About my practice
an ethos for generative work
On this page you will find a comprehensive explanation of my work, including why it is so important, why I work with this population of people who are highly self-led and who care deeply, with an eye on highly sensitive and gifted adults in particular, and the forms that work takes.
Do know that whether or not you have heard of high sensitivity or giftedness, and whether or not those labels feel comfortable for you, doesn’t really matter. My descriptions will apply to most highly sensitive and gifted people, but also to anyone who simply cares deeply, seeks change, and sometimes feels at odds with their world. What matters most is whether you resonate with the experiences I describe, and with my approach to them.
Our work together may include work on these traits, if that is what you are seeking support and resourcing with, but I also work just as much on other concerns, including change, leadership, existential matters, and all that “important but not urgent” work that hangs around our backgrounds.
We highly sensitive and/or gifted adults are a strange breed.
We embody uncommon strengths, like attunement, complexity of processing, and a predisposition to bend the status quo towards goodness and justness.
But, we are generally battered by the world’s norms, and by normative environments – a coach once told me my Myers-Briggs type was “the least suited to being in the world”.
All humans need emotional and intellectual mirroring, connection, and purpose, but our needs for these things are much more intense than people who are more neurotypical, and are much more likely to go unmet.
The consequences for those needs going unmet are also far more damaging. We are more vulnerable to chronic illness, mental illness, and relational and event-based trauma. We have far more need for emotion regulation, and tending to sensory and existential concerns.
I love this population so much, both their extraordinary heights and their painful foibles.
And, I know what they give to the world when they are resourced.
When they experience themselves and their lives with great love, ease and solidity.
When their systems and environments account for their strengths and limitations, and consistently bring regulation and restoration of self.
When they get to take their place in the family of things as their true, whole, integrated selves.
We are a population who sees the wounded world and how the status quo could change for the better.
In my own life I have worked in high achieving corporate environments (I was a civil litigator for many years), and I have experienced the total disintegration that comes from living a life that was outwardly successful, but not actually mine, for too long.
I’ve lived the consequences of that via complex mental and physical health challenges, including burnout and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (all more common in this population). These issues have been the subject of some of my creative work, and I still carry the consequences of the “before time” in my health and capacity levels.
In the remaking that followed, though, I have emerged with a beautiful clarity about my own humanity, my own system’s needs and strengths, the incredible limitations of the normative capitalist culture most of us live in, and the humanity, needs, strengths and potential of others who share my traits.
I like to call myself a recovering high achiever, and I love working with clients who identify the same way.
In working with this population, and using the medium of coaching and consulting, I have my eye on three purposes.
The first? That people with these traits have exquisite, human, loving relationships with their actual selves, and the lives those selves live, including the traits that bring extra intensity and challenge. I want your experience of life to feel good, safe, resourced, strong, and however else YOU want it to feel.
This is a beautiful goal in itself, because we as individuals were made to live positive, generative lives, and this relationship of ease toward self and life are a HUGE ingredient of that. We can only give from surplus. A system is only sustainable where its resourcing is renewable.
But it has a bigger flow-on, into the second purpose: people who feel safe and resourced in these ways naturally regulate every system they participate in, and move toward the generative work called for by our interdependent world.
Their relationships, their communities, their causes, their work. We are all leaders in the systems we participate in, whether we know it or not, and the resourced inevitably resource those around them. The scale of the local is just as important, here.
And then beyond that, there is the third purpose: supporting, resourcing and facilitating the intentional generative work this population is predisposed to do. This may be via their vocational work, or their creative practice, or their activism, or time-limited projects they feel called to effect. It may be in the work itself, or it may be in the methods, attitudes and lenses they bring to other forms of work.
This population is so attuned to larger, existential questions, like justness, suffering, inequality, interconnectedness, and the places where the status quo fails certain people (or humanity writ large). This makes resourced members of this population powerfully placed to resource and change their worlds, and ours.
Mostly, when this population plays big, the world gets better.
Not all clients are working on all these purposes at the same time, and they don’t need to.
These purposes are the work and journey of whole lifetimes; we need support and resourcing at every stage.
Some clients feel a call to play bigger in some way. I use Tara Mohr’s definition of playing big here: being more loyal to your dreams than your fears. Playing big may look like acting on a calling to serve the world in some way, or getting out from under fear that has you downplaying your strengths and capacity, or acting on an internal need to live more authentically, or any number of other things. These clients seek support and resourcing for change and for building what they envision, including support with fear and resistance, practical matters, and the experience of doing the thing or living life itself.
Some clients are executives, social enterprise leaders, artists, or people working at the intersection of complex disciplines. They seek an ongoing relational environment to resource them as they do their work, or enact agendas and visions for which they have no peers.
Some clients are at a crossroads in their lives, or on the precipice of a new chapter in life or work. They want to play bigger (which often means shedding normative ideas around achievement, not deepening them) or they feel an unsettling longing, or they want their lives to feel radically different from the defaults they have found themselves in. They seek greater self-actualisation, and a greater integration of their needs and values with the reality of their lives. The ongoing relational environment of coaching allows them to unfold, to zoom out, and to emerge in new ways that transform their relationship to self and life.
