For more than 30 years, personal development has been one of my great passions and has helped me explore these questions. I’ve learnt about and analysed human behaviour, communication, relationships, spirituality and, most importantly, myself. Along the way, I’ve discovered a lot about who I am, how I behave and how I relate to other people and they relate to me.
That journey has given me a depth of understanding of what shapes people, how they behave and how we relate to each other, which I bring into everything I do today.
I began my career as a techie with a degree in Computer Science, before moving through sales, marketing and management into corporate training, university lecturing and transformational coaching. It has given me great insight into what drives business and plenty of examples of what to do and what not to do.
It might seem an unusual journey but hey, I love variety and am a fan of evolution. Part of my evolution has included moving from Australia to France to live. Home is now the Côte d’Azur, in the heart of the French Riviera yachting region, where I work with Captains and crews locally and internationally.
I’ve managed people and businesses, carried sales targets, worked closely with customers, dealt with corporate politics and trained everyone from undergraduate students to senior executives in companies like HP, Cisco and Microsoft. More recently, I’ve coached senior people through personal and professional change.
Intuition plays a big part in how I work with people. It’s a skill I’ve developed and learned to trust through years of personal development and I access it constantly in my work. I pick up what is happening between the lines, sense where a belief might come from and see patterns and connections before my clients do, whether we’re working one-to-one or in groups.
Clients have told me my high level of intuition is one of the things that makes working with me different and special.
I identify what is worth exploring and then want to know why. I ask questions, test what I’m perceiving and help people look at themselves, others or a situation from a new perspective.
That combination of intuition, systems thinking, business experience and everything I’ve learned about people and relationships shapes the way I work today. It has also enabled me to take something incredibly complex, how people interact and affect each other within a team, and make sense of it through my People Dynamics model.
We are in relationship with lots of people in our lives and many of those relationships revolve around our work. The quality of those relationships has an enormous impact on our experience at work.
I believe people are happier, healthier and able to do their best work when they understand themselves and each other, communicate with empathy and respect and know how to work through differences. That matters to me. People matter to me.
When relationships at work deteriorate, the impact goes well beyond personality clashes. It affects how we feel, behave and communicate and ultimately creates problems in how the team works together. It creates negative energy that everyone feels.
When relationships work well and communication is respectful and effective, people enjoy being together. They support each other, contribute, cooperate and perform, creating positive energy that people want to be part of.
So I do this work because I want to help people experience that positive energy at work.
I’ve delivered corporate training internationally and lectured in Marketing and Customer Relationship Management at Swinburne University in Melbourne and, more recently, Public Speaking and Presentation Skills at IUM in Monaco.
Another quirky aspect of me is that I’m a trained actor, with experience in theatre and short films. Acting has been my creative expression outside work and I love it. It has also given me great storytelling skills. And I do love a stage with an audience.
Whether you’re a Captain thinking about yourself or your crew, a leader wanting to improve how your team works together or you’ve simply read something here that has got you thinking, I’d be very happy to have a conversation.
