For more than 20 years, I have been interested in the patterns that shape how people think, feel, relate, and make decisions. My work has spanned counselling, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, behavioural change, communication, intuitive work, and, more recently, Metaphors of Movement. Although these disciplines are different, they have all contributed to the same underlying question for me: what is actually happening beneath the problem a person is describing?

I am a Holistic Counsellor, NLP Master Trainer and accredited Metaphors of Movement Trainer, as well as a published author and award-winning Toastmasters speaker. Over the course of my career, I have trained coaches, practitioners and helping professionals, facilitated workshops and retreats, developed professional training programs and worked with people from a wide range of personal and professional backgrounds. I was also one of Australia’s early online NLP trainers, developing and delivering education at a time when online professional training was still relatively new.

My story

From a young age, I was highly aware of what was happening beneath the surface of interactions. I noticed changes in people’s behaviour, emotional dynamics and inconsistencies between what someone said and what seemed to be happening. I was often interested in the part of an interaction that hadn’t been spoken about yet.

For a long time, however, I didn’t necessarily regard this awareness as a strength. Like many perceptive people, I learned to question what I noticed. I wondered whether I was interpreting things correctly, whether I was being too sensitive or whether I was seeing meaning that wasn’t there. Learning to distinguish between perception, interpretation and assumption became an important part of my own development.

That experience contributed to my interest in how people construct meaning from what happens around them. It also influenced the direction of my professional training. I wanted to understand not only behaviour itself, but the internal processes through which people interpret situations, form beliefs, respond to other people and become caught in patterns that can be surprisingly difficult to change.

My professional journey

My early work in counselling and personal development led me into Neuro-Linguistic Programming, where I eventually became an NLP Master Trainer. NLP gave me a detailed way of examining language, internal representations, behaviour and the relationship between the way people describe an experience and the way they respond to it.

Over the years, I continued to study and work across different approaches to personal change, including counselling, hypnosis, communication and intuitive development. I became increasingly interested in what happens when people are given the opportunity to examine an experience from a different perspective rather than simply being given another strategy for managing it.

This eventually led me to the work of Andrew T. Austin and Metaphors of Movement. His approach significantly influenced the way I think about language, perception and the physical descriptions people naturally use when talking about their experiences. It provided another way of exploring the relationship between how a person describes a situation and how they are experiencing their position within it.

That work has become an important part of my thinking because it moves beyond asking someone to explain an experience intellectually. It invites us to examine the structure of the experience itself: where something is positioned, what is happening around it, what is supporting it, what is exerting pressure, where movement is possible and where it is not.

What I have learned

After more than two decades of working in this field, one of the things that continues to interest me is that people can be extremely intelligent, self-aware and experienced in personal development and still find themselves unable to resolve a particular problem.

They may understand their history. They may have read extensively, attended courses, worked with therapists or coaches, reflected deeply on their behaviour and developed considerable insight into themselves. None of that necessarily means they can see what is happening in a specific situation while they are inside it.

I have found that some of the most useful work happens when we stop assuming that the obvious problem is the whole problem and become curious about what is maintaining it. The language someone uses, the position they describe themselves as being in, the decisions they cannot seem to make, the things they repeatedly return to and even the way they experience something physically can all provide information.

This is why I am less interested in giving people another set of instructions about how they should think, feel or behave. I am more interested in understanding the problem accurately enough that the person can see something they could not previously see.

The work I do today

My work today reflects everything I have learned across these different areas. It combines the practical discipline of coaching and behavioural change with counselling, communication, pattern recognition and the perceptual approaches I have developed through my work with Metaphors of Movement.

I continue to be interested in the relationship between language and experience, particularly in the ordinary expressions people use without giving them much thought. We talk about being under pressure, carrying something, feeling stuck, being pulled in two directions, having no room to move, not knowing where we stand or going around in circles. These descriptions can sometimes tell us more about the structure of an experience than a lengthy explanation of the problem itself.

I am also interested in the relationship between difficult situations and the body. People often notice tension, fatigue, disrupted sleep, headaches, stomach discomfort or a persistent inability to switch off while they are trying to deal with something unresolved. These experiences should not automatically be attributed to a psychological cause, and physical symptoms deserve appropriate medical attention. But they can also form part of the information a person brings when trying to understand what is happening in their life.

What has remained consistent throughout my career is my curiosity about the problem beneath the problem. I want to understand what someone is actually experiencing, what assumptions or patterns may be shaping it, what keeps it in place and what becomes possible when the situation can finally be seen differently.

I’ve written Essential Scripts for Coaches and Healers, created professional training programs, facilitated workshops and retreats, trained practitioners and helping professionals, and spoken extensively through Toastmasters, where I have received awards for my speaking.

My career has taken me through many different disciplines, but I don’t see them as disconnected parts of my work. Each has given me another way of looking at people, language, behaviour and change. The more I have learned, the more interested I have become in asking better questions rather than assuming that I already know the answer.

That is probably the simplest way to describe what has kept me interested in this work for more than 20 years.

Some problems are difficult to solve until they make sense.