Some clients may fit one of the other categories, but are also lawyers. These clients seek the additional comfort and resourcing of a coach who understands the legal profession, who takes a systemic view of challenges to wellbeing and change within that profession, and who is invested in lawyers having sustainable, authentic experiences of their lives and careers, whether in the profession or elsewhere.
Some clients may be involved in mediation or litigation. They seek a brief infusion of high level coaching from someone who really understands these legal processes, and who works with them so they can experience a greater degree of agency, emotional resourcing and empowerment within these often-disempowering processes.
Some clients seek a brief engagement, to debrief, unravel, or process a particular event. Events may include sudden bad news or loss, or sudden opportunities. These clients seek a relational environment of loving witnessing, and ability to hold and stay with intense and complex emotional reactions, as well as skilled questioning to process feelings and to make plans for next steps, where applicable.
And then some clients are seeking post-traumatic flourishing. These clients have experienced some form of traumatic disintegration: trauma, burnout, severe or chronic illness, sudden loss, relationship breakdown. They have found their way through much of the acute distress of these events and now look ahead to the future: how will it be different from before? Who will they be in it? What will they need to flourish, and to live the lessons their disintegration taught them? They seek an ongoing relational environment that is trauma-informed, highly sensitive, and supportive of both the thrill and vulnerability that comes with this kind of remaking.
My coaching methods are tuned to each individual client.
There is no one size fits all way of working with any human being, let alone a population this complex and variable. We adapt and learn what is most useful as we go.
Perhaps you seek support and accountability for action, preferring concrete plans and review processes.
Perhaps you seek a process of existential or emotional inquiry, seeing yourself and your world through myriad different lenses.
Perhaps you want some combination, or you don’t know what you need. We figure that out together.
In working with all clients, I draw on a broad range of knowledge, perspectives, skills, training, and intelligences, borne of direct training and reading, and a lifetime as a highly sensitive and gifted person. I pay special attention to emotional, existential, collective and somatic intelligences, all under-valued in the cognitive-dominant world.
Though I can act as consultant or mentor at times, in few cases am I in the role of advisor. This relational environment is focused on you; I don’t assume that my own experiences will be the same as yours, or relevant to your coaching. In fact, the relational environment I cultivate within the coaching relationship will rarely refer to me at all.
Instead, I use a particular quality of listening, and questioning, to facilitate my clients’ own answers, vision, and methods.
It’s extraordinary how resourcing even the simple experience of being heard is.
My process treats coaching as a relational environment.
People get the most benefit from coaching when it is a relational environment within which to let answers, processes, plans, visions, emerge and take shape. You are always responsible for your own action and plans, but coaching represents a safe, thrilling place to explore, and to get curious whenever our plans do not, well, go to plan.
One-off sessions can be useful for specific events, such as preparing for a challenging negotiation, or processing sudden grief, but for most clients seeking ongoing support or transformation, the magic is in the ongoing experience of this relational context.
What can surprise people is that when the relationship is treated this way, some of the juiciest stuff can emerge between sessions. If you are open to it, I invite you to journal on or otherwise hold questions as you go about life between sessions. It is in the background processing our systems are so good at that we often find new answers, and new relationships to ourselves.
This means coaching is most useful when it takes place over time, both in terms of the number of sessions and in terms of the time over which those sessions take place. (Time plays a sneaky, powerful role in coaching work.)
Longer term engagements are also necessary for developing the tools most likely to bring the transformation you are seeking from coaching.
In my signature programme, which I recommend as the starting point for almost all engagements, I also use some key education to support the client’s work in coaching. This includes (in ways that are far less dry than this list would suggest):
Education and tools around the client’s internal cognitive and emotional environment
Complex systems principles relevant to individuals and individuals’ change processes, or norm-breaking work
High sensitivity and whole-person giftedness, where appropriate
Norm work – dismantling common norms that may undermine our resourcing, and developing new norms that support a sustainable, more human life.
That last one, dismantling and re-making norms, is a particularly huge matter for highly sensitive and gifted adults.
Few of us have examples of those like us who live divergent but generative lives. We are all subject to a cultural environment that would have us conform to hegemonic norms around work, achievement, gender, hustle, independence, worth, and money.
These norms are rarely supportive or sustainable for the population of clients I work with.
Changing our relationship with self, with work, with life, and doing important generative work of our own usually involves diverting from many of these norms, and tending to (and revelling in!) the consequences of that.
And what comes from all of that?
The resourcing of self.
The resourcing of the systems and environments of your life.
And, ultimately, the resourcing of the interdependent world beyond you.
If you feel like the above makes us a good fit, book a coaching call today, and we can get started.
Or, you can contact me by email, or subscribe to my Substack newsletter “The Living Library” to receive posts that align with this ethos, even as their topics go beyond it.