ABOUT
I grew up in Scotland and spent much of my younger life itching to see more of the world.
In my twenties, I left for London and began my career as a graduate sales trainee. It was the start of a working life that would eventually take me into international marketing and leadership roles, across different countries, cultures and organisations.
Those years taught me a great deal about business and leadership. They also taught me to be careful about assuming that the way I see something is the way it is.
Context matters. Culture matters. Relationships matter. And different situations can ask very different things of us.
Somewhere along the way, my attention shifted. I became less interested in simply getting things done and more curious about what helps people grow, change and find their own way through things.
That curiosity has shaped the last twenty years of my working life.
I trained as a coach and later as a coaching supervisor, continuing to follow the questions that interested me. Systems thinking profoundly changed the way I understood people and organisations. My work with relationship systems, ecopsychology, trauma-informed practice, attachment and parts work widened and deepened that understanding.
Different disciplines, but a thread runs through them: we make more sense when we understand ourselves in relationship — with each other and with the complex, living world of which we are part.
Walking has been another thread running through my life.
I walk for pleasure and adventure, but also to rebalance, reconnect and rediscover my place in the world. There is something about walking that involves more than thinking. Body, senses, place, movement and attention all become part of the experience.
In 2010, this emerging understanding found one expression in Walking Coach®, which I established alongside my other work. I began working with clients outdoors not for the adventure of it, but to explore what became possible through a more embodied, connected and integrated coaching experience. Much of what I discovered through that work now simply belongs within the way I practise.
Perhaps all of this is why I am comfortable with complexity.
I like the situations that aren't immediately clear. The conversation where something doesn't quite add up. The organisational question that turns out to contain another question. The moment when someone pauses because they've just noticed something they hadn't seen before.
My role isn't to have the cleverest answer in the room.
I think of it more as being on the same side of the table: looking at something together, bringing different kinds of intelligence to it, turning it over and seeing what we can discover. I host that process — sometimes gently, sometimes challengingly — and stay with it long enough for something useful to emerge.
There is seriousness in that work, but I don't think it requires solemnity. Curiosity helps. So does warmth. And occasionally a little mischief.
These days, in my early sixties, I'm making increasingly deliberate choices about where I put my attention.
After many years working with large organisations, I've chosen a different pace and greater proximity to the work: working closely with individual clients and small and medium-sized organisations, where there is space for intimacy and depth and I can witness change close at hand.
It feels less like winding down than another beginning — with greater clarity about what matters, what I have to contribute, and how I want to spend my time.
Away from work, walking remains a big part of my life — increasingly in the form of multi-day walks exploring Scotland. I practise Qigong, have become unexpectedly enthusiastic about pickleball, and after two years without my much-loved dog, I'm beginning to wonder whether it might be time for another four-legged walking companion.
There is still plenty to discover.
Begin with a conversation
If something here speaks to where you are, the best place to begin is a conversation. Thirty minutes, no charge, no obligation.