About.
I’ve always been fascinated by how people think and behave. Looking back, I realised I’d been trying to understand this my whole life in my own way. I just didn’t have the language for it.
Negotiation was one of the first places I noticed it.
I loved it. It felt like a game. The longer I did it, the more I realised the numbers, contracts and positions were just the surface of what was happening.
What did the person across the table actually want? What were they protecting? What weren’t they saying? Could I get them to where I want?
I’m talking about the person, the individual, not the negotiator sitting behind a role or title.
I saw the same thing in sport.
I coached triathletes for years. Training plans mattered, but confidence, fear, expectations, self-belief and what was happening in someone’s life could completely change what happened on race day.
Business and sport started to look surprisingly similar to me.
A few years ago, my own life changed.
I lost my corporate role, and with it much of the structure I had built over two decades. Around the same time, I went through a period of serious physical and mental illness and lost much of what I had built my identity around.
Without the job, the title or even sport to fall back on, I had to work out who I was underneath all of it.
That took me deeper into psychology, organisational behaviour and systems psychodynamics through INSEAD’s executive coaching programme.
Suddenly, I had language for something I had been trying to understand for years: how power, trust, authority, relationships and the things people avoid saying can shape what happens inside an organisation.
Behaviour makes more sense when you understand what it is protecting.
That changed how I looked at defensiveness, agreement, avoidance, control and what we often dismiss as ego. I became more interested in what was behind the behaviour than judging it at face value.
Today, this is my work.
I work with founders, CEOs, investors and leadership teams on business problems where human behaviour, relationships, power or authority are getting in the way.
I also take fractional CxO and advisory mandates. Staying close to the reality of running a business matters to me.