About
I'm not going to dress this up in corporate language. That's not where I come from and it wouldn't serve you.
What I bring is 40+ years of performing at a high level under real pressure. Not simulated pressure, but the kind where reputation, livelihoods and relationships are on the line, session after session.
I've also hit the wall
I know what sustained pressure does when it goes unaddressed to your clarity, your sleep, your relationships, your quiet sense of whether you're good enough. I know it not from research, but from experience.
I've questioned whether I was good enough for 45 years. I still do sometimes. And I'll be honest, there were times when I didn't manage it well. Unchecked thinking and a negative internal narrative cost me. Real situations with real consequences. I've also watched gifted musicians give up live performance entirely because the stage fright pressure finally outran their ability to cope with it.
Left unmanaged, this doesn't stay as background noise. It runs the show.
Here's what I know: you can’t fully understand what this feels like from a textbook. You can study it, categorise it and present it, but you can’t really authentically relate to it without having lived it. The academics who've spent a career in universities can tell you what the research says. I can tell you what it costs, what it does to you, and what actually moves it, because I've been on the wrong side of it and found a way through – multiple times.
I also had an extreme stutter that ruled almost half my life. Two speech therapy experts couldn't cure it. I did. Through determination, deliberate action and a fundamental shift in how I saw myself. Not when I felt ready. Not when the experts said so.
What they couldn't give me, I figured out, applied it and changed the course of my life.
That experience, and everything that came before and after it, sits at the core of everything I now bring to this work. And it's also why I know that when people say they've got it all together, they usually don't. It takes guts to own that. The people who do are exactly who I work with.
