of how groups actually function, from the unconscious roles people take up to the way authority and belonging play out in ways no org chart captures. I also attended group relations conferences during this period, which took that understanding into live, often uncomfortable territory.
From there I joined Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore as a Leadership Facilitator, working with Executive Directors across the bank's global footprint on the capability side of large-scale transformation. To deepen my thinking on leadership specifically, I studied Adaptive Leadership with Ron Heifetz at Harvard Kennedy School and the Kansas Leadership Centre, which finally gave precise language to the difference between problems that need expertise and challenges that require the leader to change. Around the same time I completed Dare to Lead with Brené Brown, which grounded the emotional and relational dimensions of leadership in a way that was both rigorous and practically useful. It was the first time I was paid to work on the human dimensions of change rather than around them.
Moving to Melbourne and starting over stripped everything back. I lost the scaffolding I'd been leaning on, the title and the sense of knowing where I stood. What was left was harder to look at, things I'd been too busy or too far from home to face.
That experience gave me something all those years of boardrooms hadn't. The inner life doesn't stay separate from the professional life. It leaks into how you lead and how you hold yourself when things get hard.
What I kept seeing in organisations was coaching that skipped this entirely. A leader struggling with conflict, with their team, or with their own authority would be handed a framework or a new communication model. Useful, and never enough. The relational and emotional dimensions, the parts that actually show up under real pressure, kept getting treated as too messy, or as somebody else's job.
These days, alongside my own practice, I serve on the Transformation Faculty at Mobius Executive Leadership and coach senior leaders on presence and communication with Stand & Deliver.
That's the gap I work in.
