Home

"Passionate about helping people and organisations to be the best they can be"

About us

Working in development for many years Denise has written Learning & Development Strategies, assessed and developed leaders and managers. She works with groups and one to one with individuals across a wide range of subjects. The focus has always been on helping those individuals, the teams they are part of and the organisations they work in, to positively thrive.

What you get by working with Denise is questions that make you think, the opportunity to build and maintain self awareness, supportive challenge and tools to get to an understanding of what you really want to do and achieve. This could be individually or collectively as a team.

You will also have access to tools and techniques that help choose the changes that you want to achieve and the development that will help you to move forward.

As an individual you will benefit by learning how to be self accepting, resilient, more confident both in yourself and in working with others.

We can all learn to build and maintain good relationships, to lead and to influence others. The firm foundation you need first is a great relationship with yourself.

Have a look at What we do below.

Keep on scrolling - thank you

What we do

We know that meaningful learning comes from a combination of on the job experience, support through coaching, mentoring and feedback; and relevant and targetted formal learning. When we work with you to facilitate learning and enhance the contribution of your people we focus on the following...

Making real connections to your values, capabilities and strengths and strategies.
Encouraging people to take responsibility for their learning and to create value for themselves.
Keeping the context of learning firmly rooted in your reality and what you experience on a day to day basis.
Encouraging independent thinking, providing choice and variety for people to learn in different ways and who they might learn with.
Setting challenges rather than giving answers, not doing things for people that they can do for themselves - people are more often than not better than they think!

Developing the capacity to thrive

We work one to one with individuals, and with teams or groups in a workshop setting to develop self awareness, skills, mindsets and behaviours that will enable them to thrive.

We all need to be resilient, confident and have the ability to adapt if we are going to be our best self right now and going forward. We believe that with focused and empathic support everyone has the potential to learn and develop. In fact being able to keep on learning is one of the key skills we need in our toolkit.

Let us help you to keep on learning and create the future for yourself which you want to have.

Adaptability and Change Readiness

The world of work is changing at an accelerated pace. Predictions are that we will experience more change in the next 10 years that in the previous 100 years.

Do you know whether you have the adaptability to thrive as the world of work changes? Are you able to reskill if things change and you want to get a different job, go to another organisations or start a new career?

As a certified partner of AQai we can assess how adaptable your people are both as individuals and as teams by measuring their AQ. AQ is a metric of adaptability. Using their innovative AI driven assessment tool we can measure an individuals AQ and when 5 or more people in one team have taken the assessment we can produce a team report. Then we help you to develop.

Developing your AQ

For individuals the AQai AQ Me report provides ideas for development and building on that we can through one to one coaching sessions and in person or virtual group workshops, exploring different dimensions of adaptability and helping you to create choices to enhance and grow your adaptive capacity. Again we would recommend a combination of the two.

For Teams, an initial session to explore the AQ Team report results and answer the "so what" question allows for sharing and greater understanding. Followed by a Team Development Plan, we work with you to make the changes within your team which will enhance your collective change readiness and your ability to learn, adapt and reskill together.

Mental Toughness

There are 4 core areas in the Mental Toughness model, each has two sub components:

CONTROL – the extent to which we feel in control of our lives and our emotions (Life Control & Emotional Control)

CHALLENGE – how we respond to challenge and unplanned change (Risk Orientation & Learning Orientation)

COMMITMENT – how we respond to (demanding) goals and targets (Goal Orientation & Achievement Orientation)

CONFIDENCE – in our abilities and in our dealings with others (Self Confidence & Interpersonal Confidence)

Together they provide a picture of your overall Mental Toughness and what you can do to develop it further.

What is mental toughness?

Professor Peter Clough defines 'mental toughness' as ".. being able to deal with everything that leading a full life will throw at you, both good and bad. It is about having that inner sense that you are content that you have within you the ability to achieve most of what you want to achieve.”

The good news is ‘mental toughness’ can be developed. We can help you understand your mental toughness and make choices on what you can do to make changes that work for you.

A psychometric test the MTQPlus is completed on-line and provides a reliable and quick assessment of an individual’s mental toughness.

MTQPlus can also be used to review the ‘mental toughness’ strengths of the team and identify strategies to improve collective capability. This can be also done through one to one coaching sessions with each team member or in team workshops.

We would recommend a combination of the two.

Happiness

Yes happiness! We believe that when work that is enJOYable everything is more positive and productive. We work with individuals or groups to really focus on living in the NOW whilst having the ability to look forward and create meaningful goals. When we understand what happiness is and it becomes a feature of our every day, then how we get to our goals and outcomes takes on a different meaning. After all, once we realise that when we achieve an outcome we look for another one, enjoying the path to get to them becomes all the more important.

"Denise’s challenging and insightful approach to coaching has brought great clarity and clearer direction in achieving my career goals and in my senior leadership role. Coaching of this quality is indispensable for any leader in today’s modern business environment."

Ali Coltman, Edinburgh

"Coaching sessions were very professional, supportive and challenging, with the emphasis on me to come up with solutions. Denise listens, shares and shapes the conversation to meet your individual needs and aims. Her coaching has provided clarity in my thinking and a plan for the future. I highly recommend Denise to anyone in need of the time and support to work out where they are and where they want to be"

Stuart Clubb, Shetland Islands

"One of the very best learning and development professionals I have come across. Very large back catalogue of experience across many fields and industries, and an amazingly fun and approachable style."

Ginny Jogee, Edinburgh