Welcome to my website.
I support individuals, leaders, and organisations to master change.
Unfolding Leaders is a space for my writing on business, leadership, individual and organisational change.
A little of my background will give context to the content you find on this website.
Over my career, I have been fortunate to have worked with some exceptional individuals and companies that did not see the industries they worked in as most do. Without their influence, my life today would be nothing like it is. Because of their impact on me, I will share some of those insights, lessons and stories on the website. (Generally speaking, names and minor details will be changed to protect the privacy of those individuals. With that said, the views expressed on this website are my own, and not those of nor are they endorsed by the individuals or companies I have worked with.)
I feel that by sharing my experiences, it makes the content more tangible and relatable than would be the case if I simply shared ideas, concepts, theories, models and philosophies.
However, I didn’t always feel this way.
For many years I lived for learning new models, theories and ideas. As a voracious reader, I literally couldn’t get enough of them. At university, I would think nothing of taking a dozen or more books from the library in order to study a topic from every angle and absorbing the wisdom of the various authors. I took this approach to my work as a researcher in leadership and organisational change and applied it into my healing journey as well.
However, ultimately my life came to a point where I had to admit that they actually don’t change anything unless you apply them into your life. Many come to this same realisation via their addiction to self-help: ‘I’ve read all of these books about how to change my life, but nothing in my life has actually changed’. And you can see this reflected in recent times by the rise of people talking about the toxic world of self-help.
For me, the realisation came via a life-changing pull up from a mentor who was able to show me the harm of what I was doing. That mentor point blank said to me that if you keep reading about personal growth, healing and spirituality, you will reach a point where it is impossible to rehabilitate you out of what you think you know but have never experienced. He stressed that you must engage directly with life in order to grow and evolve.
That mentor’s simple pull-up changed my life.
I desperately ‘wanted what he had’, so his pull-up marked a point where I stopped all of the reading, and started to approach life more experientially.
Let’s take a few steps back from that moment.
Fortunately, very early on my career, I was given the ‘building blocks’ to see that there is another way to live and organise in life. I can’t overemphasise, that without having several people in my life in different spheres that thought unconventionally about the spheres in which they worked or practiced in, that I would think exactly the same way about business, organisations, leadership, change, and people as nearly everyone else does.
One of my mentors referred to this trap as ‘socialised thinking.’ In his context, leadership and organisational change, he pointed out that most people approach and think about business, leadership and change exactly the same way. Not unsurprisingly, they get very similar results, that, on the whole, they tend to not be very satisfied with. What they then tend to do is to go and try an alternative approach that is a product of the same thinking that created their issue in the first place. This strategy is then rinsed and repeated. It leads to endless frustration.
On my own career journey, I began my working life straight out of school at the leading investment bank in my home country. It was a company that has been spectacularly successful in its industry and been a source of constant innovation since its beginning. No company in the industry had come even remotely close to what they had achieved, or being able to replicate their success. When I worked there, they’d made increasing profits every year since inception and their return on equity was hundreds of percent greater than their closest competitor. Even today, they receive hundreds of unsolicited resumes every day from graduates wanting to learn their secrets and be a part of their success.
It was the first place I learned that almost everyone thinks about certain things or does a task exactly the same way (plus or minus a small deviation), and so they get the same or similar result. At this company, I tangibly saw the results of doing something differently. This simple principle has guided me, and I have applied to almost every aspect of my life ever since. I am beyond grateful that I didn’t start out working at an average company in the industry, such is the power of those around us and what we experience to shape our views.
After leaving that company and studying at university, I moved on to work over summer with that company’s key competitor, although, this time, in the funds management field. This company had a unique investment methodology (at the time), and were one of the only companies in the industry that foresaw and had and successfully positioned themselves before the major share market crash at the time. As someone who is naturally curious, I learned and experienced a lot in a short period of time working there.
The next key people in my life followed in the years thereafter. I met a self-made millionaire, whom I relentlessly badgered to mentor me, and then the person that changed the way I saw business and organisations, forever.
Like the two companies I’d worked with before, the owner of the company was able see outside of existing paradigms. Given my work experience, I’d already met and worked with people who were able to do this, and so it wasn’t a surprise to me to be challenged to think differently about how something worked. However, this time, it was not in relation to financial markets and their products or investment strategies, as was the case with the other two companies I’d worked with. Instead, it was in relation to people, leadership, organisational change, companies, and how they worked.
Both of my mentors at this time in my life were masters of the people side of human change. Practically speaking, I saw how it led them to having unconventional about business, organisations or leadership. Coincidentally, they both also had very high levels of awareness, seeing things most people never notice. I’d never met anyone like them before. Just like working in the first investment banks, I got to see what was possible when the human side of change and leadership was mastered. And what was being revealed was explosive. Part of what they were showing me is that organisations can become spectacularly successful when you master the human side of change. Even today, most leaders and companies are unable to do this. In my work with them, I saw tangible examples of when a leader masters change, everything becomes different. It was as if what was being presented to me was the master-key to business and life success. Knowing this, along with the events happening in my life at the time, inspired me to begin my own healing journey.
In that ensuing ‘healing’ phase of my life, I jumped fully into the world of therapy, shamans, gurus, and practitioners of all kinds of healing modalities. My life suddenly became very full. I had an insatiable thirst to learn everything I could about this world, wanting to emulate the success of my mentors. Outside of work, I began regular therapy, training to become a therapist and healer, and participating in healing workshops or retreats on most weekends.
