My Interesting Job: Behavioural Change Coach

I always wanted to work with people and effect positive change in some way. Both my parents are immigration and human rights lawyers. My dad doesn’t practise anymore, but growing up in that kind of family, you hear stories from a young age about the different sorts of lives people live. When I was seven years old, my parents went on sabbatical and took me and my twin brother travelling. I remember being in Nepal and just being absolutely shocked by the poverty. I’d come from London and didn’t really understand what it meant to be poor halfway across the world. I remember so vividly standing there, at seven, with my jaw on the floor. 

For the past six years I’ve been working as a behavioural change coach. I started doing this kind of work when I was working for a charity running rehabilitation programmes in prisons for young men. That’s where I discovered neuro linguistic programming (NLP). NLP is a model that was created in California in the 80s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who were fascinated by how humans did things excellently. NLP is very structured as a process: ‘neuro’ is about neurological pathways in your mind; ‘linguistic’ is about how you communicate with yourself and other people; and ‘programming’ is about the action that you take in the world. It’s all about results and action as a consequence of the way you communicate with yourself. 

I saw how useful NLP was for some of the young men that I was working with – some of whom had committed lots of offences and had been doing the same thing repeatedly and getting into trouble. To see a cyclical reoffender change their patterns of behaviour and do things differently was really inspiring to me. When I was working with these young men in person, on the ground, I found the training that I’d done in NLP incredibly useful, in communicating with them and showing them how to think differently, from different perspectives, and new ways of doing things.

I've always been really fascinated by people and how we work and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, because storytelling is human nature. I studied classics at university, then I did a master’s in the reception of the classical world. I remember in my first year at university, reading a book about Achilles and how he essentially exhibits the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But PTSD was only very recently labelled as an experience, after the Vietnam War. The thing I loved most about studying the Greeks and the Romans, and reading the stories, myths, literature, philosophy, politics and everything is just how universal human nature is – and how we’re the same human beings today and we’re still experiencing the same physical, biological processes. 

When I was at university, I would go into state schools and mentor one-to-one. I used to tutor as well so, from a young age, I’ve always worked with people in that kind of capacity. When I finished my master’s, I joined the charity Key4Life as a volunteer. I was paired up with a guy who was soon to be released from prison. I started off doing comms, events and fundraising, as well as working as part of the team on the ground. Soon, I started running the programme in London and then I became operations manager running all the programmes.

My next job was at the Leon restaurant group, where I was head of wellbeing. My role was to develop and deliver a wellbeing programme for all its employees – whether that’s people who work back of house, front of house or in the office – to enable them to live well. That’s part of the mission statement of Leon, so it’s really important that starts with the employees and isn’t reserved just for the customer experience. 

My biggest success story is a man I met through Leon. I started working one-to-one with some of the people who were involved in the terrorist attack on Westminster Bridge. They were suffering from trauma, so I worked to show them how to change how they were remembering and recalling what had happened. When we started working together, he couldn’t be in a crowd or by the river or anywhere that reminded him of what had happened that day. At the end of the process, we did the walk he’d done that day, through Westminster and over the bridge, and it was just incredible to see the physical transformation in him. He is why I’m here and doing this job. 

There’s no such thing as a typical day. For the past year or so, I’ve been running my own business as a coach and trainer. I work with people individually, doing one-to-one coaching work, as well as running talks – anything from 45-minute keynote speeches to 400 people to group training sessions. Everything I do is related to how to change behaviour, whether that’s looking at wellbeing or moving towards creating positive outcomes or emotional resilience or leadership, communication, performance, motivation, peer-effectiveness – any area that involves showing people how to change their ways of thinking in order to get results. Some days I’m running an all-day training programme for an organisation; other days I’ll have meetings and talk to people about possible work that I might have with them; or I could be on a training course myself. It changes a lot.