Gordon Symons

My approach is grounded in the coachee’s’ reality and goals and derives initially from my years of coaching senior executives to raise their performance in specific tasks together with my background in industry and business: As a Systems Analyst at Rolls Royce, 12 years as a Team Leader and 6 years as a Performance Coach for executives at CEO, Board and Director level and more recently, as an Energy and Resilience Coach for GlaxoSmithKline.

My approach is also informed by my training as a counsellor and psychotherapist and what I have learned from working with clients’ personal and work issues for over 20 years.

I believe that this background has given me the skills which enable my coachees to engage more fully in the coaching experience, to access blocks to their potential which may lie below the surface and often, to surpass their development goals.

All my work, both as an executive coach, as a team coach and as a counsellor involves the facilitation of self-empowerment. Empowerment enables full engagement, and full engagement enables peak performance.

My style is one of detached involvement, enabling me to be fully empathetic but also sufficiently detached to avoid over-identifying with the coachee.

Once the working alliance is strong enough I challenge their beliefs, I help them to identify new options and support them in grounding their choices.

 I hold the view that our deepest centre of identity, as well as being individual to each person, is also universal and common to all of us. This centre is the source of our highest potential, of who we can be.

Our personality can enable this potential to be realised but can also block our potential from coming through. Sometimes it can be very helpful for coachees to become more aware of how parts of their personality, the coping mechanisms which they normally employ, are limiting their potential.

Typical examples of this might be the Pleaser in them, the Perfectionist and the Critic. The coachee can learn to disidentify from these useful but sometimes limiting parts of themselves in order to open more fully to their potential. It is my experience that when they do, they gain a wider vision, a new sense of proportion, of balance, a sense of inner freedom and energy for living.