I’ve never had any formal executive leadership coaching. However, when Sara contacted me, I was ready to give it a shot. It turned out to be a great decision. The best thing about Sara is that she works hard to understand who you are as a human being, not just as a leader. What started out for me as a professional experiment turned into a personal journey of self discovery which has been helpful across all aspects of my life. As a result, Sara has honed a toolbox of skills within me to help deal with a vast array of leadership challenges. I’ve made tangible changes to how I approach various aspects of my role including coaching direct reports to maximize their potential, changing the way I approach decision making and problem solving as a leader, diversifying my thinking and the team, and understanding the difference between useful and useless anxiety. I’ve been so impressed with Sara that she is now coaching other key people within my studio and already they are seeing tangible results too. I would recommend Sara without hesitation to anyone who is looking to coach either themselves or members of their organization. She will not disappoint!

Working in the innovation space, I wanted to keep my mind in tip top shape. When I started working with Sara, I never really thought about what intuition means. You always have this thought about it being something inherent, and it's going to come out when it's ready, and it's going to deliver the goods when you need it, and people say always follow your instinct, and you never understand what that typically means, you just think you're going to evolve into it. But I think what Sara did really well for me, and which I loved, was she gave me something really, really tangible in accessing it, and being able to put a framework around what and how and where it can be useful. And I think that, to me, is something that I'm still practicing, and what I realize is it just gets better over time. So, giving me the patience and the knowledge that I need to have it grow into just something that happens organically, but now with a lot more awareness about why it's happening organically and how it can support me. So I think that's been great. Sara aligns herself to the person who she's coaching. And so it wasn't that it was a one-dimensional: "this is how I do it, and you're going to have to deal with it". She took the time to really understand me, and then she was able to be a little bit more esoteric (which I like) in terms of how she communicated with me. And I appreciated that, and I think that helped me in opening up and being a lot more tuned in when I'm speaking with her, and allowed me to be a lot more open as well. I'm still learning even 2 months after finishing my program. Even though we've completed the sessions, the impact lingers on. The awareness of being present and being in the moment with how I'm going to be utilizing intuition and being able to bring that into just the course of the way I run my life, whether it be a personal thing or a professional thing. It has got such broad application. And then now that I have the tool, which is that capability, and I'm trying to sharpen it and develop it further, and it's just getting better. I wondered initially "is it really that simple?" And then I realized how it's impacting how I feel, how I communicate, the decision making that I'm doing. It has so many multifaceted impacts. And so from my perspective, I think what I took away from my experience with Sara, in short, is she gave me the tools, the awareness, and the capability, and then I've been expanding the impact of it. And so I think that that's been probably for me, so powerful, that I can wholeheartedly say that I don't feel alone anymore. I am quite simply able to access more of my capacity. Leaning in on intuition in a way where, you can get almost a black and white binary kind of approach to what can be hugely complicated, and hugely time consuming things. So I've got a lot of my time back, in true tangibility. I had a tendency personally to dwell on things for weeks and months on end. But I think that utilizing the tools that you've given me, the capability that you've given me by working with me over the over those months, has really been really helpful in me trusting my decisions. And I think for me, that's been a huge shift. I trust myself more. And inevitably, that leads me to being more confident. That inevitably leads me to being happier with my decisions, and so generally more happy. And I think that it's also made me a better leader. Because I believe that one of the jobs as a leader, is you have to instill self belief in others. And until you actually practice it yourself, which intuition and intuition coaching has helped me do, you can't really sell that concept to somebody else. So, feedback from my own team is that I'm so much more clear about the decision making that I'm doing now, that it's helping us to be confident in taking those steps as well and executing on those. Otherwise, you know, you're always asking, "Oh, was this the right thing to do? Should we should we go full throttle? Should we not?" And so I think that that helps team dynamics, it helps collaboration, it helps us trust each other more as a team. I think genuinely that that kind of lifts the entire team in a fairly organic way. I think that you need to have a view, as a leader. You can always get opinions, but you yourself need to be grounded in your views, without being rigid. So it just helps you position things a lot more clearer and more consistently. Sara's calm, very positive, and very enthusiastic demeanor makes things a lot easier in terms of building a connection. And what I would ask everyone to do is that while you're going through this journey, keep an open mind, be very, very aware of how positive the positives you're experiencing are, because as you do that, you start experiencing more. The more you do this, the more the good things start multiplying as you believe and dive into the process. I thought before that I'm a pretty uncoachable kind of person, because I've been through so many different coaches through my life. And I felt like I'd seen it all. And there isn't going to be another aspect to it. But somehow Sara found that aspect. The fact that she took the trouble to be able to find that with me, and then be able to recognize it and be able to tune herself into that for the entirety of the sessions we've had. I think that she can probably do that very effectively with literally anyone. So go head first into it. I cannot recommend coaching with Sara enough.