On my holidays, I travelled to countries like India, spent time with monks, and meditated in ashrams. I also met and became friends with all kinds of interesting people as synchronicity seemed to be heightening in my life. That included on a holiday in Bali, befriending the healer that would later be featured in the movie Eat Pray Love, and people who shared the world stage with multi-million best-selling authors, as well as many other practitioners, healers and ‘seekers’. In short, my whole world became about personal growth, healing and evolution.
It was also what I consider to be the most challenging, emotionally draining, and unrewarding period of my life. It was years of the frustration of finding myself entrapped in a model of change that is all but guaranteed to fail, whilst concurrently sustaining the very misery it purports to resolve. So, if you’ve ever struggled with change, might not be you, it might be the model.
That same flawed model forms the basis of almost every leadership, organisational, and individual change program on the face of the planet.
Why was that time so difficult?
Because, in recent decades, the healing field has morphed into somewhat of a wild west where almost anything is considered acceptable to do in the name of ‘healing’. The array of products, goods, services, books, healing methods and modalities, and their associated claims are vast. Moreover, with so many conflicting claims, it becomes really easy to get lost in that world and find that over time virtually nothing in your life has truly changed.
In my case, I had curated a library of hundreds of books on self-help and healing meticulously sourced from all over the world. On many weekday evenings and most weekends, I was training to be a therapist and coach as well as participating in healing or personal growth workshops. For a few years, it consumed my whole life.
And then, one night, everything shifted for me.
I vividly remember sitting in a men’s healing group and having the powerful realisation that the person leading the group was every bit as ‘messed up’ as I was. Until then, what I hadn’t noticed was that he just had a few more coping tools, and so he appeared to have everything in his life together. He was a psychologist, after all, and so he must know everything about the human condition. Before that, I had just assumed that because someone was a respected therapist or psychologist that they had their life together and could guide me to do the same.
Sitting with that, even more shocking was the realisation that this extended to most of the people facilitating workshops, training or working on healing me, along with those who had written best-selling books in the field. My change client mostly flew First Class, and so he had met some of these people, and had been backstage at workshops run by others. He wasn’t under the same illusions I as. On one occasion he’d pointed out to me the disconnect between the public persona of several gurus and well-known authors and how they are in private. On another he challenged my idea of going to countries like India in order to seek some kind of enlightenment or awareness, by encouraging me to look more closely at the people I met.
It was almost too horrible to look at the truth of what was being revealed to me; that those well-meaning, hardworking, and genuinely sincere people who believed 110% in what they were presenting, were every bit as lost as I was.
Given the nature of the industry, it is also something that is rarely revealed.
Your therapist, coach or trainer will never say to you, I have certain aspects of my life that I’m reasonably satisfied with, but I regularly drink excessively, am addicted to sugar, still behave like a child when I am with my family, and I’ve always sucked at relationships. The realisation that others I was working with were little, if any more evolved than me, was something that was almost too confronting to look at. But deep down, I knew it was true. I’d been feeling the emptiness of the various healing modalities and workshops I’d been participating in for many months. And once I opened my eyes to it, I saw it everywhere. Somewhat reluctantly, I stopped participating in almost every training modality, workshop, and healing program that I had been involved with.
I don’t want to sound anti-therapist here, because I am not.
Many of my close friends are therapists, coaches and healers and I seek their support when required. There is a belief in the helping industry that someone can learn a modality, even something like coaching which isn’t healing, and that is all they need. And in that sense, one practitioner is not really all that different to another. That, at most, they differ only by their amount of experience. The truth I was awakening to at the time is that that isn’t enough. It is impossible for someone to take you to a place they haven’t been. For example, I would notice in workshops that people (including the myself and the workshop leaders) would give each other well-sounding advice. But it was ‘well sounding’ because everyone else was repeating it, not that it was actually true. It was akin to everyone giving me advice on how to get to a travel destination they’d never been to, but had extensively read about, and researched online.
At the time, I was blessed with being quite close to three people who had gone very deep, to a level most other people I was working with clearly hadn’t. I began to study them meticulously to see if I could determine what they had in common. In essence, I noticed a few key things, including, that they appeared to have dealt with their issues. What was most apparent relative to other people I knew at the time, was that they lived more lovingly towards themselves and everyone they met in their life. They walked their talk. I noticed that they weren’t just ‘loving’ at a workshop on the weekend and different at other times. They were like that with everybody. It was as though they had dealt with their issues and so, not being self-absorbed anymore, they had the space to bring everybody else up. There was one more key defining difference in how they all saw and experienced the world that the others I was working with did not. However, I will discuss elsewhere on this website. In noticing these differences, it became very apparent that if I stayed working with those that I was, and reading books written by others with a similar worldview, I was not likely to make any real progress on my own inner journey.
I made the decision to walk away from almost all of the modalities I was engaging in.
Fast forward a decade, and I’m well and truly on the other side of that space. I couldn’t have made a better choice. I had honoured my sense of what was true, as uncomfortable as it was to let go of all of those things at the time. Today, almost no aspect of my life is the same as it was before or during that period. I have been blessed with working with some of the most exceptional organisations and individuals, many of whom were able to think and act outside of existing paradigms. Collectively, these people gave me back my life; a life I totally love. I want all of that for you, and more, which is why I created this website.