Hello and welcome.
People often ask how a chemical engineer came to be a leadership coach and speaker. It wasn’t a straight path.
I've always been fascinated by what lies beneath the surface—what shapes people and drives them. Long before I had the language for it, I noticed what wasn't being said and sensed the emotional undercurrents in a room. Even strangers on buses and trains would find themselves telling me things they'd never said aloud before. Looking back, I can see how that thread has run through my whole life.
Growing up in a working-class family in Glasgow's council tenements, books became both refuge and discovery. They sparked a lifelong curiosity about people, ideas, and what it means to be human. At high school, an inspirational English teacher introduced us to John Donne’s poetry in a way that fundamentally changed how I experienced language, while physics captivated me in its attempt to understand the unseen principles that govern the universe.
Curiously, I never loved chemistry, despite later choosing chemical engineering. It was the applied physics that interested me far more than the chemistry. More importantly, that decision was as much about security as it was about science. As the first in my family to attend university, expectations to achieve academically and professionally were high. Engineering offered a future that felt stable and certain.
I began my career with ICI, DuPont and Zeneca, later moving into senior management. While I valued the complexity and scale of that work, I found myself increasingly drawn to the human dynamics beneath it.
At 30, I went through a profound turning point that changed the direction of my life completely. The armour of a carefully constructed identity, one built around survival and conditioning, began to crack. It marked the beginning of a long inner journey—one that still shapes how I understand change, and who we become when the old map no longer fits. Learning to trust my inner voice transformed not only how I lived, but how I now work with leaders facing moments of transition and uncertainty.
In 2006, I founded The Awakened Leader Consultancy. For more than twenty years, I have worked with senior leaders and leadership teams navigating significant transition—moments when established ways of working are no longer sufficient for what comes next.
Over time, I've come to recognise that perception is at the heart of my work. I see the patterns and underlying dynamics that often remain hidden beneath leadership challenges. Clients describe a rare combination of deep empathy and perceptive clarity—an ability to sense what is happening beneath the surface and bring it into view with courage and care.
This way of working hasn't come from qualifications or methodologies alone. It has been shaped by decades of experience, long-term contemplative practice, annual Vipassana meditation retreats, more than twenty-five years of reflective journaling, Jungian dream work, and an enduring curiosity about human experience. Together, these have deepened my capacity to listen, discern and notice what often goes unseen.
More than anything though, it has been shaped by living through my own thresholds. Again and again, I’ve learned that we have to let go of what no longer fits, trust what is emerging before we can fully see it and have the patience to allow the next chapter to unfold.
Outside work, you'll find me with a book, writing poetry or riding horses. I divide my time between Edinburgh and Andalucía, where I'm learning Spanish and continuing to discover the world through another language. My poetry has been published in several journals, and one of my ambitions is to write in Spanish one day.
Awards & Recognition
Qualifications & Associations
My approach integrates evidence-based tools with depth practices to surface what sits beneath conscious awareness, including psychometrics, 360 feedback and work with shadow, dreams, mindfulness, and somatic practice. Together, these reveal the patterns shaping leadership and support deeper, more sustainable change.
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
EE Cummings