Nearly 8 months ago, Sara reached out to me via LinkedIn. There was something in her message and posts that intrigued me…that caught my attention. I had been working for a company for about a year and a half and knew it was not where I would want to spend the rest of my career….the fit just wasn’t right. I had considered seeking a coach to help navigate my situation as I wanted some guidance through the process and Sara's message was very timely. I would say that my initial thoughts around coaching was to help guide…support me through job transition. The coaching has indeed helped me through my transition, but I have gained much more. I have worked with a few coaches in the past and Sara's approach is so much more personable…and very comfortable. Each session has been very applicable and timely….and very individualized. Sara does not take the “textbook” approach. At the end of each session, I truly feel that progress is made, and I believe it is through a unique approach of storytelling and the way in which Sara asks questions. The dialog is always very comfortable, and we discuss things beyond surface level. With other coaches, I felt that they simply recited a book they had read or just scratched the surface in an area. For someone like me that may not initially want to share much, Sara quickly developed my trust which has resulted in a much more productive experience. I love seeing results. I definitely have a renewed level of confidence… which has carried over into not only my professional life by my personal life as well. After having nearly 3 decades of a successful career, I was in a bit of a slump. I wasn’t feeling challenged, rewarded or honestly that I was with the right company. I knew I wanted….needed to make a change, but to be honest I was scared that I would make a bad decision…again….and didn’t want to risk failure. Over the last several months, we have spent a lot of time understanding the roots my thoughts but it was with her simple exercises and rewiring and retraining of the mind that I confidently was able to make a recent professional change. Early on, Sara made a statement…it is important to know what you are running to…. and not just away from. Her coaching and guidance helped me determine what was must important to me, challenged my responses when they were surface level, and coached me to design a plan of action. But most importantly the rewiring of the brain allowed me to confidently execute the plan. I am looking to continue to work with Sara individually as well as through another group session. Sara makes our sessions comfortable, she truly cares about her clients and coaching them to success…whatever that might look like. She has helped me improve and reach my goals, rather than just simply offering guidance and recommendations. She is a true coach. I have and I will continue to recommend Sara. I have been asked how I found Sara, seeing as you are in Europe and I am in the US…and why I would have selected her over someone local. I always respond that I felt the connection early on through our early discussions and after researching and reviewing her work, I believed her approach was ideal for me. But it is the growth that I have seen in myself, an igniting of confidence and energy that is the real reason I would recommend her. Her methodology works and I've seen a large return on my investment.

Sara made me feel comfortable in exploring the uncomfortable. Before working with her, I needed to make everything OK for others. In doing so, I always put everyone’s needs before my own. No one asked or expected me to do this, I just did it. She helped me understand why I did it, and what I needed to do to move beyond it, so I could focus on my own career needs. Consequently, I’m advancing a business I started two years ago! I’m now hyper-focused on what services I want to provide, not what others would expect me to provide. This has fuelled my ambitions and is allowing me to break through barriers that were previously in my way. I’m more confident about what is I want to do, and what I must do to achieve it. This confidence has several positive spinoffs, such as increased self-worth, motivation and courage. Sara is thoughtful, patient, and insightful, and her calming disposition makes it easier to explore inner truths that can be difficult to acknowledge. I recommend coaching with her. It will change your life.

