Counselling, mediation and consulting are different kinds of work, and my role changes depending on the setting.
What remains consistent is my approach to the people, relationships and situations I work with.
I do not want to move too quickly from hearing what the problem is to deciding what should be done about it. Very often, what first presents as the problem is only part of what is actually happening.
My starting point is therefore to listen carefully, understand more fully, and only then consider what needs to happen next.
I think of this as:
Listen. Understand. Act.
Listen
Listening is more than hearing the words somebody says.
It means trying to understand how they experience the situation, what matters to them, what may be difficult to say and what they need another person to understand.
For that to happen, people need enough space to speak honestly without immediately feeling judged, corrected or defended against.
Non-judgement does not mean that everything somebody says or does is acceptable. It means trying to understand before reaching a conclusion.
In counselling, this creates the space needed to explore thoughts, feelings and experiences that may not be easy to talk about.
In mediation, it allows each person to be properly heard without assuming that listening to one person’s perspective means agreeing with it.
In consulting, it helps us look beyond the obvious presenting issue and become curious about what may actually be happening within a relationship, team or organisation.
Understand
Once we have listened, the next step is to make sense of what we are hearing.
Why does this pattern keep repeating?
What sits underneath the conflict?
What past experiences, beliefs, expectations or fears may be influencing how somebody is responding now?
What lies behind a position that somebody feels strongly about?
What else may be happening within the relationship, family, team or organisation?
Understanding often requires us to slow things down enough to see connections that are difficult to recognise when we are caught up in the situation ourselves.
It does not remove accountability.
In fact, greater understanding can make accountability more useful because we are no longer simply asking, “Who is to blame?”
We can begin asking:
“What is happening here, what part do I play in it, and what might need to change?”
Act
Insight is valuable, but insight on its own does not necessarily change anything.
At some point, understanding has to influence what we do.
That may mean responding differently to an old emotional trigger, having a conversation that has been avoided, setting a clearer boundary, changing the way a couple manages conflict, reaching a practical agreement through mediation, or addressing something within a team or organisation that is no longer working.
Action does not always need to be dramatic.
Sometimes a relatively small change, made consciously and consistently, begins to alter what happens around it.
For me, the question becomes:
What do we now understand, and what do we need to do differently because of it?
Different Roles, Common Principles
Although Listen, Understand and Act runs through my work, the professional roles of counselling, mediation and consulting remain distinct.
Counselling
Every person’s life, feelings and experiences are unique. My approach to counselling therefore needs to respond to the individual, couple or family in front of me rather than assume that the same process will work for everybody.
In the early sessions, much of my attention is on understanding your world: how you experience it, how you feel about the people in it, what has brought you to counselling and what matters most to you.
We also explore what you would like from counselling and what you hope may be different.
My role is to listen deeply, reflect thoughtfully and help you clarify your own understanding.
At times, that means walking alongside you into parts of your life that may feel overwhelming, painful or difficult to face alone. The purpose is not to judge those parts, but to understand them, including how experiences from the past may still be influencing the present.
Counselling can require courage, commitment and patience, both with yourself and with the process.
In relationship and family work, there is an additional layer. We need to understand not only each individual, but what happens between people.
That involves compassion and vulnerability, but also accountability. Being understood does not mean that we no longer need to consider the effect our behaviour has on somebody else.
My counselling work draws from a range of therapeutic approaches and ideas rather than one rigid model. It is also informed by Jungian principles, including an interest in the unconscious, personal meaning and the shadow: the parts of ourselves that we may have learned to hide, reject or leave unexplored.
The aim is not to turn somebody into a different person, but to support greater self-awareness, choice, authenticity and psychological integration.
The detailed theories, modalities and ways I work with individuals, couples and families are explored further in Approach to Counselling.
Family Law Mediation
My role is different in Family Law Mediation.
I work as a neutral mediator. I do not decide who is right, impose an outcome or make decisions for the parties.
My role is to create enough structure for both people to be heard, for the issues between them to be properly understood and for the parties to explore whether practical and workable agreements can be reached.
People often arrive in mediation with strongly held positions.
Before moving immediately into negotiation, it can be useful to understand what sits behind those positions: what each person is concerned about, what matters most to them, what they need the other person to understand and where there may be room for agreement.
Understanding another person’s position does not require agreeing with it.
But being properly heard can change the nature of a difficult conversation.
The way I approach neutrality, conflict, different perspectives and movement towards agreement is explored further in Approach to Mediation.
Consulting
My consulting work is focused on Workplace Wellness and brings together counselling, mediation and facilitation with more than two decades of management and leadership experience.
In organisations, I am interested in understanding what may sit underneath the presenting problem.
Something described as poor performance may involve leadership, communication, role clarity, relationships, morale or personal difficulty.
Conflict between two people may also tell us something about the wider team.
Low engagement may be an employee issue, a leadership issue, a culture issue, or a combination of several things.
My starting point is therefore to understand the people and the environment in which the problem is occurring before assuming what the solution should be.
I also understand the commercial realities of work.
People need to feel respected, supported and able to contribute. Organisations also need results. Revenue needs to grow, costs need to be managed, customers need to be served and people need to perform.
I do not see those as opposing ideas.
My consulting approach is about understanding the relationship between people, leadership, relationships, culture and performance, and finding practical ways to help organisations function more effectively.
This is explored further in Approach to Consulting.
What Guides My Work
There are several values that consistently influence how I try to show up in all three areas of my work.
Courage, because understanding ourselves or addressing a difficult situation can require us to face things we would rather avoid.
Compassion, because people are generally more able to examine themselves honestly when they do not feel judged or reduced to their worst moment.
Commitment, because recognising that something needs to change is different from doing the work required to change it.
Accountability, because being understood does not remove our responsibility for the effect our choices and behaviour have on other people.
Optimism, not because I expect everything to turn out as we hope, but because I believe people retain the capacity to learn, grow and respond differently.
And self-improvement, because I do not believe that our understanding of ourselves, our relationships or how we engage with other people ever needs to be finished.
My Belief
I believe in the human potential to create both chaos and healing.
We all have the capacity to lose our way, and to find it again.
We can become stuck in patterns of thinking, feeling or behaving that no longer serve us. Relationships can become disconnected. Conflict can become so entrenched that people stop hearing one another. Teams and organisations can repeat ways of working without understanding what is driving them.
But greater awareness can create greater choice.
Understanding something does not automatically fix it, but it can change the way we respond to it.
I do not believe that change is always quick, comfortable or straightforward.
I do believe in our capacity to understand, grow, repair, adapt and find a way forward.