WELCOME! What are you looking for? Explore the categories below!
WELCOME!
What are you looking for?
Explore the categories below.
Are you looking for a coach you can trust—and afford? Look no further! If affordability is the bigger question, have you considered learning to coach yourself? Or, what if you could simply read your way to enlightenment? All of these are possible through the many options available on this website. Have a look through the categories described above and see what will work for you, based on your budget and your preferred learning style.
Take the time to watch this introduction video for the Personal Effectiveness Coaching Program.
MY SERVICES
Life Coaching
Success can be defined in many different ways. For some, it’s about money. For others, it’s about the scale of contribution they make, or the quality of relationships they maintain. Still others want to search inside, find meaning, purpose their true expression. Either way, life coaching can put you on the path.
Coaching for Men
DEFINE FOR yourself what it means to be a man in the 21st Century. The old rules no longer apply. What are your values? What would meaningful success look like for you? Are you committed to achieve your potential? What legacy will you leave behind? Coaching for Men is life coaching with a special focus on men.
Executive Coaching
AS YOU climb the ladder of success, the demands become less technical and more behavioural. Develop your leadership skills as you move from one level to the next. Identify and develop your behavioural strengths and deal with your blind spots and avoidances. Define your authentic leadership brand.
Team Coaching
NO MAN is an island and no leader is without a team. Developing leader and/or team in isolation from each other does not produce sustainable results. Working together produces exponential benefits to move from being conflict-ridden to high-performing.
Enneagram Reports
THE ENNEAGRAM is a framework for understanding your personality. It reveals the links between your core personality attributes and your underlying avoidance areas, and how both show up as habitual and/or reactive behaviour patterns. You can apply the information to all areas of your life.
Self-Coaching Online
MANY PEOPLE find the investment of time and money for coaching prohibitive. If you’re in that position, you now have the option to coach yourself online with this affordable program! You’ll get to engage at your preferred pace—and price—and still enjoy a number of contact points with me, Neil, as your coach.
Books & Videos
WHAT BETTER way to start or finish your coaching journey than with a book?! All the awareness introductions and tools that you’ll get during a life or executive coaching program are made available through the Personal Effectiveness set. There are self-coaching handbooks as well. And that’s not all…!
Practical Mindfulness
MINDFULNESS IS about so much more than paying attention while eating. It is the salt in the mix of any personal development journey. It enriches and enlivens anything else you might learn or experience. It provides a path to personal mastery and is the key to transforming your experience of life.
MY MISSION
MY COMMITMENT is to effect a shift in human consciousness whereby our levels of personal mastery (self-awareness and the ability to self-manage) can match our relative mastery of science and technology.
To this end I will leverage technology to share words of wisdom that heal and support people to define and achieve holistic success in business and in life.
My hope is that all people, including and especially where we come together in the form of governments, corporations and political movements, will begin to act for the sake of harmony, and the ongoing, shared prosperity, of all spheres of life.
SINCE ALL human endeavour is achieved through one’s efforts in relation to other people, my sessions are always targeted at improved performance through a greater awareness of self in relationship with others.
I use powerful questions to support you to get the insights that you need. I partner you to convert those insights into actions, and I make sure you measure your actions. Through this, we ensure that you habituate new, productive behaviour patterns.
In the case of executive coaching, I make sure we get input from your sponsor, the company. For teams, I work with leader and team together, bringing in real work issues to create a live, action-learning environment.
I PROMISE to deliver a state of optimal performance through mindful self-awareness and personal mastery, and a commitment to excellence and being your best—a result which I call Personal Effectiveness.
Personal effectiveness means having the personal power to achieve optimal performance in service of your most meaningful goals, while remaining powerful and peaceful in the midst of life’s turbulence.
People high in personal effectiveness experience being authentic & successful, confident, caring & conscious, and powerful & peaceful.
I HAVE spent my entire professional life investigating the intersection between personal development (self-awareness, self-mastery) and holistic success in business and in life. My core approach to that has been practical, meaning I’ve gone out and tested whatever I learned.
An encounter with a psychologist in my early 20s led me to change tack and follow my passion for writing. I became an award-winning journalist and magazine editor. From there I stayed abreast of the shift to online media technologies and moved into the Internet start-up space. During that time, I experienced the power of coaching, and so I trained as a coach and, while setting up my practice, spent five years also training coaches in the same methodology.
Having practised meditation since my 20s, I learned about Vipassana meditation at age 40, and signed up for the full 10-day silent retreat, where you sit for 10 hours a day. (Vipassana meditation is an ancient practice used and taught by Gautama the Buddha, and provides the foundation for modern mindfulness.) Through Vipassana I learned objective observation of my own mind and of reality, and gained insights that inform all the work I do today—insights that I’ve tested in my own business and personal life. I have continued to practice it daily ever since.
At home, I’m a father, a fitness junkie and health nut, and a DIY pro. (I literally have thought about starting a YouTube channel and turning pro!) I enjoy watching sports, movies and series. I also enjoy reading, art shows and have a broad range of musical tastes. Oh, and I’m a whizz when it comes to WordPress websites. I’ve designed and developed many, including this one. (OK, I rely on a developer to do the real deep tech stuff.)
Above it all, I’m passionate about personal transformation and developing conscious leadership!
THE TOOLS I USE
YOU HAVE most likely been exposed to those pithy aphorisms of the ancient or Eastern sages that people share as memes on Facebook. When you read them, the really good ones, you probably find yourself going, Yes, that’s so true. In those moments, your mind goes quiet.
By contrast, when you are given information in the form of an academic lecture or text, your mind gets busy with thinking. Thinking leads to more thinking, and things can get quite noisy in your mind.
Insights that cut through thinking
When your mind goes quiet, it’s because you’ve had an insight – or a reminder – into the way things are without any interpretation that is based on historic, cultural, personal or intellectual bias. An insight cuts through subjective thinking, and knowledge-based learning, to see things as they are.
Ontological coaching is a method of questioning that delivers this type of insight, thick and fast, on the issues that you’ve been going around in circles analysing for months and years. It supports you to stop your normal spiral through delivering an insight and, in that space, to make plans to exit the spiral and set a new course.
FOR THE most part, our personalities are positive and, by expressing them, we can offer our gifts to the world. The problem is that those same personalities include what we call a defence mechanism: the things we’ve learned to avoid at all costs.
Some people avoid breaking the rules at all costs, while others avoid seeing them at all – they pretend the rules don’t exist; some avoid risk at all costs, while others avoid failure at all costs; some avoid conflict at all costs, while others avoid people at all costs. We each have one or two key areas of avoidance which are constantly being triggered and send us spiralling into habitual patterns.
Joining the dots
The enneagram is a tool that identifies your core gifts and avoidances, and links these to your habitual behavioural patterns. It joins the dots for you and for me as coach in a way that vastly accelerates the discovery phase of the coaching process, and deepens the conversation throughout.
Get your Enneagram Report and One-on-One Debrief today.
MINDFULNESS HAS become a buzzword. Yet it’s about so much more than just being present while you eat and walk. Applied properly, mindfulness is at the heart of all personal development.
The first step towards improving or transforming oneself is awareness, or being able to observe oneself objectively. This is easier said than done. When a person is angry, or scared, they are not likely to become aware. They tend to “lose themselves”.
Training the mind
Mindfulness trains the mind to recognise when it’s in a reactive state, to become present, and then to make a better choice about how to act in the situation. Clearly there are many ways to achieve this. However, mindfulness is like the “salt in the mix” that brings up the flavours of the dish – it enhances the gains you make through any other kind of practice or process.