I wanted to do coaching because you do get to a point where you start to plateau. And as soon as I felt that, I thought, I've got to find some way of having a learning mechanism for myself to develop further. Right from the start, I could just see that Sara gets me, understands what my pain points are, and has business experience herself. A lot of coaches that I've been told about or come across don't have that. They are almost academic. And I think what I found with Sara was that she’s done all of that entrepreneur experience, and has then decided to go into coaching. Because that's then relatable to me. I thought we would be much more superficial in dealing with challenges and new learnings, but I found myself unearthing unexpected things. Sometimes it's like working with a diagnostician. It was really profound to learn that these, even, childhood influences, and people around you have such a profound effect in how you see the world. And I think a lot of that is this huge, revelatory kind of moment where you're like, "that's why I do that. Let’s choose to do different." I think some of the big tangible highlights for me were stopping always chasing revenue growth (something that has been a really difficult thing to change). And a refocus towards profitability, rather than chasing revenue, that was really useful to me, because that was part of my real growth through this process. And one of the other really big ones, I think, has been the way I coach others. So coaching other people through a lot of their issues, and a lot of my teams, I'm often spending a lot of effort coaching them. But now I have a step formula that I picked up from our work on how I do that. Whereas before, it was very haphazard. I was spending hours with different team members, and meaning well, but probably, just haphazardly trying to coach them. It saves me a lot of time, it's appreciated, and it has really great results. Sara gets the business world and gets the coaching world. She’s invested heavily into improving herself. So, anyone with a growth mindset will really benefit from that, because you're pairing up, with someone who's got a growth mindset themselves, and, and really understands that they've got to be building themselves up further and further. Learning never stops. I can recommend that Sara is someone who's able to bring the best out in people. I think that's a natural ability. I think some people are born with it. And she’s recognized that and is able to really utilize it, in a way that relates directly to the business environment.

I felt I wanted to do coaching because I was inspired by the character Wendy Rhoades on the Netflix series, Billions, where she helps people achieve their highest level of performance. I personally felt that it was important to have an independent sounding board to ensure that I am at my highest level. One of the things that Sara helped me with was shifting mental blocks and anchors (that I didn’t even realise were there). I needed to break those mental cycles, push past my fears and blockers to drive forward. I really got my ‘mojo’ back through working with Sara. Some tangible business results that have transformed the business and put us on the path to 10X growth this year include: Transition from the kind of clients that we were working with (too many small customers that were draining our time and energy). We strategically focused the business towards higher margin, larger enterprise customers. We are now targeting big, brand name companies and getting some traction going! As a leader, I wanted to be in control. I realised that I needed to make smart, hiring decisions. I hired a Chief Fun Officer to motivate our team, by introducing more fun at work (especially whilst working remotely). I always felt I was dragging my team along, but I gave my team some opportunities to step up, perform and ideate. I found that supporting my team and providing these opportunities to my team led to greatly increased performance. My team are now taking responsibility, and I feel like they are really in it. Our attrition rate has now fallen from 30% to 0% in the last couple of months. I navigated issues in my personal life and resolved those issues, so I had more time and energy to focus on making the business a success. Intangibly, I got back my spark and my energy. I had almost ‘forgotten’ that I’d done this before, due to having lost my mojo. I’d built successful businesses in the past, and I knew I could do it again. The greater my energy levels, the greater the energy of my team. We are now much more resilient to the challenges that business life throws at us! I would not hesitate to recommend Sara to entrepreneurs and business leaders!

In business as in sports, having a good coach can be a game changer, which is what I got in my sessions with Sara. As I was stepping into a new role, in a new organization for me, that was due to undergo heavy change across the board with it’s fair share of challenges, Sara was a constant in my corner, helping and guiding me along the way. I have a tendency to want to do everything quickly, see a lot of progress and act a little more on my toes which caused me a lot of frustration as my organization was transitioning and transforming slower than I’d have liked. Sara helped me slow things down, remove the frustration and generally to see the bigger picture, pull out the positives and challenge the negatives with actionable steps to break them down. She consistently provided sage advice, which always brought the most important items into focus and drove me to be a better leader. By working with her, myself and my organization were able to successfully navigate really sizeable challenges, which once we got through have led to 40% YoY revenue growth, a more scalable plan for future growth, all the while retaining all of our key contributors. I doubt I would have stayed let alone my whole team if it wasn’t for Sara. She’ll add value for you regardless of your situation, but most definitely I cannot recommend her enough if you anticipate largescale, uncomfortable change occurring as she’ll help you stay focused on the most important things and see the change through!

The opportunity to do the coaching came at a time when there was already change happening within the organisation, as well as for me personally as I stepped up to a more senior position.  It was a real chance to talk through my concerns and issues around the leadership challenges and it helped me to reflect on what my personal strengths and weaknesses were – as well as learning how to play to the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses.  And to truly understand where I fitted into the leadership team and what I had to offer. I felt that you really saw me – you took the time to see the person underneath and to draw out the good parts.  You took the time to understand my personal motivators and what made me who I am. I learned that I truly am a leader and I do have a lot to offer.  I am not perfect but nobody is.  I can be impatient with people “not like me” and I need to learn what motivates others and how to play to their strengths.  I also learned that sometimes it is never going to work and people need to go their separate ways – and sometimes that is ok.  I do not need to do everything.  I need to learn to delegate and I need to learn patience if I am going to be an even better leader. Some tangible results for me were having the courage to step forward and lead the company when a void opened up at the most senior level (CEO).  Having the confidence and the belief in myself to put a whole new strategy and vision together for the company, to build a team around me and to get their support and buy in. To deliver the pitch…. And to win support and significant funding for it! I found I had a real shift in mindset and a growing self-belief in myself and my leadership abilities, that surprised even me.  I guess it was always there but Sara brought it to the surface and magnified it.  I was able to understand my motivations and my frustrations better – to know what caused them and how to deal with them.  To look at myself and see where I could improve to become an even better leader. I would 100% recommend Sara!  I am now finished the initial coaching period but we will be coming back to continue once the new leadership team has had the opportunity to settle in and gel.  I would like to extend the coaching to others in the team and find opportunities for us to be coached together as a team.

We were a young but quickly growing business. Having grown organically, we had naturally developed a strong culture and sense of purpose, but had never framed it, put it into words a developed a Vision, Purpose and Mission Statement. Having worked in business transformation for years I knew the importance of clearly defining your vision - particularly as you’re navigating your team though big changes and growth. I needed someone external to bounce off. Someone who I hadn’t worked with before, with a fresh pair of eyes and not from our industry. Sara really helped me focus on and get the important stuff done! Having a time in the diary every other week where we’d go through my actions forced me to spend time working on the business instead of in the business. She’d hold me to account - and being the type of person I am (a starter, but certainly not a finisher), I needed that most. In my previous roles, working for larger companies and reliving large scale change, I was optimistic, confident and bullish. I learnt this wasn’t necessarily the case as a business owner. I was behaving much more cautiously than I thought I was.  This cautious behaviour was limiting our potential. The feelings haven’t gone away, but I now recognise them and have a process to snap out of it. Working with Sara has definitely contributed to our growth. In figures - since we started our engagement, our run-rate revenue has doubled, our adviser headcount has doubled, and we’ve moved into a new office onsite with IBM. Over a 6 month period, we developed a clear vision, purpose and mission statement, found the confidence to grow faster (hiring more staff and investing in growth) - this was all happening, throughout the uncertainty caused by COVID. We can now see where we’re going, and we’re all working hard to get there. I’m now finding myself daring to dream more. I can’t stress enough how important it is as a small business leader to have an ‘outsider' who will challenge your thinking and push you. Of course I know best practice, but you’d be amazed how much of that critical thinking goes out the window when you’re in the thick of it, working frantically in the business - you lose sight of the bigger picture and quickly become a busy fool. I would definitely recommend Sara!

Passionate would be the first thing to say about Sara. We met when I was looking for a change, I needed to change my leadership style and it helped me to build and unify a great team by learning how to lead myself and lead others. People say change is hard. I agree, but it is much easier when you have Sara as your coach. She's been an inspiration to me and it has helped me to maximise my effectiveness. I've learnt more about myself and specific behaviors I needed to adjust. I've been fortunate to find her.

Having focus and support, I've solved problems that have enabled both my businesses to progress quickly to the next stage. And it's changed the way I think about how I look after these companies, how I control my time and support my team. And it's made me realise I need to put time in my diary to reflect, address my emotions and do what do I need to do to address that. It's been a reprogramming exercise. Which has made my businesses soar! By virtue of getting on top of the challenges I was facing, I've found a big reduction in my anxiety levels and the feeling of being able to cope with situations better, provides confidence. Aligning personal goals with business goals and making sure they are symbiotic with each other has made me a happier person. A really positive experience all around. I'd highly recommend Sara.

We are a smaller technology company,  and we were going through some quite big changes at the time I met Sara. And we were growing. We were changing the business model,  and pivoting. We were getting some new investors on board.  We had new people coming in.  And in a nutshell,  it was something I saw as a need of having a pillar,  some code,  connected to the founder team to help us get through these changes. It's so easy to slip away from, I'll say,  prioritizing our company values, during change. I have been positively surprised about how Sara helped us "address the elephant in the room" and helped us have much needed discussions, as a team, which sometimes have been difficult. The whole purpose of this was to make our business more effective and increase collaboration across important decisions we needed to make. Sara gave really fantastic support, helping us facilitate these things and be able to to flip the coin and looking at ourselves in different ways,  both from from a weakness and strength perspectives as well. This has really helped our team cohesiveness and success. There really was a high need for individual performance but we were often misaligned on expectations.  And because this is a multi-cultural team coming with various backgrounds and also experienced in different ways; we found that communication was often a challenge. It required additional attention to certain things and particularly in how to communicate and make decisions together when you're working across time zones. Sara really helped us get clear on how to do this better. We have much better clarity of what we are and who we are as a company and how we're contributing well or not well to the business, the individual role we're playing and most of all,  the common goal we want to achieve together.  We also know how to support each other in asking for help as well.  Asking for help is sometimes most difficult, even though this should be the most easiest part. Sara has been a massive help for us.  And coaching is just something that's definitely a recommendation to bring on in any company,  whether they're bigger or small. I cannot overstate the value of having third party objective support to help us move forward as a team and as a company.

I found myself getting easily frustrated with members of my team when I first started working with Sara. So one of my major discoveries through working with Sara on a group basis was how to influence people as a leader. The easiest way to change the behaviour of others is to change your own reactions! I looked at how I could communicate differently and how I could model the behaviours I wanted to see from the team. Not only did that give me back my power (and get me out of victim mode), but what I found was that people started to change naturally as a response to me changing. I also discovered the powerful role of the leader as coach. By asking the right questions at the right time, I could influence change in other people through helping them come to a realisation themselves, rather than trying to convince someone. If you want to make leading a team more effortless, getting your coaching skills up to scratch will help you to do this. AND this also directly translated into more powerful sales conversations – in my role as Head of Sales.

In August of 2020 I had been searching for a personal business consultant when I received a contact request from Sara.  After speaking with her and interviewing other consultants I made the decision to work with her.  I chose Sara because I wanted the perspective of someone who was different than mine as well as someone, I could tell would challenge my thought processes.  Thus, in September 2020 I began a yearlong consulting engagement with Sara. I chose to renew the contract thereafter and increase the scope of the engagement to group leadership coaching and team training. Throughout the process I have learned many things both of myself and in growing my business.  I have become more thoughtful of the process and team I lead, understand my vision of where I want to take my business and have a much better grasp on how to go about meeting business goals and objectives.  Sara helped in redefining our core values, sales process, and target market.  We have been able to begin to move upstream and diversify our client base.  During this time our staff has grown and correspondingly sales have increased by nearly 50%, and the business is more profitable.  Personally, I have learned to dedicate time to reflection.  I weekly set aside time to think, read and work on myself as an individual. What you will find when you work with Sara.  She is direct and works with you to find the answer you are seeking; however, will not just “give” you the answers.  Sara asks for a weekly homework and assignments.  These are easily accomplished if you are good at setting goals. Other thoughts:  write down what you talk about.  Easily said but essential as you can both review and relearn items you’ve discussed.  Read a lot.  Discuss books and listen to Sara’s perspective.  Invest the time.  The business growth and education are worth 10 times the cost of engaging with her. Finally, don’t hesitate to work with Sara.  I do not have any reservations about recommending that you work with her.

I wanted to participate in a group of diverse and interesting people because it brings this melding of minds. So that was what I was looking for when I came to the mastermind group. That hive mind. I had previously done one to one coaching with Sara and made incredible leaps and I was ready to further my learning with Sara but in a different format! The group were from different fields and different regions in the world. I think that was really interesting to find out that knowledge and experience is very much transferable. So when we were learning things as a group, people would bring their experience of that mindset or that area. And it was always relevant,even if that person was from a different background. I was also able to bring my experience to the group too. Something specific that I learned in the course – I always thought of myself as somebody who could learn skills, but I had never perceived leadership as a set of skills, more as an inner ability that you were sort of born with, like the ability to sing. And one of the things I definitely learned is that leadership is a skillset and it’s honed over time and the learning of how to be a leader never ends. Once I realised that, I could work strategically on improving elements of that skillset. Since the mastermind, I’ve taken on some more public facing engagements and assumed more responsibility over my domain of the company. So that’s actually led to some really interesting connections here in London, and a project that we’ve started on recently called London Voice, where we’re doing actual public intervention, something that I never would have gotten near to before, as usually I’m the person behind the scenes. I’ve also got more involved in the management of the legal and finances in the company, where I realised I had an affinity to these things, and that maybe they weren’t being managed optimally. And that was causing frustration to me, and also causing disruption to the company. Plus we’re closing in on a new round of funding now. In terms of mindset shifts, it was a really different experience hearing other people’s views on them and how they’dexperienced difficult mindsets, and how they’d overcome them. And then we had Sara helping guidingus through with really good mechanisms on how to deal with it. So, things like how to manage stress or founder relations, or, the common imposter syndrome! I’ve definitely integrated some of those mechanisms into my life. And I think the group setting made that an easier process, because you could tell how these people had tried that in their lives. And you could implement that in your own life, rather than sort of having this flat, kind of cold model in front of you. The group made it a human experience You learn how it works for different people in different ways. And in real situations with evidence. Sometimes it’s the evidence that it didn’t work, but then you learn how to reframe it to make the tool more effective. I learned a lot about myself through the eyes of other people, which is something I haven’t really experienced before. And the group melded really well. So I think Sara did a really great job on finding the right people for this group. It can be a great supplement to one on one coaching with Sara.

I wanted to hire a coach to improve my communication and leadership skills. Working with Sara, I have learned more about my strengths and weaknesss in my leadership style, and got more clarity on areas for improvement needed to create a strong personal brand. For example, I learned that my highly competitive nature had created a strong sales track record and a great deal of success in my life, but my lack of self-awareness and of those around me was damaging relationships and impacting outcomes, and holding me back. Through coaching, I was able to come to grips with myself and my leadership style which needed to progress beyond the journey that got me to this point, in order to reach the next level. My past highly energetic and aggressive self-focused person was not creating trust and inspiring others cohesively and consistently. I needed to put aside my ego and find other personal drivers. Great sales people often have “Grit” that is sourced deep from their childhood. They often have something to prove. Contrastingly, I realised the power of the "collective win". Great leaders think of others winning, and moving to “we” vs just the “me.” They walk a fine balance between ultimate commitment and focus and understanding others and finding what drives them. I now believe I have what it takes to be a great leader. Changing in my communication style is a major uplift. I am listening pro-actively and understanding better. Thus, my confidence has improved. Being more aware has also enabled me to connect better with others and judge each situation with more clarity, in order to take the best course of action. And to top it off, I have been offered Board Advisory opportunities and consulting work as well. I would highly recommend Sara to anyone wanting to develop their leadership potential and become a highly effective and influential leader!